As recently as the June 2026 Visa Bulletin, an India-born applicant in the EB-2 category with a priority date of September 1, 2013 or earlier could file for a green card. In July, that same line in the chart doesn't show a date at all. It shows a single letter: U. Unavailable.
That's not a retrogression. Retrogression means the line moves backward — say, from 2013 to 2011 — and everyone with a date after the new cutoff has to wait longer. "Unavailable" is different. It means the door is shut entirely, for every priority date, regardless of how old. Nobody chargeable to India is getting an EB-2 green card approved in this category for the rest of fiscal year 2026, full stop.
Why It Happened
Every employment-based category operates under two ceilings at once: a worldwide annual limit, and a per-country cap that no single country can exceed (roughly 7% of the worldwide total, with some flexibility built in). The State Department's own July bulletin explains the mechanism plainly: "due to high demand and number use by aliens chargeable to India," the pro-rated limit for India's EB-2 category was reached, and the category became unavailable for the remainder of the fiscal year. India-born applicants filed more EB-2 cases, faster, than the per-country cap could absorb — so the number count hit its ceiling months before the fiscal year runs out on September 30.
This isn't only an India story, and it isn't only an EB-2 story. In the same July bulletin, EB-1 for India retrogressed two months, from December 15, 2022 back to October 15, 2022. India's EB-5 unreserved category is unavailable too. Three separate India employment-based lines went backward or shut down in the same month.
What Most People Get Wrong
The instinct, when a category goes backward, is to look for a workaround — downgrade from EB-2 to EB-3, or vice versa, whichever line is moving. That instinct doesn't help here. India's EB-3 final action date in July 2026 sits at January 1, 2014 — barely three weeks ahead of where EB-2 sat back in June. Almost anyone with an EB-2 priority date recent enough to have been filing this year has a priority date well after 2014, so an EB-3 downgrade doesn't open a door that EB-2 just closed. For India-chargeable applicants with priority dates from the last decade, there is, right now, no employment-based category open at all.
