u/NFA_Watch

Two weeks ago I posted here that the Form 1 individual median had gone 83, 73, 48, 22 over the last four weeks of July, and I said the 22 would rise because that week was only about a third reported.

It didn't rise. With the rest of the records in, that week still reads 22. The two weeks before it actually came down, 73 to 62 and 48 to 44, because the later reports were faster rather than slower. That was the opposite of what I told you to expect, so I'm saying it plainly.

The weeks since read 8 days and 4 days.

The thing I couldn't call last time was trusts. That lane had turned on fourteen approvals, which is not enough to say anything. It's now on a hundred and two. Median over the thirty days to July 15 was 82 days; over the thirty days after, 66. Three things I checked before posting that.

Virginia dominates that lane's June records, to the point where one week is thirteen Virginia records out of thirteen. Dropping Virginia from both windows makes the fall bigger, 84 to 65, not smaller. Dropping Texas, the most common state recently, leaves it unchanged.

Recomputing the whole series using only approvals reported within three days of approval holds the reporting window constant, so slower reporting can't manufacture a trend. The most recent week reads the same either way.

Counting only approvals that waited 30 days or less takes filings still sitting in the queue out of the question entirely. Trusts produced none of those in most weeks through mid-July, then 6, then 3, then 16.

Where the two lanes actually are is different, though. In the week of August 10, the individual lane approved 30 filings and 29 of them were filed that same month. There's no old work left in it. The trust lane approved 33 that week: one from May, ten from June, fifteen from July, seven from August. It's still working a backlog. Trusts look roughly like individuals did in mid-July.

Over the last fourteen days, individual Form 1s are running a median of 6 days against Form 4 individual's 5, on 110 and 43 approvals, with overlapping confidence intervals. In June those two were 69 days and 6. Trusts are at 53.

What I can't tell you is why. This data has approvals in it and never applications, so ATF adding capacity and a backlog running dry look exactly the same from where I'm sitting.

Community-reported data, so it's a sample. If your Form 1 came through recently, the filing date and the approval date are the two numbers that make this better.

In January, Form 4 individual and trust filings were clearing at basically the same speed — 11 days and 10 days. They've separated since. Over the last two weeks of approvals, individual filings are running a median of 5 days and trusts 31.

Spread, because medians hide a lot: the middle half of individual filings landed between 3 and 13 days. For trusts it was 26 to 39.

Form 4 individual has been flat all year, between 5 and 11 days every month. The whole change is on the trust side, which has climbed steadily from 10 days in January to 31 now and hasn't reversed once.

This is community-reported approval data, not ATF's ledger, so it's a sample and it skews toward people who post their approvals online. It also can't see denials or filings still pending.

Not telling anyone how to file because there are good reasons to use a trust (how I file) that have nothing to do with speed. But if the reason was "it doesn't cost me anything," that stopped being true sometime around February. Recent report on Form1 timings available at: NFAwatch.com

Grouping approvals by the week they cleared, Form 1 individual filings went 83 days, then 73, then 48, then 22 over the last four weeks of July.

The reason looks like the backlog running dry rather than anything speeding up. Through mid-July the queue was still clearing filings from March, April and May. By the last week of the month, 45 of 53 approvals were filings placed in July — same month they were approved.

Three things worth saying before anyone takes the 22 to the bank:

The last week is only about a third reported, so that number will rise as more approvals come in. The settled one is the week of July 20 at 48 days, down from 83 two weeks earlier.

Form 1 trusts have barely moved — still around 78 days. Only individual filings did this.

And we threw out a week of our own data doing this. A dip in late June turned out to be 21 of 28 records from a single state arriving on one day, which is a collection artifact, not the queue. Excluding it, that week reads 69 days instead of 40.

Community-reported data, so it's a sample. If your Form 1 came through recently, the wait and the filing date are the two numbers that make this better. Submit your own approvals at NFAWatch.com.

Form 1 Trust NFA wait times are up 10 days from last month — 74 → 84. Not moving in the right direction. ATF tax stamp tracker. For transparency, individual filers timing didn't change much, approximately the same window within a few days quicker that I wouldn't read into as it's within a standard deviation but a hair quicker.

Was finally able to get my hands on a TX22 after searching for a few months. My Oculus came in months ago and I’ve been itching. Range time tomorrow.

The wait is growing in almost a straight line. Looking at what ATF actually cleared each month, the median Form 1 (individual) wait went 13 days in January → 35 in February → 52 in March → 61 → 64 → 69 → about 74 days for July approvals. That's roughly +11 days of wait per calendar month since the $0 tax stamp hit. Trusts are running about a week behind individuals (~84 days in July).

But the line is fair. Comparing every pair of reported approvals filed at least two weeks apart, the later filer beats the earlier filer only about 1–3% of the time (1.1% for Form 4 individual, 2.6% for Form 1). Nobody is jumping the queue — it's almost perfectly first-in, first-out.

And it's a timer, not a lottery. People who filed around the same time get approved around the same time — the middle 50% of a given month's approvals lands within about a one-week band. If you know your filing date, you can guess your approval window better than you'd think.

Bonus: Form 1 approvals arrive seven days a week, Sundays included. Form 4s basically take weekends off. (Meanwhile Form 4 individual e-files are clearing in ~6 days median, which is its own kind of painful to look at from the Form 1 line.)

Charts are from the Lab page I put these studies on — everything is computed live from community reports, so the numbers update as people report: https://www.nfawatch.com/lab

Usual caveats: community-reported data, not official ATF numbers; e-file only; recent filers are underrepresented until they're approved (the charts mark where that matters). If you've been approved recently, adding your dates takes about 30 seconds and sharpens the picture for everyone still waiting: https://www.nfawatch.com/submit

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

As some of you already know and with your help, I have been building NFA Watch (nfawatch.com) to track approval queue behavior using community-submitted data. Just published the first long-form data briefing — 5 months of approvals, statistically analyzed.

The headline finding: Form 1 and Form 4 don't share a processing regime. Form 4 Individual approvals have a median of 8 days. Form 1 approvals have a median of 48 days. Same queue, same ATF, completely different distribution shapes — opposite skew, different variance behavior, different responses to time.

A few other things the data shows that surprised me:

• In February and March, Form 1 Individual approvals basically locked — nearly every one resolved in a 55–69 day band with almost no variance. Standard deviation dropped to 5.9 days. That's not natural dispersion, that's mechanical.
• Form 4 Trust is the most boring (best) segment in the data — median held at 23–26 days for four straight months with almost no movement.
• The "Trusts are slower" heuristic is only true inside Form 4. Within Form 1, Trust and Individual medians are identical at 48 days.
• April and May data looks like acceleration but isn't — it's a right-censoring artifact. Slow approvals from those months haven't resolved yet and can't appear in the snapshot. The report covers this in detail.

Full report with 10 charts:
nfawatch.com/queue-state/the-two-queue-regime-june-2026

Happy to answer questions about methodology or what the data does/doesn't support.

Elevated distribution instability coincides with slowing throughput. Conditions are unsettled across segments.

Similar conditions are visible across multiple filing structures, though some asymmetry persists between cohort segments. Irregular distribution combined with slowing or flat velocity suggests processing disruption. Queue consistency may be under pressure from irregular cohort behavior.

Frontier is reaching cohorts filed within the past two months.
Moderate dispersion detected. Wait times vary meaningfully across segments.
Distribution instability is elevated across filing segments.

Live operational queue tracking:
https://www.nfawatch.com/