Employment based Green Cards and Wait Times

Green card defines your permanent resident status at the United States. The green card officially grants immigration benefits to the holders, among which include the permission to reside in the United States and have the permit to work. The green card holder must maintain the permanent residency status. The card can be declared invalid and the residency permit can be revoked if certain conditions are not met.

Applying a Green card fall into two basic categories:

• Family-sponsored Category
• Employment-based Category

Under the Employment-based category, maximum of 140,000 candidates are allotted green cards every year, among which there is a 7% limit (9,800) for each county.

There are five categories under Employment-based category: EB1, EB2, EB3, EB4 and EB5.

Employment-based Green Card Wait Time

Employment Category	Current Processing Wait Time(For India and China)
EB1	Immediate Processing
EB2	4-5 years
EB3	6-9 years
EB4	Immediate Processing
EB5	Immediate Processing

EB1 Category – Priority Workers:

This category is basically for the following:

• Managers and executives
• Outstanding professors and researches with at least three years experience
• Candidates who excelled in major fields like sciences, arts, education, etc.
• 28.6% of 140,000 are allotted green card in the EB1 category every year. This comes up to 40,000

EB2 Category – Advanced Degree Holders:

• Candidates applied in this category are professionals who fall into advanced degree holder’s category.
• This category is basically for the following:
  • Ph.D. graduates
  • Candidates with master’s degree
  • Candidates with at least five years of work experience
  • 28.6% of 140,000 are allotted green card in the EB2 category every year. This comes up to 40,000

EB3 Category – Skilled Workers:

This category is basically for the following:

• Skilled workers with at least two years experience
• Candidates with bachelor’s degree
• Other workers (Unskilled)
• 28.6% of 140,000 are allotted green card in the EB3 category every year. This comes up to 40,000. Unskilled workers can only take advantage of 10,000 among the total in EB3.

EB4 Category – Certain Special Immigrants:

This category is basically for the special immigrants who include the following:

• Ministers, religious workers
• current or former US government workers
• Widows/widowers of U.S. citizens etc.
• 7.1% of 140,000 are allotted green card in the EB4 category every year. This comes up to 10,000 approximately. Unskilled workers can only take advantage of 10,000 among the total in EB3.

EB5 Category – Investors:

• This category is for those candidates who would create employment and provide jobs in the U.S.
• The following criteria need to be met in order to be eligible:
  • Must invest $1,000,000. Sometimes an investment of $500,000 is accepted in certain scenarios
  • In case of investing $1,000,000 , 10 new full time jobs must be created and maintained
  • In case of investing $500,000 , 5 new full time jobs needs to be created and maintained
  • 7.1% of 140,000 are allotted green card in the EB5 category every year. This comes up to 10,000 approximately.

Yearly allotment of Green Cards to India:

According to the fact that each country should only receive 7% of 1,40,000 green cards every year and based on per employment-based category percentage ( 28.6% for EB1,EB2,EB3 and 7.1% for EB4 and EB5), here is the analysis on how many green cards are allotted to India each year in each of the employment-based category:

Employment Category	Green Cards Cap Limit
EB1	2802 + Unused cap limit in EB4 and EB5 categories
EB2	2802 + Unused cap limit in EB1 Category
EB3	2802 + Unused cap limit in EB2 Category
EB4	695
EB5	695