Adjustment of Status Fee & Timeline Calculator

Introduction: what the I-485 fee schedule and the processing clock actually measure

Adjustment of status is the procedure in section 245 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, implemented at 8 CFR part 245, by which a person already inside the United States becomes a lawful permanent resident without leaving for an immigrant visa interview abroad. The vehicle is Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status. Almost every question people ask about it reduces to two numbers: how much money has to accompany the packet, and how long the wait will be. Both numbers changed shape on 1 April 2024, and most cost estimates still circulating on the internet describe the world before that date.

The fee side changed because of the USCIS fee schedule final rule published at 89 FR 6194 on 31 January 2024 and effective 1 April 2024. That rule did three things that matter to anyone budgeting an adjustment packet. It raised the Form I-485 fee from 1,225 dollars to 1,440 dollars. It absorbed biometric services costs into the underlying benefit fee and abolished the separate 85 dollar biometrics charge for most filings, so the biometrics line that appears in older guides is no longer a real payment. And, most expensively for families, it unbundled the ancillary benefits: a Form I-765 employment authorisation request and a Form I-131 advance parole request now carry their own fees even when they travel in the same envelope as the Form I-485. Before the rule, both rode along at no extra charge.

The timeline side did not change by rule; it changed by being widely misunderstood. USCIS does not publish an average processing time and does not publish a promise. It publishes the time it took to complete 80 percent of adjudicated cases at a given office over the previous six months. That is an 80th percentile of a heavily right-skewed distribution. Roughly one case in five is, by design, still pending after the posted figure has elapsed. The same figure does double duty as the threshold for service requests: only once your case has been pending longer than the published time is it treated as outside normal processing time and eligible for an inquiry. This planner therefore treats the published number as what it is, a percentile and an inquiry threshold, rather than as an expected completion date.

How to use the I-485 fee and timeline planner

1. Count the people, not the family. Adjustment of status is charged per applicant, not per household. Enter the number of applicants aged 14 or older who are each filing their own Form I-485, and separately the number of children under 14 who are filing concurrently with a parent's Form I-485, because those children qualify for a reduced rate.
2. Count the ancillary forms separately. Enter how many Form I-765 work permit applications and how many Form I-131 advance parole applications will be filed. These are optional; a beneficiary who already holds valid H-1B or L-1 status and does not need to travel may skip both and save a substantial sum.
3. Enter the filing date you have used or plan to use. The planner requires a date on or after 1 April 2024 because the fee arithmetic below only describes the current schedule.
4. Look up your own processing time. Open the USCIS processing times tool, select Form I-485, your form category and the office that will adjudicate your case, and type the number of months it reports into the processing time field. Do not accept the default; it is only a placeholder so the page has something to draw.
5. Add your out-of-pocket costs. The medical examination on Form I-693, certified translations, passport photos, postage and any attorney fee are not USCIS fees and vary enormously. Enter your own quoted figures so the grand total reflects your actual budget.
6. Read the timeline band, then re-run it. Change the processing time by two or three months and watch the projected decision date move. That sensitivity is the honest output of this exercise: the fee total is exact, the date is a percentile estimate.

Fee formula: the unbundled I-485, I-765 and I-131 filing fees

Since the current schedule is a flat per-form, per-applicant table rather than a household rate, the total USCIS fee is a simple linear combination. Writing n_a for applicants aged 14 or older, n_c for children under 14 filing concurrently with a parent, n_e for Form I-765 applications and n_p for Form I-131 applications:

Each coefficient is a published line in the USCIS fee schedule, Form G-1055, and each is codified at 8 CFR 106.2. The 1,440 dollar figure is the general Form I-485 filing fee. The 950 dollar figure applies only when the applicant is under 14 years of age and the child's Form I-485 is submitted concurrently with the Form I-485 of at least one parent; a child under 14 filing alone pays the full 1,440 dollars, which is why the planner rejects a submission that claims child applicants with no accompanying adult applicant. The 260 dollar figure is the reduced Form I-765 rate available to someone who has paid the full Form I-485 fee on or after 1 April 2024 while that I-485 remains pending, and it is the same whether the I-765 is filed on paper or online; the standard rate outside that situation is 520 dollars on paper or 470 dollars online. The 630 dollar figure is the paper filing fee for an advance parole document on Form I-131.

Notice what is absent from the expression. There is no biometrics term, because the separate biometric services fee was eliminated for Form I-485 by the 2024 rule and survives only at a reduced 30 dollar rate for a narrow set of filings such as Temporary Protected Status. There is no premium processing term, because Form I-485 is not an eligible benefit request on Form I-907. And there is no discount for filing as a family, because none exists.

The grand total simply adds whatever non-USCIS costs you enter:

Timeline formula: turning a published processing time into a decision date

Let F be the filing date and T the processing time in months that USCIS publishes for your form category and office. The projected decision date D is obtained by advancing the filing date by T months of calendar time:

Whole months are added as true calendar months, with the day of the month clamped to the length of the target month so that a 31 January filing plus one month lands on 28 or 29 February rather than overflowing into March. The fractional remainder is converted using the mean Gregorian month of 365.2425 divided by 12, which is 30.436875 days. This matters more than it looks: adding T months as a flat 30-day multiple drifts by about five days per year of waiting, which is enough to move a projected interview month.

Because T is the 80th percentile of completed cases, D carries a specific interpretation. It is the date by which a case in the faster four fifths would normally have been decided, and simultaneously the first date on which USCIS will accept a service request on the ground that the case is outside normal processing time. The planner also reports the share of that window already consumed:

where t is today. Values above 100 percent mean the case has already outlived the published window and an inquiry is available. A second, deliberately illustrative marker is drawn at 1.25 T to represent a case that lands in the slower tail; that multiplier is a planning convention chosen for this page, not a USCIS statistic, and it is labelled as such in the output.

Worked example: a married couple and a nine-year-old child filing family-based AOS

Scenario. Ana is the beneficiary of an approved Form I-130 filed by her US citizen spouse, so she is an immediate relative and a visa number is always available. Her nine-year-old son is a derivative. Ana wants a work permit and a travel document; the child needs neither. They file on 15 September 2026. Ana looks up the USCIS processing times tool for Form I-485, employment-and-family-based category, at the field office serving her address, and it reports 13.5 months. Her civil surgeon quotes 550 dollars for the Form I-693 medical examination, translations and photos come to 180 dollars, and she is using a limited-scope attorney review quoted at 900 dollars.

Step 1, count the applicants. One applicant aged 14 or older, so n_a = 1. One child under 14 filing concurrently with a parent, so n_c = 1. The spouse is the petitioner, not an applicant, and pays nothing here.

Step 2, count the ancillary forms. Ana files one Form I-765 and one Form I-131; the child files neither. So n_e = 1 and n_p = 1.

Step 3, apply the fee formula. 1440 × 1 = 1,440 dollars, plus 950 × 1 = 950 dollars, plus 260 × 1 = 260 dollars, plus 630 × 1 = 630 dollars, giving a USCIS total of 3,280 dollars. Adding 550 + 180 + 900 = 1,630 dollars of out-of-pocket cost gives a grand total of 4,910 dollars. For comparison, the same packet filed on 31 March 2024 would have cost 1,225 + 1,225 + 85 + 85 = 2,620 dollars with the work permit and travel document included free, so the unbundling and the rate rise together added 660 dollars before any private costs.

Step 4, apply the timeline formula. T = 13.5, so the whole part adds 13 calendar months to 15 September 2026, reaching 15 October 2027, and the fractional part adds round(0.5 × 30.436875) = 15 days, giving a projected decision date of 30 October 2027. That is also the first date on which Ana can submit an outside-normal-processing-time service request. The illustrative slower-tail marker sits at 1.25 × 13.5 = 16.875 months: 16 calendar months reach 15 January 2028 and round(0.875 × 30.436875) = 27 further days give 11 February 2028.

Step 5, sanity-check the reading. Ana should not tell her employer she will have a green card in October 2027. She should tell them there is roughly a four-in-five chance of a decision by then, that the work permit she filed alongside has its own separate processing queue, and that an interview notice, a request for evidence, or a transfer between offices can each reset expectations.

Interpreting the result: what each output line is good for

The USCIS fee subtotal is the number to write on your cheques or authorise on Form G-1450, and it is exact. Since 1 April 2024 the three forms must be paid separately even inside one envelope, so a family like Ana's is writing three distinct payments of 1,440, 950, 260 and 630 dollars rather than one combined amount. Submitting a single combined payment is a common rejection reason. The per-applicant average that the planner reports is useful mainly for deciding whether to stagger filings across tax years or benefit periods.

The projected decision date is a planning anchor, not an entitlement. Use it to decide when to renew a driving licence, when a lease or a school enrolment decision has to be made, and when it becomes reasonable to escalate. The percentage-of-window figure is the one to watch: at 60 percent you are unremarkable, at 100 percent you have a procedural right to inquire, and beyond about 150 percent it is normal practice to consider a congressional liaison request or, in genuinely stalled cases, litigation advice.

Limitations, assumptions, and the parts of an AOS case this planner cannot model

The fee arithmetic is exact for the mainstream family-based and employment-based filing described above, and it is deliberately narrow. It assumes every applicant pays a standard rate. It does not model the many zero-fee categories in the fee schedule, which include refugees, Special Immigrant Juveniles, U and T nonimmigrant adjustments, VAWA self-petitioners and certain Afghan and Iraqi special immigrants, nor does it model fee waivers on Form I-912 or the reduced-fee provisions available to low-income applicants. If any applicant in your packet falls into one of those categories, the real total will be lower, sometimes zero. It also excludes Supplement A to Form I-485 for filings under section 245(i), which carries its own additional sum.

The timeline model has sharper limitations still. It converts one published percentile into one date and nothing more. It does not model the biometrics appointment, the interview notice, a request for evidence, a transfer between the National Benefits Center and a field office, or administrative processing, each of which can add months without changing the published figure you typed in. It does not model visa retrogression: for preference categories, and especially for the EB-2 and EB-3 categories for nationals of India and China, the binding constraint is priority date movement in the Department of State Visa Bulletin rather than adjudication speed, and a case can sit approvable but unapprovable for years. Immediate relatives of US citizens never face that constraint; preference applicants often do. The 1.25 multiplier used for the slower-tail marker is a planning convention adopted for this page, not a published USCIS statistic.

Two further assumptions are worth stating plainly. First, the planner assumes your filing date is on or after 1 April 2024, and refuses earlier dates rather than silently applying the wrong schedule. Second, it assumes the fee schedule has not moved since this page was reviewed. USCIS fees are revised by rulemaking and, for the newer statutory fees created in 2025, adjusted annually for inflation, so the effective date shown below is part of the answer. Verify the live figures on Form G-1055 before you write a cheque.

This page is an informational planning tool, not legal advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Immigration eligibility turns on facts this page never sees. Consult a licensed immigration attorney or a Department of Justice accredited representative before filing.

Sources and effective dates. Fee amounts are taken from USCIS, Form G-1055, Fee Schedule (uscis.gov/g-1055), cross-checked against the codified schedule at 8 CFR 106.2, US Government Publishing Office annual edition of Title 8 (govinfo.gov). The restructuring that raised the Form I-485 fee, removed the separate biometric services fee and unbundled Forms I-765 and I-131 is the USCIS final rule U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Fee Schedule and Changes to Certain Other Immigration Benefit Request Requirements, 89 FR 6194 (31 January 2024), effective 1 April 2024. Processing-time methodology and the definition of a case outside normal processing time come from USCIS Check Case Processing Times (egov.uscis.gov/processing-times). Premium processing eligibility is from USCIS, Form I-907, Request for Premium Processing Service (uscis.gov/i-907). Underlying eligibility rules are at 8 CFR part 245, and visa availability is published in the Department of State Visa Bulletin (travel.state.gov). Fee schedule effective date: 1 April 2024. Last updated: 3 August 2026. Fees are revised by rulemaking and some statutory fees created in 2025 are adjusted annually for inflation, so confirm the live figures on Form G-1055 before filing.