Glossary
Plain-English definitions for terms you'll see on NFA Watch. All data is community-reported and unofficial — nothing here is legal advice or a wait-time prediction.
- Cohort
- People who filed around the same time as you.
- Frontier (Operational Frontier)
- The oldest filing months still getting approvals — how far back the ATF is currently working.
- Active Cohorts
- How many different filing months saw at least one approval in the last 30 days.
- Median Wait
- The middle wait — half were faster, half slower (used instead of an average so one extreme case doesn't skew it).
- Typical Range
- Where the middle 50% of waits fell — most people landed in this range.
- Regime
- The queue's current pattern of behavior.
- Compression
- Wait times bunching closer together.
- Dispersion
- How spread out the wait times are.
- Density
- How concentrated approvals are in a given period.
- Volatility
- How much the wait times are bouncing around.
- Divergence
- The widening of operational differences between filing contexts — when lanes process cohorts at meaningfully different rates.
- Convergence
- A narrowing of operational differences between filing contexts — lanes moving toward more similar processing conditions.
- Fragmentation
- Internally inconsistent processing behavior where different cohort segments advance at materially different rates.
- Trajectory
- The directional momentum of approval velocity: accelerating, flat, or slowing.
- Breadth
- How widely a condition extends across filing structures — whether it is isolated to one lane or system-wide.
NFA Watch is community-run and unaffiliated with the ATF or U.S. government. Data reflects community-reported approvals only.