EB-5 Unreserved Progress (FY26 Q1 I-485 reports, FY25 consular visas, approved I-526 awaiting visa availability)

This post checks in with the backlog of EB-5 applicants with priority dates before March 15, 2022 who are still waiting for Unreserved visas.

The pre-RIA EB-5 backlog is spread across several locations. The following list notes the places where applicants may be waiting, and available information on inventory and progress for each location.

1. I-526 still pending
   • 1,105 pre-RIA I-526 remained pending as of September 2025. These people mostly have old priority dates (the FY26 Q1 median processing time was 78.5 months) and many will likely be denied in the end. (The FY26 Q1 legacy I-526 denial rate was 49%, with just under 200 petitions processed.) This pool likely represents few future visa applicants.
2. I-526 approved but no I-485 or visa application filed yet
   • This number is unreported, but should be small and mainly limited to China-born applicants waiting for Chart B. (One might guess the number by comparing I-485 and NVC applicants with expected numbers given I-526 receipts and approvals and visas issued, but I haven’t tried.)
3. I-526 approved and I-485 pending for adjustment of status
   • For pre-RIA, this pool should be just a bit smaller than the total pending I-485 inventory, for which we now have data through January 2026. See below for detailed inventory charts. As of January 2026, the pending pre-RIA Unreserved I-485 inventory was roughly 4,000, including around 3,000 from China, 500 from India, and 600 from Rest of Word. The inventory grows as the Visa Bulletin moves China Chart B and more I-485 get filed, and shrinks as visas get issued. It appears that in FY2026 Q1, AOS Unreserved visa issuance may have been around 100 to China, 220 or so to India, and 75-150 to Rest World.
4. I-526 approved and registered with the National Visa Center, waiting for consular processing
   • Department of State used to regularly report on the NVC inventory, but has not updated the official NVC waitlist report since 2023. The last available data is thanks to an IIUSA conference presentation in May 2024. As of May 2024, the NVC waitlist recorded 31,255 pending EB-5 applicants from China, 2,541 from India, and 5,774 from Rest of World. We can guess how many remain today by looking at I-526 approvals and consular visa issuance since May 2024, and guessing how the NVC inventory has been increased since 2024 by petition approvals and decreased by visa issuance, denials, giving up, etc. I guess that the NVC waitlist now has more than 20,000 but fewer than 25,000 pre-RIA applicants still waiting. See below for available detail on EB-5 Unreserved visa issuance in FY2025.

The data file linked to my EB-5 Timing page collects pre-RIA data on the Pre-RIA Data tab, and sets up a current backlog estimate by country on the Unreserved tab. Feel free to work with the data and add your own assumptions.

EB-5 Unreserved I-485 Inventory Detail

The following tables summarize the latest information about the pre-RIA Unreserved I-485 inventory in the reports “Pending Applications for Employment-Based Preference Categories” just published by USCIS for October 2025 to January 2026. One can get a rough sense of I-485 processing activity by looking at inventory differences month-to-month.

FY2025 Consular Visa Issuance

Official and exact FY2025 visa issuance numbers will not be available until Department of State publishes the next annual report. But I made a preliminary rough estimate by summing monthly reports for EB-5 Unreserved visa issuance from October 2024 to September 2025. I used yellow shading to highlight countries who are now blocked/limited by January 2026 executive orders from visas and entry. Sorry $800,000 investor in our economy — you can’t come into our country because you’re congenitally likely to use welfare [face palm]. But congrats to everyone who managed to get EB-5 visas before the 2026 orders, including 10 from Chad, my happy childhood home.

I-526 Awaiting Visa Availability Report

I’ll conclude with a post script to repeat why I disregard the confusing quarterly USCIS report titled Form I-140, I-360, I-526 Approved EB Petitions Awaiting Visa Final Priority Dates.

This report looks as if it gives useful information about the EB-5 visa backlog, but it does not. It gives a very specific data point: the number of I-526 petitions that USCIS has approved, as of the report date, that have priority dates later than the Final Action Date in the concurrent Visa Bulletin.

This data point would be meaningful if the Visa Bulletin never retrogressed, and one could assume that everyone with an I-526 approval later than today’s Visa Bulletin’s Final Action Date has no visa yet. But that assumption does not hold in EB-5, given the final action date swings for China and India in recent years. So the USCIS report does not show the backlog of people still waiting for EB-5 visas, or reflect progress in issuing visas. The table below puts the most recent September 2025 USCIS report in context of the referenced Visa Bulletins and past USCIS reports.

For example, the number of “approved I-526 awaiting visa availability” for China plummeted from over 30,000 in the June 2025 USCIS report to under 15,000 in the September 2025 report. That difference tells us nothing about visa issuance or processing activity between June and September 2025. The different Visa Bulletin dates in June and September caused USCIS to be counting a different segment of I-526 approvals for each report. We can conclude from the report comparison that about 15,000 approved China I-526 have priority dates between January 2014 and December 2015. That’s about all we can conclude. The USCIS report cannot mean that these principals mostly don’t have visas yet, since Department of State has been issuing visas past January 2014 for years already per past Visa Bulletins. The report also cannot mean that these principals just received visas, since 15,000 visas cannot have been issued to China between June and September 2025.

Looking at the India column, I compare the USCIS reports from December 2022 and September 2025 — a relatively apples to apples comparison because the Visa Bulletin had a Final Action Date in November 2019 for India in each of these months. The comparison tells me that USCIS had processed more of its post-2019 I-526 inventory by 2025 than it had as of 2022. I cannot conclude that most or all of the 470 Indian investors who had gotten I-526 approval by September 2025, according to the USCIS report, did not also have a visa already by September 2025.

Note

Thank you to the seven readers who made a contribution to the blog after my last post. I appreciate the encouragement and support. My Paypal and Stripe links remain available, for anyone who would like to support continuing this EB-5 analysis work and keeping it public.