Filed my Form 1 in April, approved July 1 after 82 days. I've been tracking the NFA queue. Here's my sense of what's actually going on.
I filed a Form 1 on a suppressor back in April and didn't get approved until July 1. 82 days. What really got under my skin was that I filed it on a trust ATF had already cleared twice that spring, because two Form 4s on that exact trust got approved the month before. Same trust, same single responsible person, nothing new for anyone to look at. The two Form 4s sailed through. The Form 1 just sat there.
That's what sent me down the rabbit hole. Last month I posted (and you all were engaged with) "The Two-Queue Regime," a pile of community-reported wait data showing Form 1 and Form 4 acting like two completely different agencies. A few of you asked for an update once the spring filings aged and I had some actual tracking history behind me, so here's where things stand. Everything below is community-reported approval data (2,819 records now). It's a sample, not ATF's own books — though this month I finally got to check it against their books, which is point 4.
If you run a trust on Form 4, your wait roughly doubled in February and never came back down. Splitting Form 4 out by the month you filed instead of lumping it all together, the gap between individual and trust medians runs 11, 20, 22.5, 20, 21 days from January to May. Trusts settled in about three weeks behind individuals and have stayed there four months straight. The silver lining is that Form 4 trust is dead consistent. My tracker has tagged it "stable" every single day for 23 days while everything else bounces around as "volatile." Slower lane, most predictable number in the whole set.
The Form 1 slowdown hasn't let up. Last time I flagged Form 1 waits locking into a tight 60-plus-day band in February and said I couldn't tell yet whether it'd break once later filings caught up. April's fully in now. It didn't break. April Form 1 individuals sit at a 60-day median; April Form 1 trusts hit 77, the worst month anywhere in the data. My own 82 days lands right in that band, so I promise I'm not just reading other people's numbers off a screen here. The daily tracking is where it really shows. The oldest Form 1 filing month still clearing in any real volume hasn't budged off March 2026 in 23 straight days. The calendar rolled from mid-June to July and the Form 1 frontier didn't move an inch, so it just fell another month further behind. Form 4 at least crawled forward from April to May around the 17th.
May's Form 1 numbers look better. Don't buy it yet. May's sitting around a 31-day median, way under April's 60, and I know how tempting it is to read that as a turnaround. It isn't. Anything filed late May that's headed for a normal 60-day Form 1 wait physically can't show up as approved until late July, so all we're seeing right now is the fast handful that already cleared. Same trap I wrote a whole section about last time. Ask me again in August.
ATF's own numbers say the same thing, and, honestly, they match mine closer than I expected. ATF refreshed their processing-times page on June 1. Two things stood out. One, their published segment times land almost dead on the community medians: Form 4 individual 8 days (I've got 4–8), Form 4 trust 25 (I've got about 26), Form 1 individual eFile 62 (my April number was 60). A bunch of people voluntarily reporting their approvals really shouldn't line up with the government's internal figures that tightly, but it does, and that's about the best sanity check I could ask for. Two, the thing I could never see from approval reports alone: so far in 2026, ATF has finalized 67% of the Form 1s that came in the door (108,608 of 161,478) versus 93% of the Form 4s (764,749 of 819,481). Form 4 is roughly keeping up with its own intake. Form 1 is running a third behind.
So why Form 1 and not Form 4? Two ideas, and the ATF numbers helped me sort out which one actually holds up.
The one I'm pretty confident about is just how the two forms get processed. A Form 1 is a make, so a person at ATF has to actually sit down and review it. A Form 4 these days is usually an eFiled can transfer that runs through a mostly automated, background-check pipeline (their own median there is 8 days). That's really the whole story behind 93% cleared vs 67%: they aren't the same kind of work. Add the January 1 tax change ($200 down to $0 on cans, SBRs, SBSs, AOWs) as a wave of new filings, and the form that needs a human on every single one is exactly where you'd expect the pile to build. My own filing is a decent little case study for this. The trust was already vetted on those two Form 4s, so there was genuinely nothing new to review, and it still took 82 days. The holdup was never the trust paperwork. It's the Form 1 make review itself.
The other idea I threw out last time, I'm walking back. I'd figured a free make-stamp would pull in a wave of junk filings (SBR configs nobody's ever going to build, people filing just because it's free now) and gum up Form 1 specifically. Clean theory. The ATF counts just don't back it up: Form 1 isn't even a high-volume form, Form 4 outnumbers it something like 5 to 1, and I've got no prior-year numbers to show Form 1 intake actually spiked. So, I'm knocking that down to "maybe a small piece of it" and leaving it there. The processing-type explanation stands fine on its own.
No predictions, same as last time. Just what moved, what didn't, and what I genuinely can't say yet.
