EB-2 NIW Approval Rates

There is no official "NIW approval rate." USCIS publishes counts — received, approved, denied, pending — in a quarterly report titled "Form I-140 by Fiscal Year, Quarter and Case Status," produced by its Office of Performance and Quality. That report is the only USCIS publication breaking the national interest waiver out of EB-2 as its own line, E21-NIW.

The series begins with fiscal year 2022. The predecessor report folded these petitions into the general E21 line under a footnote reading "Includes National Interest Waiver petitions," so no USCIS-published NIW-specific count exists for FY2021 or earlier. Any figure you see for those years is an estimate or a different classification wearing the wrong label.

Everything below comes from that series, pinned to each fiscal year's fourth-quarter (full-year) edition — except FY2026, which is the second-quarter edition covering October 1, 2025 through March 31, 2026 only. All figures are as of August 2026.

The report counts actions taken during the reporting period. The approvals and denials issued in a given year are largely decisions on petitions filed in earlier periods — USCIS's own notes caution that some applications approved, denied, or pending a decision "may have been received in previous reporting periods." The approvals in one column and the receipts in another are not the same petitions.

The same file makes the point vividly. On the labor-certification-based E21 line in FY2025, USCIS recorded 52,795 approvals against 49,921 receipts — more approvals than filings that year, because it was working down a backlog. A period ratio can exceed anything a filing cohort could produce. It is a throughput measurement, not an outcome probability.

Two further limits. The denominator includes only decisions: withdrawals, administrative closures, and transfers are absent, and USCIS says so — "Some actions taken on cases are not reflected in this report such as administrative closures and transfers between offices." And the counts are vintage-dependent, since "[c]ounts may differ from previous periods due to system updates and post adjudicative outcomes."

One more calculation to watch for. Articles reporting an NIW approval rate in the low forties for FY2024 are dividing approvals by receipts — 27,526 by 63,549 — treating every unadjudicated case in a growing backlog as though it had been denied. Our approval share of decisions for that same year is 71.0%. Neither is your odds, but if a page quotes a rate without saying what was divided by what, you cannot tell which of two calculations nearly thirty points apart you are reading.

On January 15, 2025, USCIS issued Policy Alert PA-2025-03, "Second Preference Eligibility for National Interest Waiver Petitions," revising its guidance at 6 USCIS-PM F.5, effective immediately and applicable to pending as well as future filings.

Factually, what it says: a petitioner must establish the underlying EB-2 classification before the waiver is considered; a claim of exceptional ability must relate to the proposed endeavor; whether an occupation is a profession, and whether post-baccalaureate experience is "in the specialty," are assessed case by case. It adds guidance on national importance, support letters, and business plans, and states that not every entrepreneur qualifies and that broad assertions regarding general benefits to the economy and potential to create jobs will not establish eligibility.

We describe that separately from the numbers on purpose. The decline in approval share began in FY2024, a year before the alert issued. Anyone telling you the January 2025 guidance caused the numbers to move is asserting something the published data cannot support, in either direction. Read it because it tells you what officers are instructed to look for — not as an explanation of a trend line.

The published data describes an environment. It tells us the queue is long and that denials are a far larger share of decisions than in 2022 — which changes how much we insist on before filing, and tells us nothing about how a specific record will be received.

Before filing we test the record against the guidance an officer is actually working from, including the January 2025 Policy Manual revisions. Where an argument can be answered with a sentence from that guidance, it gets rewritten or dropped.

If a case is not ready, you hear it while there is still time to fix it — well before a Request for Evidence arrives. Petition work is a flat fee, with any RFE response quoted separately.