The NLRB Charge Process Now Runs on a Two-Week Head Start

An employee talks to coworkers about pay, a supervisor pulls them aside about it, and a charge lands at the National Labor Relations Board days later. That charge does not sit in a queue quietly. It enters a process with real volume behind it and, as of a recent procedural change, a much faster clock at the very start.

The scale most employers underestimate

The NLRB is not a small agency handling a trickle of disputes. The NLRB receives about 20,000 to 30,000 charges per year from employees, unions and employers, covering the full range of unfair labor practices the Act describes — threats and interrogations, unlawful discipline tied to union activity, bad-faith bargaining, and more. Every one of those charges gets investigated by Board agents who gather evidence, and the volume alone explains why the agency has spent real effort trying to speed up how charges move through intake.

Board agents work across regional offices spread nationally, and each office carries its own caseload rather than pulling from one central pool. A charge filed in a busy region can wait longer for an available agent than an identical charge filed somewhere quieter, simply because of where the workplace happens to sit, which is a variable no employer or employee controls but that shapes how the timeline actually plays out in practice.

Once a charge is properly in the system, the timeline is not indefinite. Typically, a decision is made about the merits of a charge within 7 to 14 weeks, though the agency is upfront that some cases run considerably longer than that window suggests. Most charges resolve before that decision ever gets made — through settlement, withdrawal by the party who filed it, or dismissal by the regional director — which means the formal decision window mostly applies to the cases that stay contested the whole way through.

A new front-loaded deadline changes who moves first

A December policy memo shifted where the early burden sits. The NLRB's acting general counsel issued Memorandum GC 26-01 on December 23, 2025, introducing new intake procedures for charges filed after a set date, aimed at reducing a backlog the agency had openly acknowledged. Under the new approach, charging parties must e-file specific evidence within two weeks of docketing, rather than handing basic information to an agent later, once an investigation is already underway.

The agency has been explicit that this is not a new substantive hurdle, just a timing change: the information now requested up front is the same information Board agents always eventually needed, collected earlier so an agent is not left chasing it down case by case. A charge will not even be assigned to an investigator until that initial evidence is in, and a charge that never produces it risks being dismissed before an agent is assigned at all — a meaningfully different posture than a system where the agency did the early legwork itself.

What happens if a charge gets dismissed anyway

A dismissal is not automatically the end of the road. Decisions to dismiss a charge can be appealed to the Office of Appeals, and that office is itself a real operation, not a rubber stamp: the Office handles about 2000 cases a year, each one assigned to an attorney and a supervisor who review the full case file, including any new information the charging party wants considered. Appeals in significant cases can also reach the General Counsel directly, even when the recommendation is to uphold the original dismissal, which gives a genuinely close call a second layer of review before the door closes for good.

What this means for how employers should treat a charge

None of this makes an unfair labor practice charge something an employer can safely ignore in the early going. A charging party now has a strong incentive to move fast and document everything before the two-week evidence window closes, which means an employer should assume the other side is already organizing its case the moment a charge is filed, not waiting for an agent to ask. Getting records and witness accounts together early, on the employer's own side, is the only way to meet a faster-moving process on anything like equal footing. Waiting for the regional office to ask the obvious questions is no longer a safe assumption to build a response around.