Indian professionals seeking employment-based US Green Cards continue to face wait times stretching back more than a decade in key immigration categories, even as the start of fiscal year 2027 has restored visa numbers and brought limited movement, according to the US State Department's October Visa Bulletin. The bulletin, issued monthly, lays bare a structural disparity that has persisted for years despite periodic resets.

The Scale of the Backlog

The sharpest gap remains in the employment-based second preference (EB-2) category, widely used by professionals holding advanced degrees or possessing exceptional ability. For applicants chargeable to India, the final-action date stands at 1 November 2013 — compared with 1 January 2025 for nationals of most other countries. That places the cutoff governing Indian applicants more than 11 years behind the date applicable to the rest of the world.

The situation in the employment-based third preference (EB-3) category — covering skilled workers and professionals — is similarly stark. India's final-action date there is 1 January 2014, against 15 May 2024 for most countries, a gap of over a decade.

Fiscal Year Reset Brings Some Relief

There was a measure of better news for some Indian applicants at the opening of fiscal 2027. India's EB-1 final-action date — covering priority workers such as those with extraordinary ability, outstanding professors and researchers, and certain multinational executives — moved to 1 February 2023. The October bulletin also restored availability in EB-2 India after the category had become unavailable toward the end of the previous fiscal year, when its annual visa allocation was exhausted. According to the State Department, the arrival of fiscal 2027 immigrant visa numbers allowed filing and final-action dates to advance across several categories.

Filing Dates vs Final-Action Dates

The separate 'Dates for Filing' chart, which governs when an eligible applicant may submit an adjustment-of-status application inside the United States, offers somewhat later dates for Indian nationals. Under this chart, EB-1 India stands at 1 July 2024, while both EB-2 India and EB-3 India are set at 15 January 2015. The distinction matters: a filing date permits submission of an application, while the final-action date determines when an immigrant visa number is actually available for a case to be approved. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) determines each month whether applicants seeking adjustment of status may use the more permissive Dates for Filing chart.

Why Indian Applicants Bear the Brunt

India is one of four countries currently treated as oversubscribed under the US preference-immigration system, alongside mainland China, Mexico, and the Philippines. Federal immigration law sets a worldwide employment-based preference level of at least 140,000 visas annually, and separately caps the proportion available to nationals of any single country. The country cap has had an outsized effect on India because of the exceptionally large number of Indian professionals in the US employment-based pipeline. As a result, many applicants from India remain in temporary immigration status for years — sometimes well over a decade — while waiting for their priority dates to become current.

What to Watch

The Visa Bulletin is updated monthly and can advance, hold, or retrogress depending on demand and available numbers. For the hundreds of thousands of Indian professionals currently queued in the system, each monthly release is closely watched for any sign of acceleration — or rollback. Broader legislative reform to the country-cap system, periodically debated in the US Congress, remains the only structural fix widely acknowledged by immigration experts, though no such legislation has cleared both chambers in recent sessions.