Introduction
New data released by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reveals the scale of the employment-based green card backlog with unusual precision: as of March 2026, 878,542 approved employment-based petitions were waiting for a visa number to become available, and India accounts for 482,672 of them — more than 54 percent of the entire pending queue. This India EB backlog snapshot, drawn from USCIS’s quarterly performance data covering Forms I-140, I-360, and I-526, offers practitioners, employers, and foreign nationals one of the clearest available windows into exactly where green card demand is concentrated and what that concentration means for wait times across preference categories.
Background
The employment-based (EB) green card process has two distinct phases. In the first phase, a foreign national’s employer — or in some cases the individual — files an immigrant petition with USCIS to establish that the person qualifies for a particular preference category. USCIS approves or denies the petition based on the applicant’s qualifications and the petition type: Form I-140 for most employment-based categories, Form I-360 for certain special immigrants and religious workers, and Form I-526 or I-526E for investor-based categories.
Approval of a petition does not mean the person can immediately apply for a green card. Congress caps the total number of employment-based green cards issued each fiscal year at approximately 140,000, with per-country limits that prevent any single country of birth from receiving more than seven percent of that total in a given year. When demand from a particular country far exceeds that country’s annual allocation, a backlog develops. The State Department tracks this backlog through the monthly Visa Bulletin, which publishes “Final Action Dates” — the priority date a beneficiary must have reached before USCIS will approve a final green card application. The USCIS data released here reflects approved petitions that are waiting for those Final Action Dates to advance to their priority date.
What Is Changing
This is a data release, not a policy change. USCIS’s Office of Performance and Quality published the second quarter FY2026 snapshot of approved employment-based petitions still awaiting visa availability, queried from agency databases in April 2026 and reflecting conditions as of March 2026.
The numbers show 878,542 total approved petitions in the queue across all preference categories and all countries of birth. India’s 482,672 approved petitions dominate every major preference category. China holds 72,298 pending approvals, the second-largest national total. Mexico accounts for 25,875, the Philippines for 22,768, and all other countries combined total 274,929.
Within India’s backlog, the concentration is sharpest in the EB-2 category — advanced degree professionals and individuals with exceptional ability — where India holds 351,142 of the 391,561 total pending approvals globally. That is nearly 90 percent of the worldwide EB-2 queue. India also holds 105,360 of the 157,167 pending EB-3 professional and skilled worker petitions, representing approximately 67 percent of that category’s global total.
One important methodological note from USCIS: because petitioners can file more than one petition for a single individual, this dataset may include multiple petitions per beneficiary. The counts also cover only primary beneficiaries — derivative family members are not reflected. Petitions filed by individuals who have since obtained lawful permanent resident or U.S. citizen status are excluded from the count.
Who Is Affected
The most directly affected individuals are Indian-born foreign nationals holding approved EB-2 and EB-3 petitions who are waiting for a Final Action Date that has not yet reached their priority date. For many of them, this data confirms what they already experience: a backlog measured not in months but in years, and in some categories, in decades.
Employers who sponsor Indian nationals for green cards are indirectly but significantly affected. An employee locked in the backlog remains tied to that employer’s sponsorship structure, creating long-term workforce planning implications. Companies in technology, engineering, healthcare, and financial services — sectors with heavy reliance on Indian-born professionals on H-1B or other nonimmigrant status — face ongoing uncertainty about employee retention and status maintenance over extended periods.
Chinese-born applicants face the second-largest national backlog, particularly concentrated in the EB-5 investor unreserved category, where China holds 11,114 of the 11,118 pending approvals globally. EB-5 investors from China seeking green cards through the unreserved category face a wait structure distinct from the employment-based preference categories.
Foreign nationals born in countries other than India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines occupy a comparatively advantaged position. The 274,929 petitions in the “Rest of the World” grouping face no per-country cap constraint in practical terms, since demand from those countries collectively does not exhaust their available visa allocation.
Practical Implications
For Indian-born EB-2 and EB-3 beneficiaries, this dataset reinforces the critical importance of priority date management. With 351,142 India-born approved EB-2 petitions in queue, even incremental movement in the Visa Bulletin represents years of accumulated demand advancing. Filing a petition as early as possible — and locking in the earliest defensible priority date — remains one of the most consequential decisions a sponsored employee and their employer can make.
The data also highlights why employment authorization and travel protection through the I-485 or consular processing pipeline matters so much for backlogged applicants. Beneficiaries who cannot yet file for adjustment of status because their priority date is not current must maintain valid nonimmigrant status continuously, which creates recurring renewal costs, potential gaps in work authorization, and travel complications that compound over multi-year wait periods.
For EB-5 investors — particularly Chinese nationals — the near-total dominance of China in the EB-5 unreserved category suggests that the set-aside categories (rural, high unemployment, and infrastructure) continue to offer meaningfully faster processing for investors who qualify, since per-country limits apply differently or not at all to those reserved allocations.
Open questions remain about how upcoming fiscal year visa number allocations and any future legislative or regulatory changes to the per-country cap framework might affect queue movement. This data provides a current-state snapshot, not a forward projection, and USCIS notes that counts may differ from prior periods due to system updates and post-adjudicative outcomes.
What to Watch For Next
Stakeholders should monitor the monthly Visa Bulletin issued by the State Department for any movement in India Final Action Dates across EB-2 and EB-3 categories. USCIS typically publishes updated quarterly performance data each fiscal quarter, so the next snapshot covering April through June 2026 is expected in mid-to-late summer 2026. Any regulatory or legislative proposals touching the per-country cap — a recurring topic in immigration reform discussions — would warrant close attention given the scale of the India backlog this data confirms.
How Immigration Professional Association Can Help
The numbers in this report are not abstract. For an Indian-born professional holding an approved I-140 and watching Visa Bulletin dates move by days each month, this data represents real stakes: years of career decisions, family plans, and legal status management made under uncertainty. Immigration Professional Association works directly with employment-based beneficiaries and the employers who sponsor them to develop strategies that account for exactly this kind of long-horizon backlog reality.
That work includes helping employers maintain compliant H-1B and other nonimmigrant sponsorships for employees who will be in the queue for years, advising on I-485 filing eligibility as priority dates become current, and counseling EB-5 investors on which investor category pathways offer the most realistic timeline given current per-country demand. For Indian-born professionals in particular, the gap between petition approval and visa availability is not a formality — it is the defining feature of their immigration journey.
If you are navigating the EB backlog — whether as a sponsored employee trying to understand where you stand, an employer managing a workforce with significant green card pipeline exposure, or an investor evaluating EB-5 set-aside options — Immigration Professional Association is ready to work through the specifics of your situation with you. Reach out to our team to start that conversation.
