Indian professionals seeking employment-based permanent residency in the United States could face an estimated wait of up to 179 years, according to a recent assessment by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).
Indian applicants face the longest delays in the US employment-based immigration system, largely due to annual visa limits and country-specific caps. The NFAP assessment found that, as of December 2025, the employment-based immigration backlog had surpassed 1.2 million applicants, with nearly one million of them from India. Indian workers and their dependent family members account for about 79% of the entire pending employment-based backlog.
India vs China: A stark difference in wait times
The NFAP analysis highlights the disproportionate impact of country-based quotas on Indian applicants compared with professionals from other countries, including China and the Philippines.
For EB-1 priority workers, Chinese nationals face an estimated wait of four to five years, broadly comparable to the projected wait for Indians. However, Chinese professionals in the EB-2 category, which covers workers with advanced degrees, face an estimated 25-year wait, while EB-3 skilled workers from China could wait around seven years.
For Indian applicants whose labour certification or employment-based immigrant petition is filed in January 2026 or later, the NFAP estimates potential waits of 179 years for EB-2, 38 years for EB-3 and five years for EB-1.
Why is the Green Card backlog so large?
The think tank identifies two major legislative barriers behind the growing backlog.
The first is the annual employment-based immigration limit of 140,000, established by the US Congress in 1990. This ceiling covers both sponsored workers and their dependent family members, significantly limiting the number of people who can receive employment-based Green Cards each year.
The second is the country-specific limit imposed under US immigration law. Countries are generally subject to the same percentage cap regardless of their population or the number of applicants in the queue. As a result, populous countries such as India and China are allocated the same percentage of employment-based immigrant visas as much smaller nations such as Luxembourg and Iceland.
How India’s EB-2 backlog grew
US immigration statistics illustrate how the Indian EB-2 queue has expanded over the years.
In 2016, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) approved 47,601 EB-2 petitions for Indian workers. When dependent family members were included, the figure represented approximately 98,594 people.
However, only 4,407 Indian nationals received EB-2 permanent residency that fiscal year, according to the NFAP report. This left more than 90,000 primary applicants and their dependants entering the backlog in 2016 alone.
The pattern continued in subsequent years, with new applications entering the queue faster than Green Cards could be issued, causing the backlog to compound over time.
