In the shifting landscape of EB-1A petitions, a common question is: “what are my odds?”. In 2026, the answer depends less on raw statistics and more on the strength of your evidence strategy and how well it accounts for the forces shaping USCIS adjudications right now. The headline approval rate for EB-1A petitions can be misleading — beneath it lies a sharply downward quarterly trend, a surge in Requests for Evidence, and a growing backlog that is reshaping the timeline and risk profile of every filing. Here is what the numbers actually show.
Shifting Tides of EB-1A Approval Rates
To understand where we are, it helps to see where we have been. The EB-1A approval rate has moved through several distinct phases over the past few years, and the shift that began in late FY2024 has accelerated since the start of the current administration in January 2025.
During the Biden administration, EB-1A approval rates remained relatively strong through most of the period. FY2022 marked a recent high point, with EB-1A petitions approved at approximately 75–78%. FY2023 saw a modest decline to approximately 70.5%, with the denial rate rising to around 19%. The first real warning sign came in FY2024, when the EB-1A approval rate dropped meaningfully to 60.65% and the denial rate climbed to 23.32%. This drop in approval rates was driven in significant part by stricter application of the final merits determination rather than any formal policy change. Still, the first quarter of FY2025 (October through December 2024, the final months of the Biden administration) showed a rebound to 74.9%, suggesting the tightening may have been stabilizing.
That stabilization did not hold. Since the Trump administration took office in January 2025 (Q2 of FY2025), the trajectory has been sharply downward. The full-year FY2025 EB-1A approval rate came in at approximately 66.9%, but the quarterly data tells a more dramatic story. By Q3 FY2025 (April through June), the approval rate had fallen to 66.5%. By Q4 FY2025 (July through September), USCIS data showed the approval rate dropped to just 53.4% meaning nearly half of all decided EB-1A petitions were denied. CBS News, reporting on data from the immigration analytics platform Lawfully, noted that the rate may have dropped closer to 50% in the months that followed.
The overall EB-1 category (which includes EB-1B and EB-1C alongside EB-1A) has held up better, with approval rates of 79.7% in Q3 and 73.9% in Q4 of FY2025. But EB-1B and EB-1C petitions, which are employer-sponsored and subject to more objective documentation requirements, continued to maintain approval rates above 96%. The decline is concentrated in EB-1A, the self-petitioned, discretionary category where officer judgment plays the largest role.
Causes of the Decline in EB-1A Approval Rates
Several factors are driving the current environment. First, filing volumes have surged. USCIS received over 51,000 EB-1 petitions in FY2025, a roughly 25% increase over FY2024’s 41,150, with EB-1A accounting for nearly 30,000 of those filings. The higher volume has brought a wider range of petition quality into the system, and USCIS officers are responding with closer scrutiny.
Second, USCIS is receiving far more EB-1A petitions than it is deciding. In FY2025, USCIS received 29,582 new EB-1A petitions but completed (i.e., either approved or denied) only 18,633 cases, meaning roughly 11,000 cases were added to the backlog over the course of the fiscal year. New filings held steady at approximately 7,300–7,500 per quarter, while quarterly completions never exceeded 5,300 and dropped to just 4,364 in Q4, a 17% decline from the prior quarter. The result is a pending caseload that grew 56% over the fiscal year, from 13,526 at the end of Q1 to 21,157 by the end of Q4.
Effect on RFE Rates
The 25% increase in EB-1A filings paired with the decrease in adjudications has created a major strain to keep up with the quickly growing backlog. As a result, immigration practitioners have observed a pattern of RFEs that are longer but less coherent, sometimes ignoring evidence already in the record or applying standards from other visa categories. USCIS’s use of AI tools in case review has also drawn attention, though its precise impact on adjudication quality remains unclear. Processing times have stretched to as long as 24 months for non-premium cases according to USCIS’ own processing time estimates, in part because most EB-1A cases are now adjudicated by Service Center Operations (SCOPS) rather than being divided between the Texas and Nebraska Service Centers.
Importantly, receiving an RFE is not a death sentence. An RFE is a request for clarification, not a preliminary denial. In our experience, petitions with strong underlying evidence that receive a well-prepared, strategic RFE response continue to achieve favorable outcomes. The takeaway is that the quality of the underlying evidence, not whether USCIS asked additional questions, is the determining factor.
The important nuance is that this is not a story of a single policy change flipping a switch. The tightening began under the prior administration, but the acceleration in RFE rates, the sharp drop in Q4 FY2025, and the more aggressive posture on final merits denials are developments that have intensified since January 2025. For practitioners and petitioners alike, the practical implication is the same: the margin for error is thinner than it has been at any point in the past decade, and the petitions that succeed will be those that are built with the current adjudicatory climate firmly in mind.
CONCLUSION
EB-1A adjudications are tighter than they have been at any point in the past decade, and the trend has not yet reversed. But declining approval rates and rising RFEs do not mean the EB-1A is no longer viable, they mean the category is less forgiving of petitions that are not built to withstand scrutiny. The odds, in other words, are a function of preparation. For petitioners who invest in a rigorous evidence strategy, a coherent narrative, and documentation that anticipates the current adjudicatory climate, the EB-1A is still one of the strongest immigration pathways available. At Drummond Legal Advisors, we remain committed to representing you in preparing your EB-1A Petition with that level of rigor, building every case to succeed in any adjudication environment.
Written by John Balloveras