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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

34,515

Still pending from months before September 2026, out of 49,034 pending in total. Another 14,519 were received the same month; DOL doesn’t publish where a case sits within a month.

DOL is issuing determinations for requests received June 2026 where the wage comes from the OEWS survey, and June 2026 where it does not, as of 2026-09-30.

Where the backlog sits

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

49,034 of 49,034 pending requests

  1. April 2026 8
  2. May 2026 36
  3. June 2026 3,532
  4. July 2026 15,959
  5. August 2026 14,980
  6. September 2026 14,519
Ahead of yours Your month Received after yours

Estimated determination

December 2026

At the 15,306 requests a month DOL has been clearing.

What this can’t tell you

  • 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.

Validity follows the wage year, not your determination date, and recruitment and the 30-day quiet period must fit inside it. Which side of 30 June yours lands on decides how tight that is.

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 rule a tracked case uses. The queue position above says roughly when your determination is coming.

Email me when DOL reaches my month

One email when the prevailing wage queue you pick reaches the month your request was filed, and nothing after it.

You confirm by email first. One click turns it off.

More options

One address watches one filing month per queue; a new month replaces the old one.

FAQs

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

No number for your request? Search wage requests by employer, or paste a P- number into the status lookup to see where it sits.

Processing times: DOL FLAG (flag.dol.gov/processingtimes) · data through Oct 5, 2026 · daily

What this data includes

Processing times: DOL's published queue position and average determination time. DOL's own figure, not ours.

Cite this page

The rules behind these numbers

Waiting on a PERM case?

  • When it'll likely be decided
  • An email when DOL moves it

It's on your ETA-9089 receipt. It goes into the page's address, so you can bookmark the result.

Don't have the number? Find a case by employer name.