Search "EB2-NIW approval rate" and you'll get confident-sounding percentages — 60%, 80%, "very high." Almost none of them describe a population you can actually place yourself in. USCIS doesn't publish an approval rate for National Interest Waiver petitions specifically, so most numbers you see are either a blended all-I-140 figure (EB1, EB2, and NIW mixed together) or a vibe from a comment thread. Neither tells you how a case like yours tends to go.
We show the composition of the cases we hold, not an official USCIS approval rate.
Three reasons a single approval rate is the wrong question
It lumps EB1, EB2, and NIW together
General trackers report one I-140 approval rate across every employment-based category. NIW is a small slice inside it — the headline number isn't about your petition type at all.
Denials go quiet
Online, approvals get posted and denials disappear. Any rate built from a celebration feed is inflated by survivorship bias — you never see the cases that didn't make it.
It depends on field and profile
A research scientist and a startup founder face different bars on the same three prongs. One average flattens exactly the differences you're trying to understand.
Profile is the clearest signal we can show
We won't hand you a single approval rate — but the decided cases we hold do lean, and profile is where that lean shows up most clearly. Here's the approved share of decided cases by profile, ordered highest to lowest:
By endeavor field — among those with enough decided cases to read — approvals lean most common in Medicine / Health, Life Sciences / Biotech, Engineering, CS / Software / Data order. It's a direction to explore in the data, not a ranking to bank on.
Read these relatively, not as rates. Our sample holds more denials than the real world, so every share here sits low — the honest signal is which groups lean higher than others, not the exact percentage. For any one group, browse the actual cases rather than trusting the bar.
How many cases we hold, by field
And here's the raw coverage — how many decided cases sit in each endeavor field today. Browse any of them in the app to see how they actually went, filtered to a profile like yours:
These numbers come from crowdsourced cases — shared by their owners or compiled from public posts, a growing share tracked against USCIS; not official USCIS statistics. We show counts rather than rates, and hide slices too small to be meaningful. How we collect & count →
EB2-NIW approval rate FAQ
What is the EB2-NIW approval rate?
There's no single reliable figure. USCIS doesn't publish an NIW-specific rate, and blended I-140 numbers mix in EB1 and EB2. The useful question is how cases in your field and profile tend to go — which is what NIWStats shows.
Is EB2-NIW hard to get approved?
It depends on how well the petition argues the three Dhanasar prongs for your specific endeavor. Some fields and profiles clear the bar more easily than others — a single "hard/easy" label misses that.
Where can I see real NIW outcomes?
Right here — NIWStats collects real, crowdsourced EB2-NIW cases and lets you filter them by endeavor field, profile, filing method, RFE history, and timeline, so you can find cases like your own.
Stop guessing from one blurry number
Filter real EB2-NIW cases down to your endeavor field and profile, and see how they actually went.
Explore the cases