If you have a PERM application pending at the Department of Labor, you already know the drill: no email, no notification, no estimated timeline. Just a case number and the vague assurance that DOL is "processing cases."
What most people do not know is that DOL publishes every decision it makes — daily — through a public data system called FLAG (Foreign Labor Application Gateway). That data tells you exactly how many cases were decided today, how many are still pending in your filing month, and where your case sits in the queue.
Here is how to use it.
How DOL Actually Processes PERM Cases
DOL does not process cases in strict first-in, first-out order. Cases from the same filing month are worked as a batch — the "cohort." As the cohort gets decided, the remaining pending cases shrink until virtually all cases are cleared (typically when a cohort reaches 99%+ decided).
This means the relevant question is not just "when was my case filed" but "how far along is my cohort, and how many cases are ahead of mine in the filing date order."
What the FLAG System Tells You
FLAG updates each business day with new decisions. From the raw data you can pull:
- Total cases filed in your month
- How many are still pending
- How many were certified, denied, or withdrawn
- The exact filing dates of every pending case
That last point matters. If your case was filed on March 14, 2025, and you can see the current filing date DOL is working through in the March 2025 cohort, you have a real queue position — not a guess.
The Problem: Doing This Manually Is Tedious
FLAG does not expose case-level status directly. The data is published as bulk disclosure files that need to be downloaded, parsed, and compared against previous pulls to detect changes. DOL does not send notifications. To stay current you would need to check manually every day, remember what the status was yesterday, and notice if anything changed.
Most people do not do this. They either wait months with no information or pay an attorney's paralegal to check periodically.
What PermTrack Does
PermTrack scrapes the FLAG system every weekday and tracks every pending PERM case across all active filing months. For each case we calculate:
- Queue position — how many pending cases have an earlier filing date than yours
- Cohort progress — what percentage of your filing month has been decided
- Estimated review date — based on the current pace of decisions in your cohort
- Daily delta — how much your queue position moved since yesterday
Our Pending Cases tracker shows this data publicly for every filing month. You can look up your employer, find your case, and see exactly where it stands right now.
Getting Daily Email Updates
If you want the data delivered to your inbox instead of having to check the site, our case tracking subscription does that automatically.
Every weekday you receive an email with:
- Your queue position and how it changed from the prior day
- Your cohort's progress percentage and weekly trend
- Today's decision count for your filing month
- Your estimated review date at the current pace
On Fridays the email includes a weekly rollup instead of the daily summary.
Your subscription auto-cancels when your case reaches a final status — certified, denied, or withdrawn — so you are never charged for a month after your case closes.
What to Do With the Information
The queue position and estimated review date are most useful for two things:
Planning. If your employer needs to start I-140 prep or you are trying to time a job change under AC21 portability, knowing your estimated certification date with reasonable confidence is genuinely useful. A vague "6-12 months" from DOL's website is not.
Spotting a problem early. If your case stays pending while the rest of your cohort clears, that is a signal worth escalating to your attorney. Cases that fall behind the cohort average often have an outstanding issue — a missing document, an address discrepancy, or a hold — that the attorney needs to address proactively.
Where to Start
- Look up your filing month on the Pending Cases page to see where your cohort stands today.
- Search by employer name to find your specific case and its current status.
- If you want daily updates in your inbox, subscribe here — Tracker ($4.99/mo for weekly summaries) or Daily ($9.99/mo for daily emails with queue position).
DOL will not tell you what is happening with your case. The data is public. You might as well use it.