Green Card Backlog Hits 1.56 Million Pending Applications

The green card backlog at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reached about 1.56 million pending Form I-485 applications at the end of June, and the fastest-growing part of it was employment-based adjustment of status. Agency figures for April through June show employers’ workers and their families filing job-based green card applications at roughly twice the pace of the previous quarter, while USCIS decided fewer family cases and denied a larger share of them.

The pending totals were reported Nov. 4 by The Financial Express, which put family-based applications at about 611,000 and employment-based applications at about 268,000 as of June 30. USCIS quarterly figures reported by Newsweek show how the pile grew. Together they describe an agency taking in far more work than it finished in the quarter when its tougher approach to adjustment of status took effect.

Job-based filings doubled while decisions stood still

USCIS received 97,501 employment-based I-485s from April through June, up from 47,514 in January through March. It completed 45,236 employment cases in the later quarter, almost exactly the 44,696 it completed in the earlier one. Based on those figures, the agency took in about 2.2 new job-based applications for every one it decided, adding roughly 52,000 cases to the queue in three months.

The family side moved the other way. New family filings fell about 25 percent, to 95,175, but completions fell almost as sharply, from 83,203 to 66,918. Denials rose slightly in number even as approvals dropped by nearly 17,000, so the denial share of decided family cases climbed from about 14 percent to about 18 percent, a calculation from the same USCIS figures.

Form I-485 category	Received, Jan.–Mar.	Received, Apr.–Jun.	Approved, Apr.–Jun.	Denied, Apr.–Jun.
Employment-based	47,514	97,501	42,076	3,160
Family-based	127,189	95,175	54,678	12,240
Cuban Adjustment Act	15,312	6,279	139	447

Adjustment of status applications, fiscal 2026 second and third quarters. Source: USCIS quarterly data as reported by Newsweek.

USCIS has not said why employment filings jumped, and the quarterly data do not answer that question. What the numbers do show is that, in this quarter, the employment queue grew faster than the family queue. The family and employment categories together account for about 56 percent of the 1.56 million total; the remaining roughly 681,000 cases sit in other groups, including Cuban, refugee and asylum-based adjustment, which have barely moved this year.

A pending I-485 is not the same as a visa wait

The headline number mixes two different kinds of delay. Some applicants are waiting on USCIS itself: background checks, interviews, requests for evidence. Others filed early under the State Department’s Dates for Filing chart and cannot be approved until a visa number is available under the Final Action Date, no matter how fast USCIS works. Congress caps employment-based green cards at 140,000 a year, with per-country limits on top, so for Indian and Chinese professionals in EB-2 and EB-3 a pending I-485 is often a holding pattern measured in years, as the EB-2 backlog for Indians shows.

That distinction matters for how to read the employment surge. If much of it reflects people filing as soon as their priority dates became current for filing, the practical effect is a larger group holding work permits and travel documents while they wait, not necessarily a group that USCIS could approve tomorrow. Family applicants are in a different position. Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens face no annual cap, so a slowdown in their cases points more directly to how the agency is adjudicating.

And the agency has changed how it adjudicates. A May 21 policy memorandum, PM-602-0199, describes adjustment of status as a discretionary benefit and steers many applicants toward consular processing abroad. An August policy lets officers deny applications without first issuing a request for evidence or a notice of intent to deny. The administration presents these steps as stricter enforcement of the law as written. A lawsuit filed Oct. 5 in federal court in Massachusetts argues they exceed USCIS’s authority and were adopted without required rulemaking.

What the next quarter’s numbers will test

The April-to-June figures predate the August policy, so they capture the May memo’s early effect but not the no-warning denials. The July-to-September release is the first that will show whether USCIS is shrinking the queue through faster decisions, more denials, or both. A rising denial share in family cases, together with the steep drop in Cuban approvals covered here last month, suggests the second path is already under way for some groups.

For employment applicants, the visa supply sets the pace more than USCIS does. The November 2026 Visa Bulletin moved several employment final action dates forward, which could let USCIS approve more of the cases already in its files. A denied I-485, by contrast, cannot be appealed to the agency’s appeals office, and it ends any work permit that depended on it.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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