Methodology
How the figures on this site are calculated, and why they may differ from other sources.
Grant rate = granted / (granted + denied). Administrative closures, withdrawals, abandonment and "not adjudicated" are excluded from the denominator. The unit of count is a decision per proceeding, not per application: applicants almost always file asylum, withholding and CAT protection together. Withholding and CAT grants are counted separately from asylum. U.S. fiscal year: October 1 – September 30.
The same text is served alongside the data through the API — the caveat has to travel with the numbers wherever they appear.
What the grant rate counts
Grant rate = granted ÷ (granted + denied). Administrative closures, withdrawals, abandonment and "not adjudicated" are excluded from the denominator: the court never ruled on the merits, and recording a denial where none occurred would be wrong. Counting them as denials drops the percentage by tens of points and makes it stop meaning what people read it to mean.
The unit is a decision, not a person
We count decisions per proceeding. One person may go through several proceedings and will then be counted more than once. Counting people would be a fairer answer to "what are my chances", but it would be comparable to no public source.
Withholding and CAT are counted separately
Applicants almost always file asylum, withholding of removal and Convention Against Torture protection together. A decision that denies asylum but grants withholding is simultaneously a denial and a protection from removal: the person stays, but with no refugee status, no right to bring family, no path to a green card, and the protection can later be lifted. In the asylum grant rate such a decision therefore counts as a denial, and the cases are shown as their own figure.
U.S. fiscal year
October 1 through September 30. FY2025 began on October 1, 2024. This is the first reason figures fail to match sources that count calendar years.
Why months are not available for every year
On judge and court pages the period can also be taken by month — but only for the last three fiscal years. Anything earlier is counted a whole year at a time. The reason is page weight, not missing data: a month-by-month breakdown of a large court's whole history weighs three times as much as the rest of the page, and nobody asks it of 2011. The boundary falls exactly on the start of a fiscal year so that no year is cut in half.
An interval, not a bare percentage
Every percentage is shown with a 95% Wilson interval. It shows how reliable the figure is at that sample size: for a judge with eleven decisions the interval spans more than thirty percentage points, and "91% granted" there means something entirely different than it does for a judge with three thousand.
Gaps in the source
The release is known to lose records: some entries, applications for protection among them, disappear from it — researchers and members of Congress have both raised this with EOIR. That is a defect of the source, not of the calculation. Data missing from your case here does not mean it is missing at the court.
The codes in a case record
Court data is made of codes: one letter for "denied", two for "individual hearing". Where EOIR publishes a lookup table — about twenty of them ship with the release — we substitute the plain wording. Where it publishes none (hearing medium, motion decision, charge status) the letter stays, with a note beside it saying what is known about it and how. We will not invent a plausible label: read as fact, an invented one is worse than an opaque letter.
The asylum clock is an estimate
The clock is computed from EOIR's own asy_clk_stat markings on adjournment codes: the reason for each adjournment determines whether the clock runs or stops. Some codes EOIR resolves manually — those days are reported separately rather than assigned to either side. For the official figure ask the court or check ACIS.