Green Card Setback for Indians: EB-2 and EB-5 categories unavailable until October 2026

Indian green card applicants face setbacks as EB-1 retrogresses and EB-2 and EB-5 categories shut down for FY 2026, limiting visa availability until new allocations in October.

Written by Sunil Dhawan

Updated: June 17, 2026 17:36 IST

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The most severe blow is to the EB-2 category, which includes professionals with advanced degrees and individuals with extraordinary potential.

The July 2026 Visa Bulletin brings significant setbacks for Indian green card applicants. The most severe blow is to the EB-2 category, which includes professionals with advanced degrees and individuals with extraordinary potential. India has hit its pro-rated quota, and the category is now unavailable for the rest of FY 2026. By Unavailable it means no applications in this category can be filed until the category reopens.

For the EB-2 category, it is a full shutdown, not a retrogression. In June, the EB-2 India final action date was still open at 1 September 2013. The July bulletin shows “U,” which means unavailable.

Adding to the pressure, the EB-1 India final action date has been retrogressed — moving back two months from 15 December 2022 to 15 October 2022.

EB-5 Unreserved Category

Similarly, India’s EB-5 unreserved category — covering investor visas — has also hit its pro-rated limit and is unavailable for the rest of FY 2026, having been merely flagged as at risk just a month ago.

The announcement on the India per-country limit reached in the EB-5 Unreserved Category had come earlier on June 10. It was announced by the State Department that all available immigrant visas in the Employment-Based Fifth Preference (EB-5) unreserved category for applicants chargeable to India for fiscal year (FY) 2026 have been issued.

The only relative relief for Indians is in EB-3, where the final action date nudged forward marginally from 15 December 2013 to 1 January 2014. Both the EB-2 and EB-5 unavailable categories are expected to reopen in October, when FY 2027 begins, but the final action dates at that point will depend on fresh demand and the new annual limits.

Oversubscribed Category

If not all demand can be satisfied, the category or foreign state in which demand was excessive is deemed oversubscribed.

The final action date for an oversubscribed category is the priority date of the first applicant who could not be reached within the numerical limits. If it becomes necessary during the monthly allocation process to retrogress a final action date, supplemental requests for numbers are honored only if the priority date falls within the new final action date announced in this bulletin.

If at any time an annual limit were reached, it would be necessary to immediately make the preference category “unavailable”, and no further requests for numbers are honored.

What is Retrogression

Retrogression occurs when visa applications exceed the monthly quota, leading the government to restrict access to earlier application dates to comply with legal limits, thereby moving the dates backwards.

Sometimes, a priority date that is current one month will not be current the next month, or the cut-off date will move backward to an earlier date. This is called visa retrogression, which occurs when more people apply for a visa in a particular category than there are visas available for that month.

Visa retrogression generally occurs when the annual limit for a category or country has been exhausted or is expected to run out soon. When the new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1, a new supply of visa numbers becomes available. Usually, though not always, the new supply returns the cut-off dates to their pre-retrogression state.

Therefore, if additional demand arises or policy changes occur, retrogression may be implemented to adhere to annual limits.