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Indian professionals seeking permanent residence in the United States could face a potential 179-year wait under the employment-based second preference category, exposing the extraordinary scale of a green-card backlog that has left nearly one million Indians trapped in the US immigration queue.
The estimate, contained in an August 2026 policy brief by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), applies to a highly skilled Indian worker whose labor certification application or employment-based immigrant petition was filed in January 2026 or later. NFAP estimates a potential wait of 179 years for EB-2, 38 years for EB-3 and four to five years for EB-1.
The 179-year figure is not a prediction that an individual will literally remain in the United States for nearly two centuries. Rather, it illustrates the mathematical scale of the queue under existing visa limits and current demand, with actual waiting times dependent on future legislation, visa availability, priority dates and applicants leaving or abandoning the system.
For Indian technology professionals, engineers, researchers and other highly skilled workers, however, the underlying problem is immediate: the queue is measured in decades, not years.
NFAP estimates that Indians accounted for 996,599, or 79 percent, of the 1.26 million people in the employment-based immigration backlog across EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 as of December 2025. India’s backlog rose 19.3 percent from April 2020, with EB-2 accounting for 731,566 people and EB-3 another 213,414.
Why India is so badly affected
The central constraint is the US immigration system’s annual and per-country limits.
Employment-based immigration is generally capped at 140,000 visas a year, including dependents. In addition, the law generally limits immigrants from any one country to 7 percent of employment-based immigrant visas in a fiscal year. NFAP says India, China and the Philippines are among the countries most affected by the per-country ceiling.
The mismatch between Indian demand and available green cards has accumulated over years.
In fiscal 2016, NFAP estimates that nearly 98,600 Indians, including dependents, were approved in EB-2, but only 4,407 Indians received permanent residence through that category. More than 94,000 people were therefore left in the queue from that year’s cohort alone. Similar gaps occurred in 2017 and 2018.
The August 2026 Visa Bulletin illustrates how far behind Indian applicants are. For adjustment of status, the relevant priority date for India was October 15, 2022 in EB-1 and January 1, 2014 in EB-3, while EB-2 was listed as unavailable in August.
The result is an unusual immigration paradox: workers may be highly sought after by US employers but remain unable to obtain permanent residence because the number of employment-based green cards available to Indians is constrained by statutory limits.
Decades of temporary status
The backlog also means that many Indian professionals remain dependent on temporary immigration status while waiting for permanent residence.
NFAP estimates that an Indian with an EB-3 application filed in 2013 waited about 13 years for a green card, while a comparable applicant filing in 2026 could face roughly twice that wait under current conditions. The organisation cautions that such estimates can change if Congress alters visa limits, additional employment-based green cards become available or applicants abandon their cases.
The backlog has expanded despite an unusually large number of employment-based green cards being issued in recent years. Between fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2024, the United States issued 980,460 employment-based green cards against an expected 700,000, with additional numbers generated by unused family-based allocations. Yet the employment-based backlog still increased 20.6 percent between April 2020 and December 2025.
For the wider South Asian community, the Philippines faces a different version of the problem. Its employment-based backlog increased 91.7 percent between April 2020 and December 2025, reaching nearly 39,900, driven largely by EB-3 applicants, including nurses and other healthcare workers.
But it is India’s queue that dominates the US employment-based system.
With Indians accounting for nearly four-fifths of the backlog, the 179-year EB-2 estimate has become a stark measure of the gap between the number of Indian professionals seeking permanent residence and the number of green cards the US system can legally allocate to them.
NFAP estimates that the overall employment-based backlog, already above 1.2 million, could exceed 2 million by 2040 without changes to US immigration law.
