China Employment-Based Green Card Forecast 2026

If you are a Chinese employment-based applicant, the August 2026 Visa Bulletin lands with a familiar sting: China EB2 is holding at 01SEP21 (September 1, 2021) and China EB3 at 01JAN22 (January 1, 2022). Both dates sit years behind the All Areas figures, where EB2 is Current and EB3 is 01SEP24. This china employment forecast walks through the verified movement behind those two cutoffs and lays out an estimate-only outlook — with the firm caveat that no specific future month can be promised, only read from past pace.

Verified China employment movement

The table below uses only confirmed Final Action Dates from published Visa Bulletins. Nothing here is modeled or estimated.

What the data actually shows

China EB2 reached 01SEP21 in January 2026 and has not budged through August 2026 — roughly eight months of flatlining. China EB3, by contrast, has crept forward in small steps and landed at 01JAN22 in August, up from 22DEC21 the month before. China EB5 moved to 01DEC16 (December 1, 2016) and then held. The shape of the whole record is slow, uneven progress with long plateaus — the normal fingerprint of a country running against its per-country ceiling.

Notice the gap between China EB2 (01SEP21) and the All Areas EB2 date (Current). That distance is not about worldwide demand. It is the per-country cap doing exactly what it was built to do: capping China at about 7% of the worldwide employment total no matter how many qualified applicants line up.

Estimate-only outlook

Based solely on the verified movement above, the most honest estimate is that China EB2 stays roughly stable in the near term — it has shown zero advance since January 2026, so there is no signal of a jump coming. China EB3 may keep taking small monthly steps if demand and annual numbers allow. Treat both as tentative reads of past pace, not promised dates.

Two things could break the pattern. Spillover of unused family numbers into employment in a given fiscal year can enlarge the pool and nudge cutoffs. And retrogression can erase months of progress overnight. Neither can be scheduled, so any China employment forecast worth your time stays in the language of estimates.

Reading the China cutoffs in context

The cleanest way to read your own case is to compare China against India and against the worldwide dates side by side. When All Areas EB2 is Current but China EB2 is years back, the difference is demand against a fixed national share, full stop. Track the monthly bulletin and use the Visa Figures Archive to watch whether China EB3’s small steps keep compounding or stall the way EB2 has.