USCIS August 2026 I-485 Inventory: Supply, Processing and What FY2027 Actually Delivers
USCIS published two employment-based I-485 inventory reports on August 25, 2026: one as of June 6 and one as of August 5. Both are loaded. This covers the supply for FY2026, what has been processed against it, what is still pending, what the consular disruptions do between now and September 30, and what FY2027 looks like.
Sources: USCIS Pending Applications for Employment-Based Preference Categories (June 6 and August 5, 2026); USCIS Report to Congress on Service-Wide Forms, June and July 2026; DOS Report of the Visa Office Table V; the July, August and September 2026 Visa Bulletins. Not legal advice.
Total supply, FY2026
| FY2026 employment-based supply | Visas |
|---|---|
| Statutory worldwide floor | 140,000 |
| Unused FY2025 family numbers that fell up | 46,317 |
| Worldwide limit | 186,317 |
| Per-country ceiling, about 7 percent | about 13,000 |
Oversubscribed countries can exceed the flat per-country ceiling when other countries do not use their numbers. That redistribution is the single biggest variable in what India and China actually receive, and it is covered further down.
What has been processed
Two categories have already exhausted their FY2026 allocation and show Unavailable in the July, August and September bulletins: India EB-2 and India EB-5 Unreserved. Unavailable means the annual limit was reached and no further numbers will be issued in those categories this fiscal year.
India EB-1 retrogressed to October 15, 2022 and has held there since July. The Department of State flags in the September bulletin that EB-1 India may also become unavailable before the year ends.
On the adjustment of status side, USCIS reports monthly national totals:
| Employment-based I-485 | June 2026 | July 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Received | 16,657 | 14,109 |
| Approved | 12,216 | 12,927 |
| Denied | 1,076 | 1,169 |
| Average processing time | 10.0 months | 10.5 months |
About 25,000 approvals across those two months against about 30,800 new filings received.
What is pending
Pending employment-based I-485s, from the October 2025 baseline through the two new snapshots:
| Country | Category | Oct 2025 | Jun 2026 | Aug 2026 | Jun to Aug | Oct to Aug |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| India | EB-1 | 15,432 | 22,860 | 19,261 | -3,599 | +3,829 |
| India | EB-2 | 28,365 | 30,845 | 27,981 | -2,864 | -384 |
| India | EB-3 | 15,350 | 17,128 | 16,206 | -922 | +856 |
| China | EB-1 | 2,434 | 7,324 | 6,755 | -569 | +4,321 |
| China | EB-2 | 2,398 | 5,142 | 4,386 | -756 | +1,988 |
| China | EB-3 | 4,944 | 4,710 | 3,914 | -796 | -1,030 |
| Mexico | EB-1 | 1,800 | 2,008 | 1,996 | -12 | +196 |
| Mexico | EB-2 | 896 | 1,900 | 1,773 | -127 | +877 |
| Mexico | EB-3 | 1,895 | 4,687 | 4,435 | -252 | +2,540 |
| Philippines | EB-1 | 355 | 513 | 517 | +4 | +162 |
| Philippines | EB-2 | 302 | 679 | 685 | +6 | +383 |
| Philippines | EB-3 | 925 | 1,988 | 1,841 | -147 | +916 |
| Rest of World | EB-1 | 28,234 | 32,683 | 30,778 | -1,905 | +2,544 |
| Rest of World | EB-2 | 16,387 | 45,127 | 41,966 | -3,161 | +25,579 |
| Rest of World | EB-3 | 11,348 | 39,591 | 37,104 | -2,487 | +25,756 |
The total across all countries and all employment categories peaked at 242,849 in June and fell to 222,477 in August. That is the first decline since USCIS began publishing monthly snapshots.
Two movements drive it. India EB-1 fell 3,599, almost entirely from its 2022 priority date cohort, which went from 7,009 to 3,905. That cohort sits exactly at the October 15, 2022 cutoff. India EB-2 fell 2,864, with its 2013 cohort dropping from 7,430 to 5,532 while the 2014 cohort of 20,813 lost only 507. India EB-2 ran out of numbers in July, which is why the drain stopped at the 2013 wall instead of continuing into 2014.
The column that matters most for FY2027 is the last one. Rest of World EB-2 grew 25,579 and Rest of World EB-3 grew 25,756 over ten months. Those two categories have been Current or near-Current on the filing chart, and applicants have been filing into them at scale.
What the disruptions do between now and September 30
Two consular developments landed in the last week.
On August 21, a federal court vacated the State Department policy that had suspended immigrant visa issuance for nationals of 75 countries since January. On or around August 24, the State Department began rescheduling immigrant visa interviews worldwide so consular officers can complete training on the public charge ground of inadmissibility. No end date has been published.
Three consequences for the rest of FY2026:
- Adjustment of status is not affected. A pending I-485 inside the United States is a USCIS case. The pause applies to consular interviews abroad. USCIS approval capacity, running at roughly 12,000 to 13,000 employment cases a month, continues.
- Consular issuance slows in the final weeks. This suppresses both family and employment immigrant visas. For India the employment effect is small, because India's employment cases are overwhelmingly adjustment of status and India EB-2 has already hit its limit. The exposure falls mainly on Rest of World.
- Unused family numbers grow. Family preference categories are used roughly 98 percent at consulates. A worldwide pause in the closing weeks means fewer FY2026 family numbers get used, and unused family numbers are added to the FY2027 employment limit.
Separately, USCIS public charge guidance issued August 18 takes effect September 18, 2026. That guidance does apply to adjustment of status, and it is a different action from the consular pause.
How much has each country got in FY2026?
This is the most common question at this point in the year, and it has a precise answer in three parts: what the split normally looks like, the one FY2026 figure that can be measured today, and when the real numbers arrive.
1. How the pool normally splits
FY2024 is the most recent fiscal year with complete published data. Department of State number use, by country and category:
| Country | EB-1 | EB-2 | EB-3 | EB-5 | Total | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rest of World | 29,311 | 34,149 | 23,445 | 3,810 | 90,715 | 58.2% |
| China | 6,952 | 6,556 | 6,141 | 9,547 | 29,196 | 18.7% |
| India | 8,809 | 3,916 | 3,655 | 1,428 | 17,808 | 11.4% |
| Philippines | 331 | 379 | 10,158 | 11 | 10,879 | 7.0% |
| Mexico | 2,059 | 1,314 | 3,891 | 128 | 7,392 | 4.7% |
| Worldwide | 47,462 | 46,314 | 47,290 | 14,924 | 155,990 | 100% |
Rest of World takes 58 percent of the pool. India took 11.4 percent in FY2024. This is the single most useful frame for the question, because it shows that the size of the worldwide limit matters far less to any one country than how much of it other countries leave unused.
Applying India's FY2024 share to the FY2026 limit of 186,317 would put India near 21,000. That is an extrapolation, not a measurement.
2. The one FY2026 figure that can be measured
Priority date cohorts that became eligible to file well before the fiscal year started take very few new applications, so any shrinkage in them is adjudication. Measuring those cohorts between the October 2025 and August 2026 inventory snapshots gives a floor on India's adjustment-of-status approvals.
The answer depends on how strictly a cohort is defined as settled, and we are showing both because the difference is large:
| Definition of a settled cohort | India EB-1 | India EB-2 | India EB-3 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eligible to file at least a year before FY2026 opened | 2,787 | 352 | 1,520 | 4,659 |
| Eligible to file when FY2026 opened | 8,158 | 5,057 | 70 | 13,285 |
So India has had at least 4,700 employment-based adjustment applications approved in the first ten months of FY2026, and plausibly around 13,000. Both figures sit below the 17,808 India recorded in FY2024, which is what you would expect from a partial year measured on its oldest cases only.
The reason we publish a range rather than one number is that the stricter and looser definitions are both defensible, and they differ by a factor of three. A single figure here would imply precision that the data does not carry.
What this figure is not. It counts adjustment of status only, so immigrant visas issued at consulates are missing entirely. It covers ten months, not twelve. And it works only for India, because India's filing cutoffs are backlogged and stable enough for a settled cohort to exist. For Rest of World, Mexico and the Philippines the filing cutoffs have been at or near Current, so every cohort keeps taking new filings and the same measurement returns nothing meaningful. That is why this table has one country in it rather than five.
One FY2026 fact is exact and needs no measurement. India EB-2 used its entire FY2026 allocation, which is what Unavailable means. The same is true of India EB-5 Unreserved.
3. When the real numbers arrive
The authoritative source is the Department of State Report of the Visa Office, whose Table V gives number use by country and category. It publishes after the fiscal year closes. The interim source, monthly Department of State issuance data, currently runs only through the first quarter of FY2026 for the employment categories, and it attributes visas by the consulate that issued them rather than by country of chargeability, so it cannot be read as a per-country total either.
Anyone publishing a confident full-year, per-country figure for FY2026 today is estimating, ourselves included. We will publish the actual numbers when Table V lands. Before that, the FY2027 annual limits will allow part of FY2026 to be back-solved, in the same way the FY2026 limit let us settle a family usage question we had previously got wrong.
What to expect for FY2027
FY2027 opens October 1. Annual limits reset, and categories showing Unavailable become eligible for numbers again. Our published estimate for the family-to-employment fall-up is about 81,000, which would put the FY2027 employment pool near 221,000 against FY2026's 186,317. The worldwide consular pause pushes that figure toward the upper end of our range rather than the lower.
A larger pool does not translate proportionally into visas for any one country. What India receives depends far more on whether other countries leave numbers unused than on the size of the pool. The record is unambiguous:
| Fiscal year | India EB-1 | India EB-2 | India EB-3 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2019 | 9,008 | 2,908 | 5,083 | 16,999 |
| FY2020 | 17,014 | 2,599 | 3,194 | 22,807 |
| FY2021 | 30,825 | 28,246 | 14,954 | 74,025 |
| FY2022 | 21,437 | 59,431 | 12,600 | 93,468 |
| FY2023 | 16,604 | 4,301 | 4,782 | 25,687 |
| FY2024 | 8,809 | 3,916 | 3,655 | 16,380 |
India EB-2 ranged from 2,599 in FY2020 to 59,431 in FY2022. India's share of worldwide EB-2 over the last fifteen years has swung between 6 percent and 54 percent. FY2021 and FY2022 were the outlier years, and both had the same cause: consular processing worldwide was shut down and other countries could not use their numbers, so those numbers were redistributed to the most backlogged country.
FY2026 has only half of that condition. Consular processing is suppressed, but Rest of World has been absorbing numbers domestically instead, which is exactly what the pending table above shows. Rest of World EB-2 and EB-3 each added more than 25,000 pending applications in ten months. Numbers consumed by Rest of World through adjustment of status are not available for redistribution.
So the honest FY2027 expectation is a larger pool with a normal distribution of it, not a repeat of FY2022. A bigger fall-up raises the ceiling for every country including India. It does not by itself reproduce the conditions that delivered 59,431 EB-2 numbers to India in FY2022. For that, Rest of World demand would also have to collapse, and the current data shows it rising.
Two further points on October. Cutoff dates are not guaranteed to reopen where they left off, since a category advanced aggressively before hitting its limit can reopen at a more conservative date. And the official FY2027 limits will likely lag: DOS published the FY2026 limits eleven months into the fiscal year, so early FY2027 figures should be read as provisional.
Checking your own case
The August data is live in our Priority Date Estimator. For a category showing Unavailable it projects forward from the October reopening rather than treating a blank cutoff as Current, and it shows the inputs behind the estimate.
Estimates are based on historical trends and published government data. They are not guarantees and this is not legal advice. For advice on your own case, consult an immigration attorney.