Executive Summary
Employment-based immigration is a key pathway for U.S. employers seeking to recruit and retain skilled foreign workers. For many foreign nationals, the process begins with Form I-140, Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker, and can ultimately lead to lawful permanent residence, commonly called a “green card.” However, the pathway has become increasingly lengthy and uncertain in recent years.
Using quarterly data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) between fiscal year FY2016 and FY2025, compiled in the American Immigration Council’s new USCIS Filing Trends Dashboard, this report examines trends in employment-based immigration filings, processing times, backlogs, visa availability, denial rates, and related benefits.
The findings reveal that the employment-based green card process is facing growing strain. Demand for immigrant workers has continued to rise, but USCIS processing capacity has not kept pace. By FY2025, pending I-140 petitions for immigrant workers had reached the highest levels in a decade, processing times had lengthened, and denial rates had increased substantially. These challenges were particularly pronounced in two categories, EB-1A extraordinary ability and EB-2 National Interest Waiver (NIW) petitions, where denial rates rose sharply and forms awaiting adjudication, i.e. backlogs, expanded.
Delays extend well beyond the I-140 stage. Hundreds of thousands of approved beneficiaries of immigrant petitions remain stuck waiting for immigrant visa numbers to become available, while lengthy adjustment of status processing times and a growing number of employment authorization requests add further delays. As a result, many employment-based immigrants face years of uncertainty before obtaining permanent residence, affecting both workers and the employers who sponsor them.
Key Findings
I-140 backlogs reached record levels in FY2025. Pending petitions more than quadrupled, rising from 43,509 in FY2016 Q1 to 180,439 by FY2025 Q4, the highest level in the decade. Since FY2023 Q3, USCIS had processed fewer petitions than it received each quarter through the end of FY2025, causing backlogs to grow steadily.
The time required to clear the I-140 backlog more than doubled. At USCIS’s quarterly processing capacity, backlog clearance time increased from about five months in FY2016 Q1 to a record high of 12.3 months in FY2025 Q3, underscoring the agency’s growing failure to keep pace with demand.
The I-140 denial rates increased sharply in FY2025. The share of petitions USCIS denied rose from 6.6 percent in FY2016 Q1 to a peak of 16.5 percent in FY2025 Q3, meaning that roughly one in six I-140 petitions were denied at the height of the increase.
The EB-2 preference category became the largest source of I-140 backlogs by FY2025. By FY2025 Q4, EB-2 petitions for professionals holding an advanced degree and individuals with exceptional ability in the sciences, arts, or business accounted for nearly half (46.9 percent) of all pending I-140 cases, overtaking EB-3 as the largest source of the backlog. The shift was largely driven by rapidly increasing National Interest Waiver (NIW) filings, which nearly tripled between FY2022 and FY2025.
EB-2 NIW and EB-1A petitions faced sharply rising denial rates. By FY2025 Q4, nearly two-thirds of EB-2 NIW petitions and nearly half of EB-1A extraordinary ability petitions were denied, with denial rates for both categories almost doubling during FY2025.
Premium processing became a significant feature of the system. Requests for premium processing increased modestly over the course of FY2025, from 31,778 in Q1 to 34,265 in Q4. Approximately 44 percent of I-140 filings in FY2025 requested concurrent premium processing, generating an estimated $300 million in premium processing fees for USCIS.
Visa availability remains a major bottleneck. The number of foreign nationals with approved I-140 petitions waiting for an available visa grew by 15.3 percent from 557,041 in FY2023 Q2 to 642,226 in FY2025 Q4. Nearly two-thirds of all approved I-140 petitions awaiting visas were in the EB-2 category, and foreign nationals/beneficiaries born in India accounted for 73.4 percent of all those petitions in FY2025 Q4.
Work authorization processing deteriorated in FY2025. After years of backlog reduction, the number of pending Form I-765 applications for adjustment of status applicants more than doubled during FY2025, and backlog clearance times increased from 2.7 months to 10.2 months.
Adjustment of status applicants continued to face substantial delays. Although the backlog clearance times of Form I-485 improved dramatically after their pandemic-era peak of 42.1 months in FY2021 Q2, they climbed back to roughly 17 months throughout FY2025. The average denial rate during the first three quarters of the second Trump administration (11.8 percent) was also notably higher than the decade-long average of 8.0 percent.
Taken together, these findings point to mounting pressure throughout the employment-based green card process. Rising backlogs, heightened scrutiny in some categories, and persistent visa-number constraints are creating longer and less predictable timelines for both employers and immigrants, with significant implications for workforce planning and the United States’ ability to attract and retain global talent.
