The Family Green Card Backlog in 2026: Every Category and Country, Measured

The family-sponsored Visa Bulletin is usually reported one category at a time, which hides the shape of the thing. Laid out together, September 2026’s Final Action Dates show a system where the wait depends far less on who you are to the sponsor than on where you were born.

Every figure below is the gap between the September 2026 final action date and today, 22 September 2026. These are not estimates of future waits — they are how far back the queue is being adjudicated right now.

The full picture

Category	Worldwide	China	India	Mexico	Philippines
F1 — unmarried adult children of citizens	6 yr 8 mo	6 yr 8 mo	6 yr 8 mo	18 yr 8 mo	13 yr 4 mo
F2A — spouses & minor children of LPRs	1 mo	1 mo	1 mo	1 yr 1 mo	1 mo
F2B — unmarried adult children of LPRs	7 yr 1 mo	7 yr 1 mo	7 yr 1 mo	17 yr 7 mo	13 yr 3 mo
F3 — married children of citizens	11 yr 11 mo	11 yr 11 mo	11 yr 11 mo	25 yr 2 mo	20 yr 7 mo
F4 — siblings of citizens	14 yr 11 mo	14 yr 11 mo	14 yr 11 mo	19 yr 10 mo	19 yr 1 mo

Three things jump out, and each one is telling you something different about how the system is built.

1. Mexico’s F3 wait is over a quarter of a century

The F3 final action date for Mexico is 1 July 2001. A US citizen who petitioned for a married son or daughter in the summer of 2001 is being reached now.

Put in context: a child who was born the week that petition was filed is now old enough to have filed their own petition and waited five years on it.

Mexican F4 is barely better at 8 April 2001 — 25 years and 5 months. And the Philippines is not far behind: F3 at 20 years 7 months, F4 at 19 years 1 month.

These are the two categories where the per-country cap and the volume of demand collide hardest. The cap limits any single country to roughly 7% of the annual total in a category, regardless of how many citizens of that country are petitioning. For countries with large numbers of US-citizen relatives, that ceiling is the entire story.

2. India and China are in the same place as the worldwide queue on family

This is the finding that surprises people who follow employment-based immigration, where India is decades behind everyone.

In F1, F2B and F3, India and China sit on exactly the same date as the worldwide figure. In F4 they split — China matches worldwide at 14 years 11 months, while India falls to 19 years 10 months — but nothing here resembles the employment-side picture, where EB-2 India is currently Unavailable and EB-3 India is being adjudicated at January 2014.

The reason is demand distribution, not policy. The family per-country caps bind only where a country generates more demand than its share. Mexico and the Philippines do, in the adult-child and sibling categories, by a wide margin. India and China do not — their pressure is concentrated in the employment categories instead.

The practical takeaway: do not carry an assumption from the employment queue into the family queue, or the reverse. They behave like different systems because, for most countries, they are.

3. F2A is not slightly better. It is a different order of magnitude.

Look at the F2A row again: one month, for every country except Mexico, which is at one year.

Compare that to the F2B row directly beneath it — 7 years 1 month worldwide, 17 years 7 months for Mexico. These two categories cover people separated by a single fact: whether the child is under 21 and unmarried, or not.

F2A gets a statutory exemption from a large part of the per-country limit, on the reasoning that separating a lawful permanent resident from their spouse and minor children is a different category of harm from a longer wait for an adult sibling. That single provision is the difference between one month and seventeen years.

Two consequences follow:

• The age-out cliff is brutal. A child who turns 21 does not move back a little; they move from a one-month queue to a seven-year one (17+ years for Mexico). The Child Status Protection Act exists to soften exactly this, and it is not automatic — see our CSPA guide.
• F2A is Current on the filing chart right now, and USCIS designated Dates for Filing for family categories in September 2026 — so F2A beneficiaries can file the I-485 this month regardless of priority date. We cover that window and what it unlocks in F2A is Current for filing.

What the table does not tell you

Three honest limits on reading any of this:

A final action date is not a prediction of your wait. It tells you where the queue is being processed today. If you filed in 2020, your wait is not “today’s date minus 2020” — it depends on how fast the date moves between now and when it reaches you, which depends on demand that has not materialised yet.

Dates move backwards. Retrogression is normal, and the September 2026 bulletin carried explicit warnings about it in three employment categories. Family categories retrogress too.

The dates advanced this year for an unusual reason. The Department of State stated in the September bulletin that issuance to applicants from certain countries fell because of executive actions, leaving FY2026 numbers unused — and that it advanced dates across categories to make those numbers available to other applicants. That is a supply-side movement that can reverse, not the queue draining. We explain the mechanism in why Visa Bulletin dates advanced in 2026.

October will reset the year — whenever it arrives

October opens fiscal year 2027 with a fresh annual allocation, which is normally when family dates are reset for the year ahead.

As of 22 September 2026 the October bulletin has still not been published — roughly a week past the Department’s usual mid-month release. Until it appears, September’s figures are the only real ones.

For the categories themselves, see our family-based green card guide, and for the mechanics of reading these charts, how to read the Visa Bulletin.

This is general information, not legal advice. Priority dates, CSPA eligibility and category conversions have real complexity — confirm your own position with an immigration attorney.