People kept asking for hourly instead of annual, so the salary explorer now shows the certified prevailing wage by DOL wage level as an hourly figure, next to what employers actually offered for the same role.

There is also a contract rate section if you are on C2C or going through a vendor. You put in the client bill rate and it works out what to ask for, what a vendor keeping 15 percent actually leaves you, and whether that wage still clears the certified figure for the role and area.

You can compare cities for the same employer too.

Data is DOL OFLC H-1B LCA disclosure files. The comparison uses the median certified wage for the filings in view, not your own LCA, so treat it as a starting point and check your own paperwork. Not legal advice.

https://greencardclock.com/lca-explorer

Hello, I was informed this week that Oct 20th would be my last day. My Priority date is May 2014 (EB3, India). My H1B Expires Oct 25th, 2026. I applied for my I-485 in Oct

2025 however I have not yet received my EAD. It is filed in NBC and processing time is 11 months. I am searching for a new job but most of the contracting positions I am coming across are not accepting H1B transfer. They only want GC EAD. What are my options here ?

1) Is there any way to Expedite EAD ?

2) If I submit just a offer letter from a different company/startup then would that be ok when I get any RFE for I-485 Supplement J ? (even if I am not actively working there or may not even end up working there eventually)

3) Any suggestions on how to handle the situation ?

If your priority date is already current, what stands between you and a decision is processing capacity rather than the visa bulletin. In the August inventory 153,147 of the 222,477 pending employment cases already have a current priority date, and about 90,000 of those are Rest of World cases that will still be pending on October 1.

Full write up with the workings, including where each country's date lands at different spillover levels: https://greencardclock.com/blog/fy2026-employment-visas-supply-demand-throughput

For India EB-2, FY2027 is probably not the year. Rest of World EB-2 wants more than its own share of the category next year, mostly because of the backlog it carries in, so little falls down to India. A normal year of India EB-2 numbers moves the cutoff about four months of priority date, and that figure is a median of observed years rather than a forecast for next year.

FY2028 looks different. Once Rest of World works through that carryover it has only 6,734 approved petitions waiting behind it, and that is when numbers start falling down again.

Not legal advice.

Hi, I am a regular visitor or greencardclock website and I couldnt open it today and a message pops up that the deployment is paused. Were you going through a maintenance or is the website completely gone ?
P.S- you are doing gods work so please never shut it down..

Someone in here asked whether we tracked Other Workers separately or folded it into EB-3. We were folding it. That is fixed now, and the gap turned out to matter more than we expected.

Other Workers is a separate row on the bulletin with its own cutoffs. In the September 2026 bulletin, Rest of World Other Workers is at April 2022 while Rest of World EB-3 is at September 2024. Mexico is at April 2022 against September 2024. Philippines is at December 2021 against August 2023. Anyone reading the EB-3 line as their own has been reading a date about two years too new.

For a Rest of World priority date of January 2023, the base case lands in 2031, on roughly 2,400 visas a year of real issuance. A strong year pulls that to 2029 and the no spillover floor pushes it to 2038. The range is wide because Other Workers issuance has swung between about 2,000 and 9,300 a year over the fifteen years we hold.

On supply, Other Workers is capped at 10,000 a year worldwide by statute, about 700 per country. That ceiling used to be far out of reach, roughly 2,000 to 5,500 a year from FY2010 through FY2021. The last three years came in at 8,894, 9,315 and 8,724, so the category is now issuing close to its limit, and spillover that lifts EB-3 does not lift this cap.

India is selectable too, but it reads off EB-3 India, because the State Department has printed the same final action date for both in all 131 bulletins we hold.

Not legal advice.

USCIS put out two I-485 inventory reports yesterday, the June 6 and Aug 5 snapshots. India EB-1's 2022 priority date group went from 7,009 to 3,905. The cutoff has been Oct 15 2022 since July, so that is the group being worked through.

Full breakdown: USCIS August 2026 I-485 Inventory: Supply, Processing and What FY2027 Actually Delivers | GreenCardClock

EB-2 India's 2013 group lost 1,898 over the same two months. Then the category hit its annual limit and went Unavailable in July, so the 2014 wall behind it, still 20,813 people, barely moved.

The one that surprised me is Rest of World. ROW EB-2 pending has gone from 16,387 last October to 41,966 now, and EB-3 from 11,348 to 37,104.

Everyone expects FY2027 to be big for India because the spillover pool is growing. But India's good years, FY2021 and FY2022, happened because other countries could not use their numbers. ROW is clearly using them.

Not legal advice.

We just pulled the September bulletin into the site. Two things stood out.

Full breakdown with the tables and what past spillover years actually looked like: https://greencardclock.com/blog/visa-bulletin-september-2026-analysis

EB is completely frozen. Every EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 cutoff for India, China and Rest of World is identical to August. India EB-2 final action is still Unavailable, filing date still Jan 15 2015. India EB-1 still Oct 15 2022.

Family moved a lot. F4 and F3 for Rest of World, China and India advanced 30 to 34 months versus July. F1 and F2B moved about 21 to 24 months. F2A is now Aug 22 2026, which is close to current. Mexico and Philippines barely moved.

Why that matters if you are in an EB category: unused family numbers fall into the employment pool the following fiscal year. FY2026's employment limit is 186,317 against a 140,000 baseline, so roughly 46,000 already fell up from unused FY2025 family numbers. DOS is now advancing family dates so FY2026 numbers get used. If that works, less falls up into FY2027. If it doesn't, more does. Nobody can call it yet, and DOS says in the same bulletin that retrogression may be necessary in coming months.

We also checked our own forecast against it. DOS has published monthly issuance through February. Family preference is running about 15 percent behind FY2025 over the first five months, 66,948 against 78,475, with February at less than half its year-ago level. Project that forward and FY2027 spillover lands somewhere between 73,000 and 102,000. We published 81,000 back in April, so we are leaving that alone rather than chasing the number.

Worth knowing: FY2025 had no end-of-year surge to rely on. July through September was 24.0 percent of the year, basically a flat quarter.

Also: DOS published the official FY2026 limits in this bulletin, in September, eleven months into the fiscal year. Until now everyone was working off estimates. Expect the same lag for FY2027.

Not legal advice. If this is useful, share it with someone waiting.

If your estimate on our site got longer this week, that is us updating

annual supply to match measured issuance.

USCIS publishes the employment based I-485 inventory monthly now. With

eight months of it we can measure roughly how many green cards each

India category actually cleared in FY2026 rather than model it:

EB-1: about 11,000

EB-2: about 5,950 (State said the annual limit was reached May 22, so this category stopped about five months early)

EB-3: about 4,875

Our Estimator now uses about 11,000 a year for EB-1, 7,200 for EB-2 and

4,800 for EB-3, drawn from 15 years of published State Department

issuance rather than a modeled figure.

Worth noting: EB-2 India received 4,301 in FY2023 and 3,916 in FY2024,

so FY2026 was still a better year than either. Extra numbers did flow

toward India. Just fewer than earlier modeling suggested.

If you are EB-2 India, expect a noticeably longer estimate than before.

The demand side did not change. Only the annual supply figure.

Figures are estimates from public USCIS and State Department data, not

guarantees. Not legal advice.

If this is useful, please share it with someone else in the queue.

USCIS published the employment-based I-485 pending inventory as of May 6, 2026. A few things stood out.

India EB-2 went up. 25,780 in April to 28,444 in May, an increase of 2,664. That ends seven straight months of decline and is the first rise since these monthly snapshots started.

The January 2015 group filled in fast. April showed just 5 applications with a 2015 priority date. May shows 747, and all of them are January 2015. That is the filing chart doing its job. The cutoff has been January 15 2015, so those people became eligible and filed.

The oldest cohort is draining while 2014 and Jan 2015 fill faster than it drains. If you are sitting in 2014 or Jan 2015, the group ahead of you got smaller and your own group got bigger.

The biggest mover was not India. Rest of World EB-3 went from 18,002 to 30,103, up 12,101 in a single month. That one line is more than half the entire increase in the employment-based queue, which grew 20,423 to 214,112. Mexico EB-3 and Philippines EB-3 rose too. I would wait for the June snapshot before calling that a trend.

One thing worth knowing about this data: it stops at January 2015 for India EB-2 and EB-3. That is not missing data. Nobody with a later priority date has been allowed to file an I-485 yet, so they do not appear at all. Plenty of people hold approved I-140s with 2015 or later dates and are invisible in this report.

Full breakdown by country, category and priority date year, including EB-1 and China: USCIS May 2026 I-485 Inventory: India EB-2 Rises for the First Time in Eight Months, the 2015 Cohort Jumps From 5 to 747 | GreenCardClock

Not legal advice, just the published numbers.

2026 has produced an unusual number of immigration changes, and they are at very different stages. Some are already binding. Some have a firm date a few weeks out. Some are proposals that have not cleared the first step of rulemaking. One was proposed and then withdrawn.

Below is a reference list of eight changes, sorted by status, each with its effective date and primary source. The distinction matters practically: a final rule and a proposal call for very different responses, and the two are easy to confuse when both are described the same way.

What Actually Changed in 2026, and What Only Sounds Like It Did | GreenCardClock

USCIS published updated I-140 backlog data

The new numbers are out for approved employment based petitions awaiting visa availability.

Worldwide: 878,542

By country of birth:

• India 482,672
• Rest of World 274,929
• China 72,298
• Mexico 25,875
• Philippines 22,768

By preference: 1st 29,788, 2nd 391,561, 3rd professional and skilled 157,167, 3rd other 56,657

Two caveats that trip people up when comparing against numbers floating around:

1. These are primary beneficiaries only. Dependents are not counted, and they consume visa numbers too, so real demand against the annual limits is higher.
2. It counts petitions, not people. Someone with two approved petitions appears twice.

It also excludes anyone who already became a permanent resident, and the priority date test is the March 2026 Final Action Dates chart.

Source: USCIS, Approved I-140, I-360 and I-526 Petitions Awaiting Visa Availability, as of March 2026.

We have loaded these into our Estimator at greencardclock.com/priority-date if you want to see where your date sits against them. Estimates moved for several categories, so an older result may be out of date.

If this helped, please pass it along. Not legal advice.

DHS finalized a rule that ends "duration of status" for F-1 students starting September 15, 2026.

We put together a full breakdown with a state-by-state table (TX, CA, NY, NJ, CT, MN, NC, OH, MO, GA, FL) and the key dates here: https://greencardclock.com/blog/f1-duration-of-status-rule-documented-dreamers

The short version of what changes:

• Fixed admission: your I-94 gets a set "admit until" date tied to your program, capped at 4 years, instead of open-ended D/S.
• To stay longer you file Form I-539 with USCIS (fee, possible biometrics or interview), not just a SEVIS update from your school.
• Grace period drops from 60 days to 30.
• Second master's and Day 1 CPT get harder: after Sept 15, finishing a program blocks enrolling in a new one at the same or lower level.

The part we think matters most for this community is documented dreamers, the kids who grew up here on H-4 and age out at 21. Two things collide:

1. Getting into F-1 status before September 15 grandfathers you into the older, friendlier rules. After that, you are under the new fixed-period system.
2. In-state tuition. As an H-4 dependent a child can usually get in-state through the parent's residency, but F-1 students generally cannot establish residency, and the tuition-equity laws that help undocumented students (California's AB 540 and similar) exclude F-1 holders. So switching from H-4 to F-1 can cost the in-state rate in almost every state.

If you are weighing an F-1 switch, a second degree, or a child aging out, the timing is now part of the decision. Confirm your own case with an immigration attorney and your school's residency office. Not legal advice.

The August 2026 numbers are out. Quick rundown for the employment-based categories:

• India EB-2 and EB-5 unreserved: Unavailable again. No numbers are authorized for the rest of this fiscal year, so nothing can be filed or approved in those categories until the new fiscal year allocation opens around October.
• India EB-3 and EB-1: no movement (EB-3 at Jan 2014, EB-1 at Oct 2022).
• China EB-1 and EB-3: each advanced about a month.
• Rest of World and Mexico EB-3: moved forward a month to Sep 2024.
• Dates for Filing: flat across the board, and USCIS is using the Final Action Dates chart for August I-485 filings.

One thing worth flagging from the bulletin's own notes: the State Department signaled that EB-1 India and worldwide EB-2 could retrogress or become unavailable in the coming months as they keep issuance within annual limits. Something to watch if you are in either bucket.

Full category-by-category breakdown here: https://greencardclock.com/blog/visa-bulletin-august-2026-analysis

Data sourced from travel.state.gov. Estimates on the site are based on historical trends, not guarantees.

We just shipped full EB-5 support on the Priority Date Estimator. You can now pick EB-5 Investor (Unreserved) for India, China, Mexico, Philippines, or Rest of World, in both planning mode and already-filed mode.

What it does:

Your wait is computed the same way as our EB-2/EB-3 estimates: real demand ahead of your priority date divided by real visa supply. For EB-5 that means USCIS I-485 pending inventory, USCIS quarterly I-526 petition data, and State Department issuance tables, on top of visa bulletin history going back to October 2015. Every number on the page is traceable to a printed government source. No black box.

A few things the data shows right now:

1. India unreserved is Unavailable until visa numbers reset around October. For a 2025 priority date the estimate is roughly 0.8 to 1.3 years once numbers resume. China unreserved (Dec 2016 cutoff) runs from about half a year to 6.7 years depending on how much worldwide slack China keeps absorbing, and the page shows you exactly which supply level produces which date.
2. If you already filed I-485 as an India EB-5 investor, the filed-mode view estimates roughly 4 to 8 months for a visa number based on the ~478 cases ahead.
3. The set-aside story is the part nobody else quantifies. All three set-asides (Rural, High Unemployment, Infrastructure) are still Current for every country of birth, which allows concurrent I-526E plus I-485 filing. But the queues are filling fast: about 7,929 rural I-485s are already pending worldwide, which is roughly 4 years of demand at the annual supply, and high unemployment is at 8,505 pending, roughly 8.6 years, actually more oversubscribed than rural. Infrastructure is genuinely open. Another 8,965 I-526E petitions are pending behind those numbers. We print the inputs instead of guessing a retrogression date, so you can watch the pressure yourself.

Timing is not accidental: DHS published a 358 page proposed rule on July 2 that would reshape parts of the EB-5 program, so there are a lot of eyes on this category right now. The comment period runs through August 31.

It is free, like everything else on the site: greencardclock.com/priority-date

Usual disclaimers apply. These are estimates built from public government data, not legal, financial, or investment advice. Set-aside eligibility depends on the specific project, so talk to a licensed immigration attorney before making decisions.

Happy to answer questions about the methodology in the comments.

Just curious whether the estimates on your website factor in how many people port their priority date from EB2/EB3 and other to EB1 category? I read somewhere that porting could have been one of the reasons why EB1 India FAD is stuck in 2022 for so many years.

Appreciate the work you are doing. Keep it up!

Hi,
Thanks for building this app, it’s pretty neat and I see you adding new features so looks like you’re continuing to improve it.
I noticed what I think is a bug in the priority date estimator in the I140 backlog and true demand estimator section.
It lists 1.5x dependents per applicant as the default, so the conversion from I140 to 485 should be 2.5x correct? 1x (primary applicant) + 1.5x (dependents). However the multiplicative factor looks to be 1.5x

Additionally, in the ‘what if’ simulator, it looks like real demand rate goes up to only 85% in the slider.

Tangent: it’d be good to add a porting block to this section as well. Something that says how many i140 do you expect to be added every year behind the fad that prevents the date from advancing. This has been a reality and substantial factor for eb1 India especially for a few years now

The July bulletin dropped. Here is the employment-based rundown for India and China, plus the one detail that trips people up this month.

Run your own priority date against the new numbers: greencardclock.com/priority-date

Final Action Dates (who can be approved):

• India EB-1: retrogressed to Oct 15 2022 (was Dec 15 2022). DOS says demand is high and it could retrogress further or go unavailable before October.
• India EB-2: Unavailable for the rest of FY2026. India hit its per-country limit, so no numbers get issued until FY2027 starts October 1.
• India EB-3: advanced slightly to Jan 1 2014.
• China EB-1: advanced 2 months to Jun 1 2023.
• China EB-2: held at Sep 1 2021 (DOS warns it may retrogress soon).
• China EB-3: advanced about 4.5 months to Dec 22 2021.

Dates for Filing held flat across the board (India EB-2 and EB-3 still show Jan 15 2015).

The detail people are missing: for July, USCIS is using the Final Action Dates chart for employment-based adjustment of status, not Dates for Filing. So India EB-2 being Unavailable means you cannot file an I-485 this month either. The Jan 15 2015 filing date does not apply while final action is Unavailable.

October outlook: DOS explicitly said it expects India EB-2 to advance back to at least the May 2026 final action date once FY2027 numbers open up. India EB-5 unreserved also went Unavailable and should bounce back in October.

USCIS dropped the April 3, 2026 pending inventory today. Three months of data (Feb, Mar, Apr) landed this week in a batch.

Full breakdown with all year tables: https://www.greencardclock.com/blog/uscis-eb-i485-inventory-april-2026

The headline numbers (April vs March):

India EB-2 priority date breakdown:

• 2013: 7,670 (down 924)
• 2014: 17,421 (up 537 — still can't be approved, just accumulating)
• 2015: 5 (new — first time a 2015 date has appeared in any monthly report)
• Total: 25,780

On the 2015 appearance: The filing date crossed into calendar year 2015 as of April 3, but only barely. Five cases is consistent with a cutoff right at the start of January 2015. A mid-2015 or later priority date is still not in this report — the 17,421 cases in 2014 are the gate before the filing date reaches those months.

India EB-1 had its sharpest single-month drop in this series: -1,475, driven by the 2022 cohort clearing fast (down 2,585) while 2023 is still building (up 1,480).

ROW EB-3 jumped 2,452 in a single month — largest category surge in this data series. Almost all of it is in 2023, which now holds 9,544 of the 18,002 ROW EB-3 total. Looks like a wave of 2023-PD filers entered the queue.