Visa Spillover & Spillup: How Unused Numbers Move

The annual green-card supply is not a fixed pie that sits unused when demand falls short. Immigration law has built-in rules that shift unused numbers from one pool to another, and two of them — spillover (family to employment) and spillup (per-country to rest-of-world) — explain why some cutoff dates jump in certain years and why backlogged countries still lag. Understanding visa number spillover turns the monthly surprises into a predictable mechanism.

The base limits

The statutory ceilings set the starting point. The employment-based (EB) limit is about 140,000 visas per year, the family-based (FB) limit is about 226,000 per year, and the Diversity Visa program adds about 55,000 per year. No single country may receive more than about 7% of the worldwide total in any category — the per-country cap that drives the long India and China employment backlogs and the Mexico and Philippines family backlogs.

Spillover: family → employment

If family-based categories do not use all of their roughly 226,000 numbers in a fiscal year, the surplus does not disappear. A portion of those unused family numbers becomes available to the employment-based pool on top of its own ~140,000 base. In years with weak family demand, this spillover can enlarge the employment total and help employment cutoffs advance more than they otherwise would. The effect shows up in the bulletin as faster movement once the recalculated supply is known.

Spillup: per-country → rest of the world

Within employment (and family), each country’s ~7% share is itself a ceiling. When a country does not use its full share — because of low demand or processing bottlenecks — those unused per-country numbers are released to the rest of the world in that preference category. This is why the All Areas cutoff can race ahead while a specific country such as India or China stays frozen: the worldwide pool absorbs others’ unused share, but each country is still bounded by its own 7%.

Why backlogged countries still wait

Spillover and spillup add numbers to the system, but they do not override the per-country cap. India and China employment demand far exceeds each country’s ~7% share, so even with extra worldwide employment numbers, their cutoffs remain years behind. The August 2026 bulletin makes this concrete: All Areas EB2 is Current, yet India EB2 is U and China EB2 is 01SEP21. The worldwide pool moved; the per-country ceilings did not.

The EB-5 set-aside exception

One carve-out breaks the per-country pattern. 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-aside categories are not subject to the same country ceiling, so their wait is not governed by the India or China employment cutoffs. For reference, the standard EB-5 investment is $1,050,000 and the targeted-employment-area (TEA) amount is $800,000.