EB-2 NIW

Browse the appeal decisions

Every published USCIS Administrative Appeals Office decision in this category, filterable by outcome, prong, year, occupation and service center. Multiple approved self-petitioners named reading the decisions in their own field as the most useful free hour they spent, so this exists to make that possible. Information, not legal advice.

Decisions indexed 5,1402015 to 2026

Sustained 3.3% 144 of 4,328 decided on the merits, about one in 30

Remanded 10.1% 439 sent back — not a win

Most contested Prong 1 in 91% of decisions naming a prong

What these numbers are not

Every decision here is an appeal of a petition that was already denied, so none of this is an approval rate. USCIS does not publish approved petitions, and no NIW-specific approval rate exists in any official source.

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Find the decisions like yours

Prong Field Year Service center Sort Search the occupation

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The 5,140 decisions load from a data file and are filtered in your browser, so nothing is sent anywhere. With JavaScript off the list cannot render — the appeal outcomes page covers the same corpus in aggregate, and the full decisions are on the USCIS listing.

Outcomes at a glance

Dismissed — 3,745 (73%)
Motion dismissed — 714 (14%)
Remanded — 439 (9%)
Sustained — 144 (3%)
Unreadable — 90 (2%)

How to read a card

Drafting rather than reading?

The step-by-step self-petition guide turns the patterns in these decisions into what to actually do, in order.

The sentence on each card is assembled from parsed fields — the order line, the stated occupation, which prongs the decision says were not established. It is not a summary of the reasoning: nothing here was read by a model. To see why a case was decided as it was, open it on the USCIS listing.

Blank fields are shown as unknown rather than hidden. 1,100 of decisions never state an occupation, 1,884 name no prong, and 90 have an order line that could not be parsed.