5,970 Visas Are Left for Afghans Who Served the U.S. Military. 15,300 Are Already Approved for One.

Congress caps how many Afghans can receive a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) as a principal applicant — a running total, not an annual one, that stood at 50,500 after lawmakers added 12,000 to it in March 2024.▸ To qualify at all, an applicant must document at least one year of "faithful and valuable service" employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government, the international coalition, or a successor mission — the law's own words for what the visa is compensation for. Every quarter, the State Department reports the state of that program to Congress under Section 1219 of the FY2014 National Defense Authorization Act. The report covering October 1 through December 31, 2025 shows 5,970 of those numbers left — and 15,300 principal applicants who have already passed the government's own vetting and are waiting only on a visa interview, 2.6 times the supply left to cover them.

The SIV process runs through 13 government-controlled steps, and the Q1 FY2026 quarterly report counts how many principal applicants sit at each one.▸ At the far end, 311 have already been interviewed and are in final administrative processing. Just behind them, 15,300 have Chief of Mission (COM) approval — the government's own determination that they proved their service — and are waiting for the National Visa Center to schedule an interview. Those two groups alone, 15,611 people, already outnumber the 5,970 visa numbers left for principal applicants by more than two and a half to one. That's before counting the 51,122 more who are fully documented and still waiting on the COM decision itself, or the 66,408 behind them who haven't even finished submitting paperwork.

Every one of those pending applicants was filed under a program that, as of December 31, 2025 — the same date this snapshot was taken — stopped accepting new Chief of Mission applications altogether.▸ Absent new legislation extending the filing window, anyone who served the U.S. government in Afghanistan and hadn't already applied by that date has no path left to open one. Meanwhile the two numbers that matter most have been moving in opposite directions for at least three straight quarters: the visa pool has shrunk every quarter, and the already-approved queue competing for it has grown every quarter. The queue overtook the pool by September 30, 2025, and the gap has widened since.

The quarter that widened the gap fastest was also the one in which the government's own capacity to process cases fell.▸ During the October 1–November 12, 2025 lapse in appropriations, two-thirds of the Afghan SIV Unit's U.S. direct-hire staff were furloughed. Then, following a November 26, 2025 attack on two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. by an Afghan national, the department paused Chief of Mission processing outright. The result: the unit issued COM decisions on 4,418 cases in Q1 FY2026, down from 8,704 the quarter before — a drop of more than 4,000 decisions, per the department's own accounting. Average total government processing time for a completed SIV case — from an applicant's first contact with the National Visa Center to a visa or a final refusal — rose to 1,191 calendar days, up from 1,049 the prior quarter and 1,025 the quarter before that. State's own documentation notes this measure generally overestimates time attributable to the government, since it can't fully separate out delays caused by applicants or third parties — which makes the rise even harder to attribute to anything but the shutdown and the processing pause.

Denials moved the other direction — 8,907 principal applicants were denied or had approval revoked in Q3 FY2025, 5,923 in Q4, and 2,855 in Q1 FY2026 — which only underscores that the backlog isn't built from unqualified applicants being slow-walked toward rejection.▸ It's built from a program whose entire remaining capacity — 5,970 numbers — is already smaller than the number of people it has personally vetted and cleared.

Figures describe Afghan principal applicants under Section 602(b) of the Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009, as amended ("SQ" SIV classification). Derivative family members — spouses and children, who do not count against the numerical cap — are reported separately in the source documents and noted in the data tables here where relevant. "Visa numbers remaining" is State's own preliminary figure, subject to revision for recaptured numbers.