Data victory! (FY2025 Q3 with I-526E detail)
October 9, 2025 6 Comments
Wonderful news to report: USCIS finally published more quarterly data (for April to June 2025) and preemptively included two new reports with I-526/I-526E receipt detail by country and TEA category! Maybe someone at USCIS wisely thought: we don’t want to see Galati Law’s name one more time — let’s just give the people what they want instead of getting sued. Thanks to AIIA and IIUSA for all the hard work on FOIA requests that helped push this good result of improved data transparency, and to USCIS for listening. You can visit the USCIS Immigration and Citizenship Data page to access the new reports (and appreciate how much work goes into processing the raw data into the kind of analysis you find here). I’m in process of updating my spreadsheets. I will note a couple headlines: over 1,000 I-526E were approved in Q3 (4x more than the previous quarter), meaning that the pool of qualified Rural and High Unemployment visa applicants is very likely large enough by now to trigger Visa Bulletin cut-off dates, if only Department of State can catch up with interview scheduling and visa issuance. And Q3 had another bumper crop of I-526/I-526E receipts, with over 1,700 more investors added to EB-5’s economic benefit and ballooning backlogs. Important knowledge to have!
Discover more from EB-5 Updates
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
EB-5 Updates 
Looking forward to the analysis!!
Hi Suzanne, have you noticed the dramatic increase in Chinese 526 petitions awaiting visa? The difference between June 2025 and March 2025 is roughly 20,000 petitions. That is almost 50,000 applicants! I highly doubt there are that many 526s in backlog between Jan 2014 and July 2016, and I doubt those numbers come from recent approved pre-ria 526s. Did I understand it wrong?
That report “Approved Employment-Based Petitions Awaiting Visa Availability” is such a strange report — I’ve always struggled with how to draw meaning from it. One important thing to note: the key words “Awaiting Visa Availability” and the note explaining what this means: “The priority date is based on XX Visa Bulletin Final Action Dates chart.” So the number in this USCIS report will change quarter to quarter not only/mostly due to a different number of people waiting, but due to the fact that each report references a different visa bulletin, counts from a different final action date (i.e. different priority date), and thus measures a different segment of the total backlog. For the June 2025 report, I wonder if someone just totaled up the number of China I-526 approvals for I-526 filed since January 22, 2014 (the cutoff for visa availability according to the June 2025 Visa Bulletin Chart A), and forgot to deduct the segment of those approvals who have already received LPR status. Approximately 43,000 China I-526 were filed January 2014 to March 2022, so it’s plausible that 30,000 could simply represent all approvals of I-526 filed in that segment of time (70% approval rate). Maybe the USCIS report-maker looked at the June 2025 visa bulletin and simply assumed that its FAD represented the end of the line and the last people who got visas, not remembering that the June 2025 VB happened to have a retrogressed date (i.e. that actually many people with PD later than January 2014 do have LPR by now. The “we can just assume no visas at all yet” cut-off is actually in December 2015 given VB history). Also, the notes to the report indicate that it intends to “exclude petitions on behalf of individuals that have obtained lawful permanent residence” but not that it excludes approved petitioners who have subsequently not pursued visas and not choosing/able to still wait. The NVC waitlist is a much more meaningful report for the number of China-born applicants actually still awaiting visas, and I eagerly await the NVC report update. Also FYI, I have a log of the past USCIS reports starting in Row 280 on the Pre-RIA Data tab in the EB5 Backlog Data Excel file linked to my EB-5 timing page. I did this to facilitate comparison between reports with reference to the corresponding final action dates, which is the only I way I can think to maybe make some sense of the “approved I-526 awaiting visa availability” reports.
Hi Suzanne, do you have a sense for what this new data means for Indian rural investors that filed in September?
what is your prediction on retrogession ? which month will it hit us ?
what about i 829 processing date /