NIW Approval Rates by Profession: What 6,362 AAO Decisions Show

The headline number is 5.9%

Our AAO dataset holds 6,362 National Interest Waiver appeals. Of those, 375 were approved, 5,292 were denied outright, and 533 were sent back to USCIS for another look. That is a 5.9% approval rate at the appeal stage.

Before that number scares anyone off: every case here had already been denied once. The Administrative Appeals Office only sees petitions that lost the first round. First-time NIW filings approve far more often. So this is not your odds of approval — it is a record of which arguments survive a second, harder review and which ones fall apart.

The 5.9% average hides an enormous spread

Group the same 6,362 cases by field and the average comes apart. Here is the real distribution. The case counts matter — some categories are thin enough that the rate is noisy, and we have left the denominators in so you can judge for yourself.

• Scientific research (physical and life sciences) — 93 of 481, 19.3%
• Electrical & electronics engineering — 18 of 136, 13.2%
• Medicine & surgery (physicians) — 24 of 227, 10.6%
• Information technology & computing — 77 of 1,069, 7.2%
• Civil & structural engineering — 7 of 109, 6.4%
• Mechanical engineering — 4 of 109, 3.7%
• Finance, accounting & insurance — 13 of 400, 3.3%
• Education & teaching — 6 of 264, 2.3%
• Management & business administration — 9 of 388, 2.3%
• Entrepreneurship & startups — 0 of 164, 0%
• Nursing — 0 of 106, 0%
• Aviation — 0 of 91, 0%

Scientific research clears the AAO bar more than three times as often as the overall average. Three full categories — entrepreneurship, nursing, and aviation — did not produce a single approval across 361 combined appeals.

Why research wins and entrepreneurship loses

The gap is structural, not luck. A research record arrives with evidence the AAO already knows how to weigh: peer-reviewed publications, citation counts, independent expert letters, grant funding. When the work sits in clean energy, public health, or semiconductors, the national-importance argument is half-built before the petition is written.

Entrepreneurship is the opposite case. USCIS has long discounted job creation as a national-interest argument, and a founder's petition tends to lean on projected impact rather than a documented track record. Projection does not survive appeal — the AAO wants what already happened, not what might. Management, sales, and business administration cluster just above zero for the same reason.

Nursing and aviation fail for a different reason. Both usually have a working labor-certification path, which undercuts the core NIW argument that waiving the job offer serves the national interest. If the ordinary process is available and functioning, the waiver is a hard sell.

The service center matters more than people expect

Which USCIS service center handled the case visibly moves the number:

• Texas — 180 of 3,798 approved, 4.7%
• Nebraska — 144 of 1,996, 7.2%
• California — 12 of 106, 11.3%
• Vermont — 38 of 284, 13.4%

Texas adjudicates the largest share of NIW cases and approves the smallest fraction of appeals — under half the rate of Nebraska, and roughly a third of Vermont's. You do not get to choose your service center, so this is not advice to forum-shop. It is a reason to file an airtight petition the first time if your case routes through Texas, because the appeal there is unforgiving.

What the denials have in common

Read the denial language across thousands of these cases and one theme repeats: the petitioner did not establish that the proposed endeavor has national importance. It shows up far more than failures on the other two Dhanasar prongs. The runner-up is procedural — appeals filed late, or petitioners who could not establish that an exemption applied at all.

The practical takeaway: a denial is rarely about whether the work is good. It is about whether the petition connected that work to a benefit the United States can point to beyond the petitioner's own career. That connection is the single most common thing missing from the 5,292 denied cases.

Reading your own odds

Find your field in the list above, then treat that rate as the appeal-stage floor, not your forecast. A strong first-time petition does not land in this dataset at all. What this data is good for is the reverse question: if your field approves at 2–3% on appeal, a weak initial filing is very hard to rescue, so the first petition has to carry the full weight.

• Look up your specific profession in the profession lookup tool for the granular rate and similar real cases.
• Compare service-center patterns in the service center comparison.
• Get a case review to find which prong your own profile is weakest on before you file.

Every number in this article comes from the same 6,362-decision AAO dataset, queried directly. No projections, no rounded-up marketing figures — if a category shows zero approvals, that is what the record says.