How to check your PERM case status and prevailing wage determination timeline

A PERM status check is done by the sponsoring employer, not by the employee the case is filed for. The Department of Labor runs PERM filings through FLAG, the Foreign Labor Application Gateway, and that system is built around the employer's account. There is no beneficiary login that lets a sponsored employee look up their own labor certification the way a USCIS receipt number works.

There is a second thing worth knowing, and it changes what you should be asking for. The per-case status field in FLAG carries one word and can hold that word for a year, so it rarely tells you how much longer you have to wait. The number that answers that question is the DOL processing queue: public, updated monthly, and readable in about two minutes without anyone's permission.

This post covers both. How the status check works inside FLAG for whoever has the login, what each status value means, and how to estimate your own position from the queue.

Who can check a PERM case status?

The employer that sponsors the case is the one that files it and the one that holds the FLAG account. The sponsored employee has no login of their own.

Put simply: your employer can see your PERM case. You cannot.

This surprises people because so much of the immigration process gives the applicant a tracking number. PERM works differently by design. The labor certification is a test of the U.S. labor market run by the employer rather than an application about the employee. Your name appears on Form ETA-9089, but the case belongs to the company.

In practice, the login sits with one of three parties:

• The company's immigration attorney, who usually files and monitors on the employer's behalf
• An HR or mobility contact who has been added as a user on the employer's FLAG account
• The employer's authorized representative who signed the filing

If you want a status update, one of those three is who has it. Asking is reasonable and normal. What is not reasonable to expect is a running commentary, since for most of the wait there is genuinely nothing new to report.

Processing figures in this post are current as of August 2026. DOL updates them monthly, so pull the live numbers from the FLAG processing times page before you plan around them.

Checking PERM status in the FLAG system

For whoever holds the login, the check itself is short.

1. Sign in at flag.dol.gov with the employer's account credentials.
2. Open the case list for the account. Applications appear by case number, job title, and submission date.
3. Locate the case. If the account holds many filings, filter by the beneficiary's job title or the submitted date rather than scrolling.
4. Read the status field on the case record.

That's it. There is no progress bar, no estimated completion date, and no queue position. The status field carries one word or phrase, and it usually stays on the same value for months at a time.

If you're the employee and your employer is willing to share, ask for two things: the current status value and the date the application was submitted. Those two data points are all you need for the queue math further down.

What each PERM status means

The status field uses a small vocabulary. Here's what each value tells you and what it doesn't.

Two things worth knowing about this list.

"In Process" is not a signal of progress. A case can sit on that value for a year while it waits its turn, and nothing about it tells you whether your case is next week or next spring.

An audit is not a finding against you. DOL selects some cases at random and others for specific reasons in the filing, and an audit means the recruitment file gets examined rather than that something was done wrong. Our guide to the PERM audit process covers what DOL asks for and how long the review adds.

DOL PERM processing time: which filing month is being processed now

DOL publishes what it is currently working on, by filing month. This is the useful signal, and it's public.

The processing times page states which month's filings are currently being adjudicated in each queue. As of the August 20, 2026 update, DOL was reviewing PERM applications in these queues:

To estimate your own position, take your filing date and count forward. If your employer filed your ETA-9089 in March 2026 and DOL is reviewing September 2025 filings, roughly six months of queue sits ahead of you before anyone opens your case. That's not a prediction of your decision date. It's a measure of the backlog you're behind.

DOL also publishes an average processing time alongside the queue month. For analyst review in July 2026, the average was 372 calendar days. Read that as a description of cases that finished recently, not a countdown for yours, because the queue month is the leading indicator and the average is the trailing one.

Check the queue monthly. When the month it names advances by more than one calendar month, the backlog is shrinking. When it advances by less, it's growing. That trend tells you more about your own wait than any individual status value ever will.

For a fuller treatment of what the total PERM timeline looks like across all its stages, see how long PERM takes.

How to check prevailing wage determination status

Is the prevailing wage determination the same thing as the PERM application? No, and treating them as one filing is the most common reason a status answer sounds wrong. They are two separate submissions with two separate DOL queues, and a case can be sitting in the first while everyone describes it as being in the second.

Before the PERM application can be filed, the employer requests a prevailing wage determination on Form ETA-9141 from the National Prevailing Wage Center. DOL returns a wage figure for that occupation, at that level, in that location. Only after the determination comes back can recruitment be run and the ETA-9089 be filed.

So if your employer says "the PERM is in progress," it's worth asking which stage they mean. A case waiting on a prevailing wage determination has not started its PERM clock at all.

The PWD status is checked in the same place: the employer's FLAG account holds the ETA-9141 case record, and the prevailing wage determination processing time is published on the same DOL processing times page, on its own line and moving independently of the PERM queue. As of the June 30, 2026 update, the National Prevailing Wage Center was processing PERM prevailing wage requests received in April 2026 for determinations based on the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, and March 2026 for non-OEWS determinations.

Non-OEWS determinations, which rely on an alternate wage source such as a collective bargaining agreement or an employer-provided survey, run on their own timeline and are typically the slower of the two.

Why the PERM process takes so long: the four legs of the wait

If your PERM has been pending for eighteen months, that time is not one delay. It is four separate legs stacked end to end, and each one has a different cause and a different owner.

None of these legs is your employer's pace or your attorney's pace. Every one of them is either DOL queue depth or a waiting period written into the regulation, which is worth holding onto when a case has been quiet for a year and it starts to feel like someone has stopped working on it.

Naming which leg you are in also changes the question you can ask. "Why is my PERM taking so long" has no answer anyone can give you, because it asks about the total and the total is the sum of four queues nobody controls. A leg-specific question has a real answer.

Take a case where the ETA-9089 was filed in March 2026 and DOL is currently opening September 2025 filings. That is roughly six months of backlog sitting between the filing and the moment an analyst opens it, so the honest read is "nothing will happen until the queue reaches March, and the queue is moving about a month per month." Now the useful question is not "when will it be approved" but "has the queue month advanced since last time," which you can check yourself in two minutes.

Compare that to a case where the PWD has not come back yet. The queue math above does not apply at all, because the PERM clock has not started. The question there is when the determination is expected, and after that comes two months of recruitment before the ETA-9089 is even filed.

What to ask your employer about your PERM case status

Employers vary in how much they share, and some of that variation is legal caution rather than unhelpfulness. The recruitment file contains information about other applicants, and the company has its own reasons to control it.

Requests that are usually straightforward:

• The date the ETA-9089 was submitted, so you can do the queue math yourself
• The current status value on the case
• Whether the case has been selected for audit
• Whether the prevailing wage determination has been received, if you're at that stage
• The date on the certification once it comes through, because that starts a clock

Requests that often get declined, and reasonably so:

• Copies of the recruitment report or applicant resumes
• The company's internal reasoning on job requirements
• Access to the FLAG account itself

If you're changing jobs, planning a move, or timing a family decision around this, say so. A specific reason gets a more specific answer than a general check-in, and it also tells your employer's counsel which dates matter to you. For how a job change interacts with an approved I-140 later in the process, see changing jobs after I-140 approval.

After certification: the 180-day filing window

A certified PERM does not stay valid indefinitely, and this is the deadline most worth knowing.

The employer has 180 days from the date DOL approves the labor certification to file Form I-140 with USCIS. USCIS must receive the petition before that window closes. An expired labor certification is rejected, and rejection means starting the entire PERM process over: new prevailing wage request, new recruitment, new filing, new place in the queue.

Two years of waiting can be undone by a missed calendar entry, which is why the certification date is the one piece of information worth chasing your employer for the moment it lands.

The certification date also matters for a second reason. Your priority date, your place in line for a green card, was set when the PERM application was filed with DOL, not when it was certified. That date follows you through the I-140 and into the Visa Bulletin. Our guides to Form I-140 and reading the Visa Bulletin cover what happens next.

A status check tells you where one case sits today. If you want the stage before and the stage after it, our PERM guide walks the whole labor certification start to finish: how the prevailing wage determination is requested, what recruitment has to include, what DOL asks for in an audit, and how certification connects to the I-140 and your priority date.

Everything about PERM in one placePrevailing wage, recruitment, audits, and the path from certification to I-140.

Read the PERM guide

Getting a straight answer about where your case stands

Waiting through a PERM is hard partly because the information is held by someone else and partly because the status values are uninformative even when you get them. Reading the DOL queue yourself puts one piece of it back in your hands.

Tukki is a U.S. immigration provider that works on employment-based green cards, including PERM-based EB-2 and EB-3 cases, along with self-petition paths like EB-1A and EB-2 NIW. Applicants get a direct line to the attorneys working their case and can see where it stands without waiting for someone to check.

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