Green Card Wait Times by Country 2026: India, China, Philippines, and the Rest of the World

India faces the most severe employment-based green card backlogs of any country by a wide margin. EB-2 India wait times have historically stretched beyond ten years measured from priority date to final approval, and periods of retrogression can add further delay on top of an already long baseline wait. EB-3 India typically shows wait times in the range of eight or more years, though it has at times moved ahead of or behind EB-2 depending on relative demand in each category during a given period. EB-1 for India-born applicants who qualify as extraordinary ability, outstanding researchers, or multinational executives generally remains close to current, since EB-1 as a whole experiences far less demand pressure relative to its allocation than EB-2 or EB-3, making it one of the only realistic ways for an India-born applicant to avoid a decade-plus wait if they meet the higher evidentiary bar.

China-born applicants face substantial backlogs as well, though generally shorter than India's. EB-2 China wait times have typically run in the range of five or more years, reflecting China's position as the second-largest source of employment-based green card demand after India. EB-3 China has fluctuated over time, sometimes tracking close to EB-2 China and at other times diverging based on category-specific demand shifts. As with India, EB-1 categories for China-born applicants generally see far less backlog than EB-2 or EB-3, making extraordinary ability, outstanding researcher, or multinational executive classification an attractive option for those who qualify and want to avoid the multi-year EB-2/EB-3 China wait. China-born applicants should also watch the visa bulletin closely every month, since movement in either direction tends to be less dramatic than the swings sometimes seen for India, but can still shift meaningfully across a fiscal year depending on filing volume trends among the broader China-born applicant pool.

The Philippines has its own distinct backlog pattern, most notably in EB-3, where wait times have run around seven or more years, driven by historically high demand from Filipino applicants in skilled worker and professional categories. This is a smaller backlog than India or China's EB-2/EB-3 waits but still represents a meaningful delay compared to most other countries. For the vast majority of other countries, grouped under the "all other countries" or "rest of world" column in the visa bulletin, wait times in most employment-based categories typically run in the range of one to three years total, largely reflecting standard processing time for PERM, I-140, and I-485 rather than any true backlog, since demand from these countries generally stays within the per-country allocation.

Congress set the total annual employment-based green card allocation at a fixed number, and within that total, no single country of birth can receive more than approximately 7 percent of the worldwide total in a given category and year, regardless of how large that country's population or applicant pool is. Because India and, to a lesser extent, China and the Philippines produce a disproportionately large share of employment-based green card applicants relative to their 7 percent per-country share, demand from these countries vastly exceeds their allocated portion of the annual numbers, while countries with smaller applicant pools rarely come close to using their full 7 percent share. This mismatch between where demand originates and how the per-country cap distributes available numbers is the fundamental structural reason backlogs concentrate so heavily in a small number of countries rather than spreading evenly across the applicant pool.