The U.S. Department of State announced it has exhausted the annual quota for Employment-Based First Preference (EB-1) immigrant visas for the current fiscal year (FY) 2025. This means that U.S. embassies and consulates around the world have stopped issuing these visas for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2025.
The EB-1 visa category is designed for priority workers, including individuals with extraordinary abilities, outstanding professors and researchers, and certain multinational executives or managers. According to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the annual limit for this category is 28.6% of the total worldwide employment-based immigrant visas.
The State Department, in collaboration with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has issued all available visas in this category, reaching the annual limit ahead of schedule. The issuance of these visas will resume on October 1, 2025, with the start of the new fiscal year (FY 2026), when the annual visa limits are reset. Qualified applicants will be able to receive their visas at that time.
Last week, the State Department had confirmed that all available immigrant visas in the Employment-Based Second Preference (EB-2) category had been issued for the fiscal year (FY) 2025. Consequently, U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide had immediately ceased issuing new EB-2 visas.
This development was not a surprise. Back in July, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs had issued a warning in its August 2025 Visa Bulletin, alerting the public that both the EB-2 and EB-3 green card categories were at risk of becoming unavailable.
The bulletin cited an “unprecedented surge” in visa and green card usage, which was rapidly depleting the approximately 140,000 employment-based visas allocated for the fiscal year, a limit that includes a 7% per-country cap. As a direct result of this high demand, the final action date for EB-2 visas for “Rest of World” applicants had already retrogressed by six weeks, a clear sign of the impending shortage.
The Department of State had announced in February that the annual limit for the Employment-Based Fourth Preference (EB-4) category, also known as Special Immigrant Visas, had been reached within just five months of the fiscal year. This category, which is allocated 7.1% of the total employment-based visas (approximately 9,940 visas), had its cap reached much earlier this year compared to the end of August in the previous year.
According to the March Visa Bulletin, the final action date for this category was August 1, 2019, meaning applicants face an approximate 4.5-year wait. For those already in the U.S. applying for adjustment of status, the wait time is even longer as USCIS is using the final action date for filing, not the more recent filing date.
Kishor Panthi
View More PostsKishor Panthi is the founder and editor-in-chief of Khasokhas and NepYork. He is the author of three books, “Kampan,” "UNTRANSLATABLE" and “Zero Mile.” He writes about social issues, immigration, and politics.
