Why Our Conservative, Base, and Optimistic Dates Are So Far Apart: 15 Years of Real India EB Visa Data
Several readers asked us versions of the same question this week: why does the Conservative date on the Priority Date Estimator run so far beyond the Base case? One reader with a Dec 2014 India EB-2 priority date saw a base estimate of early 2028 next to a conservative line of late 2034 and wanted to know which one to believe. It is a fair question, and the answer is not a formula. It is a table of official government data that we think every applicant should see once.
Source: U.S. Department of State Visa Office Annual Reports, Table V (employment-based visa number use by country and category), fiscal years 2010 through 2024. These are public documents. FY2019 has no comparable breakout because DOS published a combined table that year, and FY2025's full-year table has not been published yet. Not legal advice.
The short version
- India EB-2 visa supply does not cluster around one typical number. In 14 recorded years it was either roughly 2,600 to 7,200 (seven years) or 17,000 to 59,000 (seven years). No year has ever landed in between.
- Our Conservative scenario is the statutory floor, about 2,800 per year for India EB-2. That is not a paranoid invention: 13 of the 14 recorded years delivered at least that much, and four of the last eight completed years sat at or near it.
- Our Base case is anchored to the middle of the real distribution including spillover years, currently about 13,800 per year. Seven of 14 recorded years delivered at least that.
- Because history really does split into a floor regime and a spillover regime, an honest estimate is a range, not a single date. Plan around Base, treat Conservative as the legal worst case bound.
The full table: India EB visa numbers used, FY2010 to FY2024
These are the visas actually charged to India in each employment-based category, per the State Department's own annual accounting.
| Fiscal year | India EB-1 | India EB-2 | India EB-3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 6,741 | 19,961 | 3,036 |
| 2011 | 4,563 | 23,997 | 4,002 |
| 2012 | 9,506 | 19,726 | 2,804 |
| 2013 | 9,640 | 17,193 | 7,816 |
| 2014 | 12,978 | 23,527 | 3,526 |
| 2015 | 12,253 | 7,235 | 7,026 |
| 2016 | 10,985 | 3,930 | 4,617 |
| 2017 | 13,082 | 2,879 | 6,641 |
| 2018 | 10,967 | 4,096 | 6,112 |
| 2019 | No category-by-country breakout published (combined table year) | ||
| 2020 | 17,014 | 2,599 | 3,194 |
| 2021 | 30,825 | 28,246 | 14,954 |
| 2022 | 21,437 | 59,431 | 12,600 |
| 2023 | 16,604 | 4,301 | 4,782 |
| 2024 | 8,809 | 3,916 | 3,655 |
FY2025's full-year table is not out yet. FY2026 is in progress; our monthly USCIS pending-inventory tracking shows the India EB-2 queue draining at a net pace of roughly 5,700 cases per year so far this year.
Two regimes, almost no middle
Sort the 14 India EB-2 years from smallest to largest and something jumps out:
| Floor regime (7 years) | Spillover regime (7 years) |
|---|---|
| FY2020: 2,599 | FY2013: 17,193 |
| FY2017: 2,879 | FY2012: 19,726 |
| FY2024: 3,916 | FY2010: 19,961 |
| FY2016: 3,930 | FY2014: 23,527 |
| FY2018: 4,096 | FY2011: 23,997 |
| FY2023: 4,301 | FY2021: 28,246 |
| FY2015: 7,235 | FY2022: 59,431 |
There is a hole in the middle of this distribution. No recorded year delivered between 7,235 and 17,193 visas to India EB-2. Supply is effectively a coin with two faces: a floor year or a feast year.
The mechanics are no secret. Every country is limited to about 7 percent of each category's worldwide total, which works out to roughly 2,800 visas per year for India EB-2. That is the floor. But when other countries or categories leave visa numbers unused, the law lets those numbers spill over, and oversubscribed India absorbs nearly all of them. In FY2010 to FY2014, worldwide EB-2 demand was light, so India received 17,000 to 24,000 a year. In FY2021 and FY2022, pandemic consulate closures left a historic pile of family-based numbers unused, those spilled into employment categories, and India EB-2 hit 28,246 and then an astonishing 59,431. In the years between and since, worldwide demand was strong, spillover dried up, and India fell back to the floor: 2,879 in FY2017, 2,599 in FY2020 (number use can even undershoot the floor when consulates physically cannot process), 4,301 in FY2023, 3,916 in FY2024.
Why this rules out a single estimate
If history gave us a bell curve, we would show you its middle and be done. It does not. The average of these 14 years is about 15,800, a number dragged upward by FY2022's once-in-a-generation 59,431 and delivered by exactly zero typical years. The median, about 12,200, sits inside the hole where no real year has ever landed. When the underlying reality is two regimes, the only honest presentation is a range whose ends correspond to the two regimes. That is precisely what the three scenarios are.
How to read each scenario
| Scenario | India EB-2 supply assumption | How often history delivered at least this | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | ~2,800/yr (statutory floor) | 13 of 14 recorded years | The legal guarantee if spillover never comes back. A bound, not a forecast. |
| Base | ~13,800/yr (middle of the real distribution, including spillover years) | 7 of 14 recorded years | The planning line. Assumes floor years and spillover years keep alternating roughly as they have. |
| Optimistic | ~17,900/yr (strong spillover) | 6 of 14 recorded years | A repeat of the good years. Requires family-based or EB-1 numbers going unused again. |
Two things follow from the table. First, the Conservative line is not pessimism for its own sake. Four of the last eight completed years (FY2017, FY2020, FY2023, FY2024) sat at or near the floor, so a string of floor years is not a tail risk, it is a regime that has happened, repeatedly and recently. Second, the Base case is not optimism for its own sake either: half of all recorded years delivered Base-level supply or far more. The honest answer to "which one is right" is that each scenario has been the right answer in some stretch of the last 15 years.
The same logic drives the other categories. India EB-1's worst recorded year is 4,563 (FY2011), which is why its Conservative anchors there rather than at the statutory minimum. Categories for countries that are not oversubscribed barely feel any of this, which is why their estimates show much narrower ranges.
What changed in our June upgrade
In early June we upgraded the estimator's supply model from hand-maintained baseline figures to this dataset directly: the supply scenarios are now computed from the official year-by-year issuance record above, refreshed as new government data drops, alongside the monthly USCIS pending-inventory feed that tracks the queue itself. Two visible effects followed, and they confused some readers precisely because they moved in opposite directions. The Conservative line now anchors to the statutory floor, so it reads later than the old hand-set conservative did. The Base case now anchors to the real median including spillover years, so for most dates it reads earlier than before. Nothing about your case changed; the model simply stopped averaging away the two-regime reality you can see in the table.
The queue side also got more complete in June: the pending count ahead of each priority date now includes the oldest cases that USCIS reports only as an aggregated "Prior Years" total, which nudged some queue figures up slightly. Between the monthly USCIS inventory drops, bulletin movements, and these upgrades, the numbers now move more often than the old static version did. That is the data updating, not the methodology wobbling.
How to actually use the range
Plan around the Base case. Treat the Conservative date as the bound the law guarantees you even if spillover never returns, useful for worst-case decisions like whether to maintain a backup status, not as the expected outcome. Treat Optimistic as genuine upside that has happened in roughly four of every ten recorded years. And watch the drivers: spillover for the coming fiscal year becomes estimable from family-based demand and EB-1 usage long before the year ends, and the estimator's spillover section tracks exactly that. You can see your own date's range, computed live from this data, on the Priority Date Estimator, and the month-by-month queue movement in our latest USCIS inventory breakdown.
This article is informational only and is not legal advice. Figures are from public U.S. Department of State Visa Office annual reports (Table V, FY2010 to FY2024) and USCIS public inventory data, and may be revised as agencies publish new releases. Estimates are not guarantees. For guidance about your own case, consult a licensed immigration attorney.