The 7% Per-Country Cap Explained

One rule explains more green-card waiting lines than any other: the per-country cap. It limits any single country to about 7% of the worldwide total of immigrant visas in each category. A country with modest demand barely notices it. A country whose applicants vastly outnumber its share lives behind a cutoff measured in years. This article explains the per country cap 7% and why it produces the familiar India and China employment backlogs and the Mexico and Philippines family backlogs.

How the 7% cap works

The worldwide employment-based limit is about 140,000 per year and the family-based limit is about 226,000 per year. Each country may claim no more than about 7% of the worldwide total in any single category. For a high-demand country, that 7% is consumed almost immediately each fiscal year. Once a country’s share is gone, its cutoff stops advancing — or retrogresses to “U” — even while the All Areas (worldwide) date keeps moving, because the worldwide pool is not subject to that country’s individual ceiling.

India and China in employment

The August 2026 employment Final Action Dates show the cap’s effect in plain numbers:

India EB2 is U and China EB2 is 01SEP21, while All Areas EB2 is Current. The worldwide supply is open; India and China are simply bounded by their 7% shares. India EB3 at 01JAN14 and China EB3 at 01JAN22 tell the same story one category over.

Mexico and the Philippines in family

The same 7% rule drives family backlogs. Mexico and the Philippines are among the largest sources of family-based demand, and each is limited to about 7% of the worldwide family total (about 226,000 per year). Their family cutoffs therefore fall far behind the worldwide family dates. The cap is category-neutral: it bites wherever a single country’s demand dwarfs its annual allocation, which is why the same mechanism appears in both employment (India, China) and family (Mexico, the Philippines).

Why the cap exists

The per-country limit was designed to spread immigration across many nations rather than let a few countries dominate the annual allocation. The trade-off is that applicants from the highest-demand countries wait far longer than the statutory “annual limit” headlines might suggest, because that limit is subdivided by country before it reaches them.

An exception: EB-5 set-asides

One employment carve-out escapes the cap. Under the 2022 EB-5 reform, set-aside visas — 20% for rural, 10% for high-unemployment, and 2% for infrastructure projects — are exempt from the per-country backlog. Investors in those set-asides are not bound by the 7% ceiling, so their path does not run through the India or China employment cutoffs. The standard EB-5 investment is $1,050,000, with a $800,000 amount for targeted employment areas.