Chicago USCIS field office: N-400 processing time, backlog and denial rate
Chicago is one of the ten busiest field offices in the country. USCIS says 80% of naturalization cases here finish within 8 months, faster than the typical office (10 months). It has a shorter queue than most offices, and a denial rate below the national 11.1%.
What USCIS publishes
For Chicago, USCIS currently states that 80% of naturalization cases are completed within 8 months. That is the only wait figure USCIS gives per office, and it is an 80th percentile, not an average and not a median: four cases in five finish sooner than this, and one in five takes longer. We captured it in July 2026. USCIS overwrites the figure in place and keeps no history, so this is a snapshot rather than a trend.
It is worth holding this next to the queue figure below, because the two are built from completely different USCIS sources and they broadly agree with each other. That agreement is what gives the queue figure its credibility.
The queue
Chicago had 18,329 cases pending and decided 7,767 of them in the quarter, which is 2.4 quarters of work already in front of it. Nationally the figure is 3.8, so this office is carrying less queued work than the country as a whole, by +1.4 quarters.
A year earlier, in the same quarter, it had 2.3 quarters queued. The queue has grown by +0.1 quarters since then.
Approvals and denials
Of the 7,767 cases Chicago decided in the quarter, it approved 7,196 and denied 571, a denial rate of 7.4%, +3.5 pts against the same quarter a year earlier. The national denial rate was 11.1%.
A denial is not a failed test. USCIS publishes no civics-test pass rate for any field office, so this page shows none. Naturalization cases are denied for many reasons, most of them about eligibility, continuous residence, or good moral character rather than the test itself. A high denial rate at an office tells you nothing about how hard its officers make the civics test.
The queue and the denial rate at Chicago are both outside an applicant's control. The civics test is not: the questions are published in full, and every official one is in our free US citizenship test practice.
Nearby in the index
Other offices in Illinois, then offices carrying a similar amount of queued work.
- TucsonArizona · 2.4 quarters queued
- PhiladelphiaPennsylvania · 2.4 quarters queued
- New YorkNew York · 2.4 quarters queued
- GreerSouth Carolina · 2.3 quarters queued
- St. AlbansVermont · 2.3 quarters queued
- NorfolkVirginia · 2.4 quarters queued
Office location is where the office sits, not the full area it covers. Confirm your own case with USCIS. Citizen Pass is an independent study tool, not affiliated with any government agency.
Sources, data notes and caveats
Where the numbers come from
- USCIS, Number of Form N-400 Applications for Naturalization by Category of Naturalization, Case Status, and USCIS Field OfficeThe nine quarterly workbooks are committed in data/raw/. Direct file URLs are listed per quarter below.
- DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, Table 23: Persons Naturalized by State or Territory of ResidencePublished June 2026. Counts are rounded to the nearest 10 by the publisher. This counts people who COMPLETED naturalization and is a different measure from the N-400 case actions above.
- USCIS Historical Processing Times factsheet, FY2016 to FY2024This is a CYCLE-TIME median. USCIS states it is not comparable to the 80th-percentile figures shown on the live processing-times tool. The two must never be plotted on one axis.
- USCIS Case Processing Times toolNOT used as an input to this index. Recorded here because it is the figure most readers arrive with. It publishes only the 80th percentile (80% of cases completed within N months), never a median, and USCIS keeps no public history of it. See scripts/wait-times/ for the forward-looking capture.
- USCIS, 2025 Civics TestN-400 filed before 20 October 2025: 2008 test, up to 10 of 100 questions, 6 to pass. Filed on or after: 2025 test, 20 of 128 questions, 12 to pass.
- USCIS Naturalization Test PerformanceNo per-office or per-state pass rate is published anywhere. No pass-rate data exists yet for the 2025 test version. This index therefore reports no pass rates at office or state level.
What these numbers do and do not mean
- This measures cases, not tests. Nothing here is a civics-test pass rate. USCIS publishes no pass rate by field office or by state, and none is estimated on this page. Most denials turn on eligibility, continuous residence, or good moral character rather than on the test.
- The queue figure is a description of an office, not a prediction about you. It is cases waiting divided by cases decided in the quarter, so it reads as quarters of work already queued at the office's current rate of work. Your own case can be faster or slower for reasons that have nothing to do with the size of the queue.
- Small offices are not rated. Below 200 completed cases in the quarter, a single decision can swing a rate by several points, so we publish the counts and withhold the rate.
- Suppressed cells. USCIS replaces small counts with a “D” to avoid disclosing individuals. We carry those through as unknown, never as zero, which is why a few offices have counts but no rate.
- Two processing-time measures exist and they are not comparable. The USCIS processing-times tool publishes an 80th percentile, meaning 80% of cases finish within that many months. The historical factsheet publishes a median on a different, cycle-time basis. USCIS states these should not be compared. We keep them apart, and neither one feeds the queue figure.
- Pending is not a running total. USCIS states that some case actions are not reflected across reporting periods, so a quarter's pending count cannot be reconstructed by adding receipts to, and subtracting completions from, the quarter before.
- Figures get restated. USCIS revises earlier quarters without notice. Every number here is as published in the workbook listed above, for October 1, 2025 - December 31, 2025.
All sources last verified July 2026. Spot an error? Tell us and we will check it against the source.