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PERM Tracker

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Prevailing wage queue calculator

How many prevailing wage requests sit ahead of yours, counted from the Department of Labor's own published backlog.

How long is the prevailing wage queue?

Pick the month DOL received your ETA-9141. The number of requests ahead of yours is DOL's own published count.

Requests ahead of yours

33,503

Still pending from months before June 2026, out of 50,300 pending in total. Another 16,797 were received the same month; DOL doesn’t publish where a case sits within a month.

DOL is issuing determinations for requests received April 2026 where the wage comes from the OEWS survey, and March 2026 where it does not, as of 2026-06-30.

Where the backlog sits

Every month DOL still has prevailing wage requests pending for, and how many.

50,300 of 50,300 pending requests

  1. December 2025 11
  2. January 2026 63
  3. February 2026 106
  4. March 2026 627
  5. April 2026 14,386
  6. May 2026 18,310
  7. June 2026 16,797
Ahead of yours Your month Received after yours

What this can’t tell you

  • How fast DOL clears the prevailing wage backlog is not something it publishes, and we will not guess at it. The count of requests ahead is exact; the wait it implies is not shown until the rate can be measured from DOL’s own figures over time.
  • A prevailing wage determination is the first step of a PERM, not the whole thing. The recruitment window and the ETA-9089 filing window both run from the date it is issued.

What the determination is worth when it lands

The queue above says roughly when yours is coming. This says how much time it buys you when it does, which is not the same for everyone and is not a fixed number of days.

One day, 4.0 times the runway

A determination issued June 30, 2026 is valid 90 days. One issued July 1, 2026 is valid 364.

The validity period is anchored to the wage year, not counted from your determination date. Recruitment, the 30-day job order and the 30-day quiet period all have to finish inside it, so which side of 30 June yours lands on decides whether that is comfortable or tight.

Issued January 1, 2026 to April 1, 2026

90 to 180 days

Runs to 30 June of the same year, so the later in this stretch it issues the less is left.

Issued April 2, 2026 to June 30, 2026

90 days

Ninety days from the determination date, flat. The shortest window the rule produces.

Issued July 1, 2026 to December 31, 2026

181 to 364 days

Runs to 30 June of the following year. A determination on 1 July gets almost the whole wage year.

20 CFR 656.40(c), computed for 2026 by the same function that runs on a tracked case. You can't choose your determination date, but the queue position above says roughly when yours is coming, and that's enough to know which of these you are planning inside.

Get notified when DOL reaches your month

We’ll email you when the analyst-review queue reaches the month your case was filed. It isn’t a newsletter and nothing else follows it.

The month is the only thing that decides when we write to you. You confirm by email first, so an address can’t be signed up by someone who doesn’t control it, and one click opts out.

Common questions

What’s a prevailing wage determination?
It’s DOL's ruling on the minimum wage an employer must offer for a specific job in a specific place. It’s filed on form ETA-9141 and it has to be issued before the PERM recruitment can be relied on, which is why it sits in front of everything else.
Why does the prevailing wage queue matter so much?
Because the determination date, not the filing date, is what the rest of the case is measured from. The recruitment window and the ETA-9089 filing window are both arithmetic on it, and the determination itself expires, so a long wage queue moves every deadline that follows.
Why is there no estimated wait shown?
DOL publishes how many requests are pending but not how fast it clears them. The count of requests ahead of you is exact and comes straight from DOL. Turning that into a date needs a clearance rate, which we measure from DOL's own figures as they change over time.
What’s the difference between the OEWS and non-OEWS queues?
OEWS is the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, which is the default wage source. A request that relies on a different source, like an employer-provided survey, goes through a separate queue that DOL reports separately and which usually runs at a different pace.

The determination sets every date that follows

The recruitment window, the quiet period and the filing window all run from the determination date, and missing one restarts the case.

Work out those dates

Processing times: DOL FLAG (flag.dol.gov/processingtimes) · data through Aug 28, 2026 · daily

The rules behind these numbers

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