Congress sets a fixed number of immigrant visas each year. If the agencies cannot finalize enough cases before the fiscal year ends on September 30, unused employment-based numbers generally expire. They do not carry forward, and no new law is needed for them to disappear.

That general rule has a significant EB-5 exception, and the exception is where the current story sits. Across the broader employment-based system, waste has largely been eliminated in recent years. Within EB-5, the reserved categories are being substantially underused.

The General Rule

Unused family-sponsored numbers roll into the following year’s employment-based limit. Unused employment-based numbers expire. That one-way relationship is why the employment-based ceiling swings so widely from year to year.

FY2021 is the reference case. Pandemic-era consular closures left family-sponsored numbers unused, pushing the employment-based limit to roughly 262,000. The agencies could not finalize enough cases, and about 66,781 employment-based visas were lost at year end.

Waste Has Largely Been Solved

The pattern since then has been different. USCIS reported that all available employment-based numbers were used in FY2023, and FY2024 and FY2025 both reached full utilization as well.

FY2026 again runs above the statutory floor. Family-sponsored usage fell roughly 46,000 short of its cap in FY2025, lifting the FY2026 employment-based total to 186,000 against the normal 140,000.

EB-5 Follows a Different Rule

Reserved EB-5 visas do not expire on the same schedule. Under the RIA, a reserved visa unused in one fiscal year carries over into the same reserved category the next year. If it goes unused a second time, it is released in the third year into the unreserved EB-5 pool.

Unused reserved numbers therefore do not vanish immediately. They migrate. A rural or high unemployment visa that nobody claims eventually becomes an unreserved visa, which changes who can use it and when.

How Much Has Gone Unused

FY2025 makes the gap concrete. The State Department issued 922 reserved EB-5 visas through consular processing, roughly 13 percent of what was available in those categories. IIUSA estimates at least another 1,700 reserved numbers were used through adjustment of status.

The unreserved side behaved in the opposite way. All 9,831 available unreserved EB-5 visas were issued in FY2025, a full 100 percent utilization rate driven largely by pre-RIA applicants from China and India.

FY2026 Availability

EB-5 received 13,206 newly available visas in FY2026, about 3,266 more than a standard year. Of those, 8,980 went to the unreserved category and 4,266 to the reserved categories.

Adding carryover from prior years, IIUSA estimates roughly 7,634 reserved visas are available in FY2026: about 4,771 for rural areas, 2,386 for high unemployment areas, and 477 for infrastructure. Carryover releases could push unreserved availability as high as 10,000, against a normal allocation of 6,760.

Why Reserved Numbers Go Unused

Demand is not the constraint. More than 30,000 people are estimated to be in the set-aside pipeline, far exceeding the visas available in any year.

The constraint sits earlier in the process. An investor cannot claim a visa until the I-526E petition is approved, and I-526E adjudication volume fell in Q1 and Q2 of FY2026 while the pending queue passed 10,000. Consular scheduling capacity is the second constraint. Reserved categories have stayed current all year, which means the visas were available and the qualified applicants to use them were not.

What Recapture Debates Are About

When numbers are lost, advocates periodically push for recapture legislation that would restore previously unused visas on top of current limits. The proposals are usually framed as a one-time correction that would not change per-country caps.

Whether Congress acts is a political question. The legal baseline is unchanged: absent new legislation, unused employment-based numbers expire, and the RIA carryover protection applies only to the reserved EB-5 categories.

Key Takeaway

The headline finding has flipped from where it stood a few years ago. Broad employment-based visa waste, the dominant concern after FY2021, has largely been addressed through three consecutive years of full utilization.

EB-5 now carries the opposite problem in its reserved categories, where a 13 percent consular utilization rate in FY2025 sits alongside a pipeline of more than 30,000 people. Because those numbers carry over rather than expire, the effect is not immediate loss. It is a growing reserved balance that eventually shifts to the unreserved pool, and a set of EB-5 investors waiting on petitions rather than on visas.

All figures are current as of August 2026. FY2026 allocation figures reflect the State Department’s Annual Numerical Limits published May 20, 2026. Issuance figures reflect full-year FY2025, the most recent complete year published.

Sources

IIUSA, DOS Publishes FY2026 Annual Immigrant Visa Limits (FY2026 EB-5 allocations, carryover, and reserved availability estimates). https://iiusa.org/dos-publishes-fy2026-annual-immigrant-visa-limits-13206-new-eb-5-visas-available-this-year/

IIUSA, EB-5 Visa Issuance in FY2025 (reserved and unreserved utilization rates by category). https://iiusa.org/eb-5-visa-issuance-in-fy2025-trends-in-unreserved-and-reserved-categories/

U.S. Department of State, Visa Statistics and Annual Numerical Limits (annual limits and allocation mechanics). https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-statistics/immigrant-visa-statistics.html

USCIS, Fiscal Year 2023 Employment-Based Adjustment of Status FAQs (full use of FY2023 employment-based numbers). https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-processes-and-procedures/fiscal-year-2023-employment-based-adjustment-of-status-faqs

U.S. Department of State, Visa Bulletin for August 2026 (EB-5 allocation structure and set-aside percentages). https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-bulletin/2026/visa-bulletin-for-august-2026.html

Lucid Professional Writing, EB-5 set-aside backlog and visa issuance analysis (pipeline estimates). https://blog.lucidtext.com/category/eb-5-statistics/