H-1B to Green Card: Timelines, Priority Dates and the Backlog

Why "how long" depends on where you were born

The employment-based green card process described in the companion guide on PERM and green-card stages has a fixed set of steps: prevailing wage, recruitment, PERM certification, and an I-140 immigrant petition. What is not fixed — and what most people actually want to know — is how long the wait is after the I-140 is approved. That answer depends less on the employer and more on two things outside the employer's control: the worker's immigrant visa category (commonly EB-2 or EB-3 for H-1B-sponsored workers) and the worker's country of birth, also called country of chargeability. Congress caps the number of employment-based immigrant visas issued worldwide each year and further caps how many can go to natives of any single country. When demand from a country's natives in a category exceeds that country's annual share, a backlog forms and a queue begins.

Priority dates

A worker's place in that queue is marked by a priority date — generally the date the PERM application was filed, or, for categories that skip PERM, the date the I-140 was filed. The priority date does not change once set, even if the worker later changes employers in a way that lets a new case carry it forward (see the guide on changing employers on H-1B), or switches between green-card categories that share the same underlying filing. It is the single most consequential date in the entire process, because it is the date compared, every month, against a moving cutoff to determine whether a visa number is currently available.

The visa bulletin

That moving cutoff is published monthly by the Department of State in the Visa Bulletin. For each employment-based category and country of chargeability, the bulletin lists a cutoff date; a worker whose priority date is earlier than the listed cutoff can move forward — filing for adjustment of status, or being scheduled for an immigrant visa interview abroad. Cutoffs move at different speeds for different countries and categories, and they can advance for months and then retreat, a pattern the Department of State calls visa retrogression. Because the bulletin changes monthly and is the authoritative source, this guide does not restate any current cutoff date or estimated wait — check the bulletin directly for the category and country that apply to a specific case.

Why country of birth matters so much

The per-country cap is the same share of the worldwide total regardless of how large that country's population or applicant pool is. Countries that send a large number of employment-based green-card applicants relative to their per-country share — most persistently India, and to a lesser degree China — see demand run well ahead of supply in most years, producing the queues that make headlines. A worker born in almost any other country, by contrast, may face little or no bulletin wait in the same category. This is why two workers at the same employer, in the same job, with the same priority date, can have entirely different timelines once nothing but their birth country differs. It is also why a single "how long does a green card take" answer does not exist — it is always a function of category and country, checked against the current bulletin.

What VisaBench's backlog-exposure metric shows

Because country of birth drives so much of the wait, it is useful to know how exposed a given employer's sponsored PERM filings are to it. VisaBench's backlog-exposure benchmark (methodology G4) reports the share of an employer's PERM filings with beneficiaries born in India or China — an approximation, for a reader born in one of those two countries, of how much of that employer's own sponsored population is in the same queue. It says nothing about how fast that employer resolves cases, and nothing about any individual worker's own timeline; it only describes the composition of the employer's recent PERM filings. Employer pages such as Google's report this figure alongside PERM follow-through and approval-rate benchmarks, and the full set of ranked employers is on the top sponsors page.

Putting it together

For someone deciding between offers, or trying to understand their own case, the practical sequence is: identify the immigrant visa category likely to apply, identify country of chargeability (usually country of birth), find the priority date once a PERM or I-140 is filed, and check that combination against the current Visa Bulletin every month. An employer's sponsorship history — covered in the guide on how the H-1B process works and in the PERM stages guide — explains whether an employer supports the green-card process at all. The bulletin, not the employer, determines how long the wait is once that process has started, and the bulletin is the only source that should be treated as current.

This guide is general information, not legal advice; consult a licensed immigration attorney about your case. Bulletin dates, category rules, and country-of-chargeability determinations are fact-specific and change over time.