EB-2 NIW approval rate: what the published numbers show and where cases fail

The EB-2 National Interest Waiver is a green card category with a step removed. You ask USCIS to waive the labor certification because the work you propose to do serves the national interest. You self-petition, which means no employer files for you and no job offer is required. USCIS publishes how many of these petitions it approves and denies, and the number is lower than most people expect. It is also narrower than it looks. This post gives you the figure, the scope it covers, and then the part that matters more: where these cases fail.

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What is the EB-2 NIW approval rate?

In the most recent published USCIS data, covering the first three quarters of fiscal year 2026, 9,238 National Interest Waiver petitions were approved and 9,585 were denied. That is an EB-2 NIW approval rate of 49% of decided cases. USCIS publishes counts rather than a rate, so that percentage is our arithmetic on its numbers: approvals divided by approvals plus denials.

Source: USCIS Form I-140 quarterly data. Current as of October 2026. Three things about the scope of that figure. It covers the fiscal year through its third quarter only, because USCIS has not yet reported the fourth. It counts petitions, not people, and USCIS notes that a petitioner may file more than one. And approvals and denials are decisions taken during the period, which can include petitions received in earlier periods. The EB-2 NIW approval rate is also not the EB-2 approval rate, and the gap between them is wide. Across all of Second Preference in the same period, USCIS approved 48,073 petitions and denied 10,843, which is 82%. The non-waiver side of the category, advanced-degree professionals who come with a labor certification, approved at 97%. The waiver is where the EB-2 denials sit, which is worth knowing if you are weighing the EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 categories against each other. All of these numbers come from one place: the quarterly report on Form I-140, the petition every EB-2 case is filed on.

What the EB-2 NIW approval rate does not tell you

The figure describes a population, not a case. It mixes a post-doc with three years of publications, a founder with revenue, and an engineer with a strong record and a thin endeavor description. One number is reported for all of them. A pending petition is in neither column. The 96,297 cases pending at the end of the period include everything awaiting a first decision and everything awaiting a response to a request for evidence. On an EB-2 NIW, an RFE is not a denial. It is USCIS telling you which prong it is not yet satisfied on, and a strong response resolves plenty of them. Our guide to responding to a USCIS RFE covers the mechanics. So the EB-2 NIW approval rate of 49%, and the NIW denial rate of 51% behind it, are not odds that apply to you. What applies to you is whether your record answers three specific questions. That is where the rest of this post goes.

The three-prong test, in short

One framework decides every NIW. Dhanasar, a 2016 AAO decision reported as Matter of Dhanasar, 26 I&N Dec. 884, set the three questions and is written into the USCIS Policy Manual. In the Policy Manual's wording, USCIS may grant the waiver where the petitioner shows three things. That the proposed endeavor has substantial merit and national importance. That the petitioner is well positioned to advance it. And that on balance of factors it benefits the United States to waive the job offer and labor certification requirements. The standard of proof is preponderance of the evidence, so each prong has to be more likely than not. One requirement sits before the three prongs. You have to qualify for Second Preference itself, as either a professional holding an advanced degree or a person of exceptional ability in the sciences, arts or business. Policy Alert PA-2025-03 of January 2025 put that order into the Policy Manual, and it is the most recent NIW guidance change. The prongs get reached once the classification is established. That is the short version. Our post on how to apply for an EB-2 NIW walks the framework and the filing. The EB-2 NIW visa guide covers eligibility end to end, and the cost of an EB-2 NIW sets out the filing fees.

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Where an EB-2 NIW is denied, prong by prong

When an EB-2 NIW is denied, the notice names the prong. For this post we read Administrative Appeals Office decisions in the EB-2 advanced-degree category, issued between 2022 and October 2026, searched on 15 October 2026. Those are appeals, so every one of them is a denial and none of them can tell you a rate. They can tell you what the officer was not persuaded by. Each ruling in this database is a non-precedent decision. It binds the parties to that case and nothing else, and USCIS states these decisions do not create or modify agency guidance. Read them as worked examples of how the same evidence gets weighed, not as rules. We did the same read on the O-1 in our post on O-1 profile building red flags. The pattern here is different from the O-1 pattern. An O-1 case tends to turn on whether a document satisfies a criterion. Most of the dismissals we read came back to the first prong of the NIW. Dhanasar puts the proposed endeavor at the heart of that prong, and an endeavor is something you write rather than something you can submit a certificate for.

Prong one, substantial merit

Rarely the problem on its own. Research, engineering, medicine and business endeavors generally clear substantial merit without difficulty, and the Policy Manual accepts merit in areas including business, entrepreneurialism, science, technology, culture, health and education. Do not spend your record proving your field matters.

Prong one, national importance described at the level of the field

This is the recurring failure. In In Re: 39352298 (Oct. 2, 2025), the AAO dismissed the appeal of a Software Engineer III and wrote that national importance "does not focus on the importance of one's field or industry in general" but "focuses on the specific endeavor that the foreign national proposes to undertake." On the evidence filed, it found that "none of the articles mention the Petitioner or his planned projects." That is the shape of it. The petition argued that software engineering matters to the United States, and never said what this engineer would build.

Prong one, national importance measured by the employer's market

The second version is an endeavor whose benefit stops at the company paying for it. In Re: 20519530 (May 9, 2022) dismissed an operations manager's appeal on that ground. The record did not show "how providing general operation manager services stands to sufficiently extend beyond the businesses that employ him." Work can be valuable to an employer and still not reach national importance. Petitioners filing from a strong corporate role miss that distinction often.

Prong two, well positioned to advance the endeavor

Prong two asks about you rather than the work, and it is where cases that clear prong one still fail. In In Re: 40989600 (Feb. 25, 2026), a gene-editing researcher's endeavor was accepted as nationally important and the appeal was dismissed on prong two instead. The AAO was direct about why. It held that "an individual's claim to some high stature in his or her field, without more, is not probative" on this prong. On the letters of recommendation filed, it found they "do not elaborate on how the Petitioner's research observations support how well she is positioned." Three failures recur here. A citation record offered as proof of influence, with nothing showing the work was taken up. Letters that praise your knowledge without naming where your work was used. And a plan for the future that keeps changing shape.

Prong three, balance of factors

Prong three gets reached and decided against petitioners, and arguing it is not the same as satisfying it. In In Re: 43194276 (Jul. 30, 2026), a chemical engineering graduate student won prong one on appeal and the AAO dismissed anyway. It held he "has not established that the national interest in his contributions is sufficiently urgent to warrant forgoing the labor certification process." He had argued both urgency and impracticality. The AAO weighed prong three against gaps it had already found on prong two. His plans changed three times across his own statements, no funding was in his own name, and no interest was shown from users or investors.

What the strong cases did differently on the proposed endeavor

The difference is specificity, and it shows up the same way across profiles. A researcher names the problem and the people who use the result, not the discipline: a diagnostic for a named condition, and the clinics or agencies that would deploy it. A founder names the customers and the contracts, so the benefit is traceable past the company. An engineer names the deployed system and who outside the employer depends on it. Two people with identical publication records get different outcomes because one described their work and the other described their field.

The balance of factors argument, written out

Prong three is not a summary of the first two prongs. It asks a separate question: given that this person is qualified and this work matters, why should USCIS skip the test of whether a U.S. worker could be hired for it? Arguments that stand on their own terms include impracticality, where the endeavor is self-directed and there is no employer to run a recruitment for. There is urgency, where the delay of labor certification has a cost to the work itself. There is the case where the contribution is specific enough that a labor market test would not surface a substitute. Say which of those applies to you and why, in its own paragraph, with evidence behind it.

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What to check in your own record before you self-petition

One checkable item per prong, and none of these is a verdict on whether you qualify.

1. Prong one. Read your endeavor description and underline every sentence that names a specific output, user or deployment. If the paragraph still reads as a description of your field with those sentences removed, it has not been written yet.
2. Prong two. Read each letter of recommendation for a sentence naming where your work was used and by whom. A letter that praises your knowledge without naming a use is not independent evidence that the work landed.
3. Prong three. Find the paragraph that argues for waiving the labor certification on its own terms. If the only answer is that you are well qualified, prong three is missing.

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