China supplied more EB-5 investors than every other country combined for most of the program's history, and India has been the other large source market since the end of the 2010s. The ranking itself is the least useful part. What matters is that any single country of birth can claim only 7 percent of the annual EB-5 supply once demand exceeds it, so the two largest markets sit in a queue while smaller ones walk straight through.
Country tables also move for reasons that have nothing to do with how appealing a green card looks that year. A fee change, a lapse in the Regional Center program, a tightening of foreign exchange rules, a shift in the monthly bulletin: each one reshuffles the order.
Two federal datasets, two different answers
USCIS counts petitions. State counts visas. Those are different populations, separated by years of waiting.
USCIS publishes receipts, approvals and denials by fiscal year through its immigration and citizenship data reports. The Department of State publishes visas actually issued, broken out by nationality, in its annual immigrant visa statistics tables. An investor from Mumbai who filed Form I-526E in 2024 appears in the first dataset now and in the second one near the end of the decade.
Blend the two series and you produce a chart that looks authoritative and says almost nothing. Ask which source a ranking came from before you trust it. Our own reading of the published numbers sits in EB-5 Statistics 2026: Visa Numbers, Country Caps and What They Mean for You.
Why China held the top spot for two decades
EB-5 came out of the Immigration Act of 1990 and went nearly unused for years, with the Regional Center pilot added in 1992 and few takers for a long time afterward. Chinese demand ended that. Families with new wealth wanted an exit option for their children, and agencies in Shanghai and Shenzhen built a retail distribution machine around a product Congress had designed for institutional finance.
Volume outran the cap and the queue formed. China mainland first received an EB-5 cut-off date in 2015 and has carried one ever since. Beijing's currency rules made the paperwork harder rather than the demand smaller. An individual may move only USD 50,000 a year out of China through the standard channel, which is why source of funds files from Chinese investors run to hundreds of pages documenting gift chains from relatives.
New Chinese filings dropped sharply once the length of that queue became common knowledge. Why buy into a decade of waiting? The mechanics of that line are set out in EB-5 Backlog and Retrogression Explained: Country Caps and Set Asides.
India's turn came at the end of the 2010s
Indian EB-5 volume stayed small until the employment based green card queue for Indian nationals stretched past any sane planning horizon. H-1B and L-1 holders already living in Texas, New Jersey and California began treating $800,000 as the price of leaving a line their children would age out of before it moved.
Children drive more Indian filings than any brochure ever has.
India also enjoys a structural advantage China does not. Indian EB-5 investors are overwhelmingly inside the United States already on a nonimmigrant status, so when a visa number is available they file Form I-485 to adjust status without leaving, and since 2022 they can file it at the same time as the I-526E. Work authorization and travel documents then arrive years ahead of the green card. Newer source markets are following the same playbook, as described in Emerging EB-5 Markets 2026: Beyond China and India, Who Is Driving Demand Now?.
India has carried a cut-off date in the unreserved EB-5 category, while the reserved categories have moved much faster. Dates change every month. Read the current Visa Bulletin published by the Department of State rather than any article, this one included, and see EB-5 Visa Bulletin Explained: How to Read Priority Dates and Cut-Offs for why the two date charts disagree.
The 7 percent cap does most of the work
EB-5 lives in 8 U.S.C. 1153, the statute allocating immigrant visas. It reserves 7.1 percent of the worldwide employment based supply for immigrant investors, which comes to roughly 10,000 visas a year with spouses and children counted inside that figure. A separate section of the same title, 8 U.S.C. 1152, holds any one country of birth to 7 percent of the total whenever demand exceeds supply.
Run the arithmetic yourself.
Seven percent of about 10,000 is roughly 700 visas. A family of four consumes four of them. An oversubscribed country therefore supports fewer than 200 investor families a year, and China and India each generate several times that. South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil and Mexico do not, which is why their investors usually face no country specific wait at all. Vietnam has crossed the line before and could cross it again.
How the 2022 set asides redrew the map
The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, enacted inside Public Law 117-103, split the annual supply into four pools. Twenty percent is reserved for rural projects. Ten percent goes to high unemployment areas. Two percent goes to infrastructure. The remaining 68 percent is unreserved, and the Chinese and Indian backlogs sit entirely in that unreserved pool.
Reserved visas carry their own per country arithmetic. Because those three categories started fresh in 2022 with no accumulated demand behind them, they have moved far faster than the unreserved pool, and a rural project at $800,000 has become the default recommendation for buyers born in India or China. Sales follow the queue. One statutory provision changed the country mix more than a decade of marketing did.
Everyone below the top two
Beneath China and India the volumes get small enough that a single Regional Center's good quarter can lift a country several places. Names that recur near the top include South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria. Globally mobile buyers from Turkey and the Gulf states also have fewer places to spend than they did, since Ireland ended its investor program in 2023 and Portugal dropped the real estate route from its golden visa the same year. Whether those buyers turn up in the EB-5 queue is something the issuance tables will show years from now, not something anyone can assert today. That competitive picture is laid out in EB-5 vs Golden Visas 2026: How Competing Programs in Other Countries Compare.
Chargeability follows your birthplace, not your passport
Here is a misunderstanding that costs people years. Your queue position is fixed by country of birth. A person born in Chengdu who naturalized in Canada three decades ago is still charged to China, and no additional passport changes that.
Cross chargeability is the exception worth knowing. Where a spouse was born in a country with no backlog, the family can be charged to that country instead, which occasionally moves a case from a decade of waiting to a current date. Check this before you choose a project, because it decides whether paying for a rural set aside is worth anything to you.
Reading a country ranking without fooling yourself
Last year's ranking describes last year's sales and tells you nothing about your own timeline. Your country of birth sets the queue. Your priority date sets your place in it. Which of the four visa pools your project falls into decides which queue you are standing in at all.
Rankings are the wrong thing to watch. Track the unreserved cut-off date for your country in the monthly bulletin, and track whether the reserved categories begin showing dates of their own. The day rural retrogresses for India, every current recommendation in the market changes.