USCIS released updated employment-based backlog figures on September 8 as part of its quarterly data drop, showing how many approved immigrant petitions were waiting for a visa number as of June 2026. The total is 856,662 — and that counts only primary beneficiaries. Spouses and children, who consume visa numbers of their own, are excluded from the report entirely.
The concentration is extreme. India accounts for 491,773 of those approved petitions, or 57% of the worldwide total. China is second at 71,779. The single largest bucket in the entire dataset is India EB-2, the advanced-degree category that includes National Interest Waiver petitions: 356,360 approved petitions waiting, out of 391,296 in EB-2 worldwide. Indian nationals hold 91% of the global EB-2 queue.
Set that against the supply. The employment-based annual limit is roughly 140,000 visas worldwide, of which EB-2 receives about 28.6%, or approximately 40,040 — and those are shared across every country, with per-country rules limiting any single country’s baseline share to 7% absent spillover from unused numbers elsewhere. India’s EB-2 category was already declared unavailable for the remainder of FY2026 after its allocation ran out, with processing set to resume at the fiscal year reset on October 1.
The other categories show where relief exists and where it does not. EB-1, the priority worker category that covers extraordinary ability and multinational managers, has only 31,962 approved petitions waiting worldwide — India 17,861 and China 14,101. EB-3 professional and skilled workers has 147,492, with India at 106,214 and the Philippines at 19,147. The fourth preference for certain special immigrants carries 216,678, the large majority of it charged to the rest of the world rather than to India or China.
Two things follow for anyone with an approved petition or one in progress. First, the real queue is substantially larger than 856,662. USCIS is explicit that these counts represent primary beneficiaries only; adding derivative family members has historically roughly doubled the number of visa numbers actually required, which means the effective demand is likely well over 1.5 million against an annual supply of about 140,000. Second, the gap between EB-1 and EB-2 for Indian nationals is now roughly twenty-fold — 17,861 versus 356,360 — which is the arithmetic behind why so many EB-2 filers with strong records look hard at whether they can qualify for EB-1A instead. That calculus depends on meeting a genuinely higher evidentiary standard, and as separate USCIS data shows, EB-1A approval rates have been falling, so it is a trade of queue length against adjudication risk rather than a shortcut.
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Source: 1Point3Acres (一亩三分地)