U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has released case processing data for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, covering petitions decided between October and December 2025.
The numbers show declining approval rates for the O-1A nonimmigrant visa for individuals of extraordinary ability and the EB-1A immigrant petition for extraordinary ability, a modest uptick for the EB-2 National Interest Waiver, and a service-wide backlog that keeps climbing.
For petitioners and their employers, this is a snapshot of how USCIS is actually deciding cases right now.
USCIS ended Q1 FY2026 with 11.3 million cases pending, 17 percent more than at the same point in FY2025. The agency completed just 1.8 million cases during the quarter, a 41 percent drop from the same quarter one year earlier and a 28 percent drop from the quarter before it.
The net backlog, meaning cases still within the government's control to decide, reached 6.3 million by the end of Q1, up from under 4.3 million a year prior. The frontlog, which counts cases USCIS has received but not yet opened, stood at 197,684 cases at the end of the quarter. A year earlier, that number was zero.
These are agency-wide figures covering every form type USCIS processes, not only employment-based categories. But a backlog of this size does not stay contained to the categories driving it. It shapes staffing, adjudication pace, and the volume of Requests for Evidence across the board.
Within that broader picture, USCIS also reported approval rates by category. The O-1A approval rate fell to 91.0 percent in Q1 FY2026, down from 92.7 percent in Q4 FY2025 and 93.9 percent for the full FY2025 year. That is still a high approval rate in absolute terms, but the decline is now the third consecutive drop.
The EB-1A approval rate fell more sharply, to 47.5 percent in Q1 FY2026, down from 53.4 percent in Q4 FY2025 and 66.9 percent for all of FY2025. That is a steep decline in the span of two quarters.
The EB-2 NIW approval rate moved the other direction, rising to 42.6 percent in Q1 FY2026 from 35.7 percent in Q4 FY2025. Even with that increase, the rate remains well below the 55.2 percent approval rate for full-year FY2025, and it does not tell the whole story.
USCIS adjudicated 5,586 EB-2 NIW petitions in the quarter, approving 2,380 and denying 3,206. That is the second consecutive quarter in which EB-2 NIW denials outnumbered approvals, even as the approval rate itself improved quarter over quarter.
Category-level breakdowns for H-1B and L-1 petitions were not part of the reporting available on this release as of this writing. This piece is scoped to O-1A, EB-1A, and EB-2 NIW, where Q1 figures are available, along with the service-wide numbers above.
Here is what we see driving these trends, based on the pattern across recent quarters rather than anything USCIS has stated directly about its adjudication standards.
EB-2 NIW filings have grown substantially in recent years, following a broader application of the Dhanasar framework that governs national interest waiver eligibility. That growth in volume has coincided with tighter scrutiny at the adjudication stage. Practitioners have reported an increase in Requests for Evidence built around the same three Dhanasar prongs, particularly the "national importance" element, where USCIS increasingly wants specific, quantified evidence of a petitioner's individual contribution rather than a general description of the field's importance.
A similar dynamic appears to be affecting EB-1A. Both categories rely on comparable evidentiary theories around extraordinary ability and, for EB-2 NIW, national interest, so heightened scrutiny in one area often shows up in the other.
None of this changes the legal standard for either category. What it likely means in practice is that petitions with thinner evidentiary records, particularly those relying on letters of support that describe a field's importance without tying it to the petitioner's specific, measurable contributions, are more likely to draw an RFE or a denial than they may have eighteen months ago.
For petitioners currently preparing an EB-1A or EB-2 NIW filing, or deciding whether to file now versus later, this data is one input among several. It does not tell you how any individual case will fare, and it should not be read as legal advice about a specific filing strategy. Petitioners weighing timing or evidentiary strategy in light of these trends should discuss their specific case with counsel.
