I-129F 2026 Slowdown: What is happening at USCIS?
Around the first week of March 2026, many K-1 applicants started to notice a clear shift in USCIS processing activity. Since mid-2025, USCIS had been processing K-1 cases at a consistent rate, reducing the end-to-end wait time from about 10 months in summer 2025 down to about 8 months in early 2026. After such an extended period of consistent output, the sudden reduction in I-129F approvals has raised concerns across the community.
The Current Slowdown
At Track My Visa, one of the key metrics we monitor to understand these shifts is the USCIS processing activity. We carefully track how many cases (from our userbase) USCIS is approving or otherwise processing on a given working day.
Looking at USCIS activity over the last 90 days, we can clearly see a notable drop in case throughput starting in early March 2026. However, it's important to note that USCIS is still processing cases - this is a slowdown, not a shutdown.
Slowdowns at USCIS can happen for a variety of reasons and they can often be temporary, lasting just a few days before activity returns to normal. It's important not to focus on short-term blips, however, the slowdown has lasted for almost 6 weeks, which, after so many months of stable processing activity, is worth taking seriously. If USCIS continues at this slower pace, the backlog will quickly grow and end-to-end processing times for K-1 applicants will quickly rise.
At Track My Visa, we carefully track a visa processing concept we call the "Front of the Line." While not an official USCIS term, it's one of the clearest ways to understand how far USCIS has worked through the backlog. Put simply, the Front of the Line represents the filing date that separates cases USCIS has already begun working on from those still waiting in the queue. Essentially, it shows how far back in the queue USCIS has reached.
By analyzing how the Front of the Line is changing over time, we can better understand how quickly USCIS is pushing forward through the backlog. The graph above shows how quickly USCIS advanced the Front of the Line on a weekly basis from September 2025 to April 2026. With the exception of a slight pause around the end-of-year holidays, we can see how stable USCIS's progress has been, until early March, when the progress started to plateau.
Let's pull some real numbers to help understand the slowdown more concretely.
- On Jan 1st, USCIS was processing cases filed before May 21, 2025
- On Feb 1st, they were processing cases filed before July 2, 2025
- On March 1st, cases before August 14, 2025
- On April 1st, cases before August 26, 2025
That's a significant month over month shift: late May → early July → mid August → late August.
This plateau is even more visually noticeable when we zoom in, viewing the Front of the Line history on a daily basis. Whereas USCIS used to move the Front of the Line on most working days, it is now often paused for days at a time, only to jump forward by one filing date before stalling out again.
When we combine these two signals - the reduced processing activity and the reduced forward progress in the case backlog - we get a very clear message that something has shifted at USCIS.
The 2024 Slowdown
Since Track My Visa launched back in 2023, we've tracked USCIS's K-1 processing through speedups and slowdowns alike. The most notably similar slowdown was the 2024 slowdown.
Prior to the 2024 slowdown, USCIS had massively reduced the USCIS I-129F backlog, coming out of the COVID pandemic with a focus to reduce K-1 wait times down to 6 months - a target they most certainly reached. Back then, some cases were being approved in as little as 5 weeks, while others were still waiting 4-6 months. USCIS was processing cases quickly, but also working on a very wide range of filing dates all at once.
After USCIS successfully cleared up a large portion of the backlog, they hit the brakes. The 2024 slowdown seemed intentional - and warranted - with most of the backlog being cleared, USCIS was able to shift resources to other areas.
While there may be similarities between the 2026 and 2024 slowdowns, there are a few key differences. Prior to the current slowdown, USCIS had reduced the end-to-end wait times for I-129F from 10 months down to about 8, but, in no way had they come as close to fully processing the entire backlog as they did in 2024. The current processing times don't justify a sudden slowdown. However, in both the 2024 and 2026 slowdowns, the reductions in USCIS processing activity were equally sudden and significant.
You can view more about the 2024 slowdown on our Youtube.
Possible Changes At USCIS
Such a sudden and sustained slowdown hints that some internal processes at USCIS may have changed in some capacity.
There are some signals that this slowdown may be tied to some sort of organizational restructuring at USCIS:
- Some I-129F cases are getting updates from the SRC service center, instead of the standard WAC
- Similarly, the I-130 IR Consular backlog is seeing an even more significant slowdown, starting just a few weeks before the I-129F slowdown
- There are rumors that I-130 may be changing their case processing to field offices instead of service centers. While this doesn't impact I-129F directly, it does signal that there may be some internal changes at USCIS in general.
What Comes Next?
The uncertainty around this slowdown is frustrating for many I-129F filers. However, the good news is that USCIS slowdowns will always eventually reverse. Processing will eventually rebound. We are just unsure when or how quickly this will happen.
If the slowdown is caused by some sort of restructuring at USCIS, once these changes settle, processing speed can re-increase quickly. If it doesn't, the rising wait times will eventually trigger some sort of action to help stabilize and reduce them.
For now, the biggest unknowns are how long this slower pace will last and what the "new normal" will look like once the slowdown is over.
No matter how things unfold, we will continue to monitor the situation closely and share updates as things evolve.
— Track My Visa Team