WASHINGTON — For an engineer who has spent fourteen years in the United States on H-1B status, renewing every three years, watching the priority date queue, building a career and a mortgage and two children who are American citizens, the October 15, 2022 Final Action Date for India’s EB-1 category has a very specific meaning. It means she qualifies. It also means the number that qualifies her might not exist by the time September ends.
The State Department’s September 2026 Visa Bulletin, released this week as the final bulletin of fiscal year 2026, holds India’s EB-1 Final Action Date at October 15, 2022, unchanged from August. According to the bulletin, high demand means the EB-1 India category could be designated “Unavailable” before September 30. An Unavailable designation does not reset the next day. It closes the intake until fiscal year 2027 begins on October 1, when the annual employment-based green card allocation restarts.
India’s EB-2 category crossed that line in May. The EB-2 India queue exhausted its FY2026 allocation earlier this spring and will remain Unavailable through September 30. The structural reason is a per-country cap embedded in US immigration law that limits no single nationality from receiving more than seven percent of total annual employment-based green cards, regardless of the number of qualifying applicants. India, which generates far more H-1B petitions than any other country, consistently hits that ceiling while workers from lower-demand countries use their numbers within months.
The FY2026 employment-based total stands at approximately 186,000, the statutory minimum of 140,000 plus carryover from unused family-based numbers from fiscal year 2025. Skilled immigration has become an increasingly visible pressure point in US economic and technology policy, with the EB-2 India backlog measured in decades and EB-1 now showing the same warning signs that preceded EB-2’s exhaustion.
For applicants inside the United States seeking to adjust their status, the September bulletin specifies a critical constraint: USCIS has designated the Final Action Dates chart, not the Dates for Filing chart, as operative for all employment-based categories this month. The Dates for Filing chart, which can allow applicants to file before their priority dates formally become current, is not available for any employment-based category in September. According to the agency, applicants who file under the wrong chart will have their applications rejected.
Administrative changes add further complexity to this month’s timelines. USCIS is rolling out revised versions of Form I-539 and Form I-765 on September 15, and a revised Form I-485, the core adjustment of status application, on September 18. Applications submitted on the old form versions after the rollout dates will be rejected without a grace period for forms already in transit.
The employment-based landscape has been further complicated by a proposed fee revision that would sharply increase H-1B petition costs. The administration’s proposal would set the filing fee at $103,000 for H-1B cap-subject petitions, affecting approximately 85,000 filings annually. According to reports, employer uncertainty about its timing has begun affecting hiring timelines at smaller technology firms that depend on the annual H-1B lottery.
Workers in the EB-1 category, which covers people of extraordinary ability, outstanding researchers and professors, and certain multinational managers and executives, represent the higher end of the employment-based immigration queue. The October 15, 2022 Final Action Date means USCIS is currently adjudicating cases from more than three and a half years ago. Workers whose petitions were approved after that date are not eligible to proceed regardless of their qualifications or years of waiting.
The EB-5 unreserved category, which covers investor visa applicants outside designated regional centers, is also at risk of exhausting before September 30. EB-5 investors commit a minimum of $1 million, or $500,000 in targeted employment areas, in exchange for conditional permanent residence. The unreserved set-aside has run out before the fiscal year end in prior years, and September’s bulletin carries the same warning.
What changes on October 1 is not the length of the backlog but the annual count. Fiscal year 2027 begins with a fresh allocation of approximately 140,000 employment-based green cards, potentially augmented by carryover from unused family-based numbers from September. Whether that carryover is significant depends on how many family-based visas go unused in the remaining weeks of the fiscal year, a figure that will not be known until late September.
In a year that has also seen enforcement actions targeting visa holders on domestic flights alongside a proposed $103,000 H-1B fee, the September Visa Bulletin arrives at a moment of broader pressure on legal immigration pathways. Critics of the per-country cap structure have long argued that it creates a separate, longer queue for workers from high-demand countries that is disconnected from the merit criteria the visa categories themselves are designed to apply. A researcher who qualified for EB-1 as a person of extraordinary ability waits the same number of years as any other India-born EB-1 applicant, not because her petition was weaker but because the system counts birthplaces.
The October 2026 Visa Bulletin, the first of fiscal year 2027, is expected in mid-September. It will show whether EB-1 India was in fact designated Unavailable before September 30 and what October’s opening date looks like for applicants who have spent years watching the queue. For those who spent September tracking that number, October answers the question September raised. It does not answer how many fiscal years they have left to wait.
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