On a PIP while your green card waits in the India queue

Does a PIP affect my green card?

No. Not the I-140, not the priority date, not the years you have banked past the six-year limit, not your spouse's work permit. A performance plan is an internal document. None of the rules below turn on it, and none of them turn on a rating, a meeting, or anything said in a review.

They turn on employment ending. So does your status, which the visa page covers, and which is the more urgent clock if it comes to that. This page is about the slower thing you have been carrying for years, and what an ending does and does not do to it.

If you are reading this at two in the morning, that first paragraph is the part to hold onto.

Why this page is separate from the visa page

Because for most people in this queue, the visa is not the biggest thing at stake.

Of the H-1B petitions approved in the 2025 fiscal year, 283,772 of 406,348 were for people born in India, and computer-related work accounted for 62 percent of all beneficiaries. Those are counts published by the immigration service in April 2026. India and China together make up 88 percent of continuing-employment approvals against 66 percent of first-time ones, which means the population already inside the system, already counted against the annual cap, is the one this page is for.

Chargeability runs on country of birth, not citizenship or where you live now. Under the law, no single country may take more than 7 percent of a year's employment-based immigrant visas, and dependants are counted against the same total as the workers they come with. How many visas that total holds moves from year to year, so the percentage is the part worth carrying and the multiplication is not worth doing.

The National Foundation for American Policy, in a brief dated 26 August 2026, estimated 996,599 people from India waiting in the first three employment-based preferences as of December 2025, out of 1,264,495 in total. For a petition filed in January 2026 or later it projected a potential wait of 179 years in the second preference and 38 in the third. Those are projections from the size of the queue under current law, published by a named body on a named date. They are not a forecast about you, and nobody should give you one.

Two withdrawals, and they are not the same act

This is the confusion that costs people the most, and employers do not always explain it.

• Withdrawing the H-1B petition ends your status and starts the sixty-day clock the visa page describes.
• Withdrawing the I-140 is a different act with a different consequence, and after a point it has very little consequence at all.

Under the regulation on revoking approved petitions, an I-140 withdrawn 180 days or more after it was approved, or 180 days or more after an adjustment application was filed alongside it, stays approved unless it is revoked on some other ground. The same holds if the employer's business shuts down.

In most cases a new employer still files a fresh immigrant petition, and the date you have earned attaches to it. The exception is if you already have an adjustment application that has been pending long enough to port, in which case no new petition is needed at all. That case has its own section further down, headed If your adjustment application is already pending. Either way, the approval you already hold is not undone by somebody clicking withdraw on their way out.

So the first thing to find out is the date your I-140 was approved. Not the date you were told about it. The date on the notice.

Your priority date is yours

The regulation on priority dates says the date of an approved first, second or third preference petition carries over to a later petition in those categories. It is lost in four situations: revocation for fraud or wilful misrepresentation, revocation of the labour certification, invalidation of the labour certification, or a finding that the approval rested on a material error.

Being dismissed is not on that list. Neither is failing a performance plan, resigning, or signing a separation agreement. The list is short and it is closed.

Two things it does not do, which are worth saying plainly. A denied petition never established a date in the first place. And a date belongs to one person and cannot be handed to anybody else.

Two routes past the six-year maximum, and both survive a job change

If you have been here a while you are probably past the ordinary six-year maximum, or close to it, on one of two routes. Both are in the same regulation and both survive a job change.

The per-country route applies to somebody who currently holds, or previously held, H-1B status, who has an approved petition in the first, second or third preference, and who would be eligible for permanent residence but for the per-country limit. It allows status past the six-year maximum in increments of "up to 3 years" for as long as that stays true. The provision it comes from is titled, in the statute, One-Time Protection Under Per Country Ceiling. The rule that holds you in the queue is the same rule that lets you keep waiting in it.

Or previously held is doing real work in that sentence, and the regulation goes further in two places that are easy to miss. One is headed Current H-1B status not required, and reaches somebody not in the status when the petition is filed, expressly "including an alien who is not in the United States". The other is headed Subsequent petitioners may seek exemptions: the employer petitioning for you need not be the one that obtained your immigrant petition, any approved one will serve, and a later petition may rest on a different one again.

Together those say the thing worth knowing. Leaving, even leaving the country, does not spend what you have accumulated, and the employer who sponsored you does not own it.

The lengthy-adjudication route applies where 365 days or more have passed since a labour certification or an immigrant petition was filed for you. It runs in increments of up to a year, and it runs until the approved labour certification expires or a final decision is made on the certification, the petition, or your application for a visa or adjustment. Two details in it matter more than anything else you will read about changing jobs:

• The petitioner "need not be the employer that filed" the labour certification or the immigrant petition being relied on. A new employer can build on your old employer's paperwork. That is the regulation's own words, not a practice or a courtesy.
• A later extension does not have to rest on the same petition as the first one.

There is one forfeiture rule attached to this route, and it is usually quoted without the half that protects you. You lose it if you are the beneficiary of an approved petition and do not file for adjustment or an immigrant visa within a year of a visa becoming available for your category and country. But where that year is interrupted because no visa is available, a fresh year starts when one is available again, and the agency may excuse a failure caused by circumstances beyond your control. If your date has ever moved backwards, the second half is the half about you.

If your adjustment application is already pending

A minority of readers here have an I-485 on file. If you do, a different rule applies and a different 180 days.

Job portability needs the application to have been pending 180 days or more from its receipt date, and the new job to be in the same or a similar occupational classification as the one in the immigrant petition. The petition may be approved or still pending. If your employer withdraws it, the agency may send a notice of intent to deny, and Supplement J is the form that answers it.

If you do not have an adjustment application pending, this section is not yours, and the 180 days here is not the 180 days in the withdrawal section above. Two rules, two clocks, two starting points.

Your spouse's work permit

An H-4 spouse can hold work authorisation only if the H-1B principal has an approved immigrant petition, or holds status under the lengthy-adjudication provision above. The application has to show that the principal is currently in H-1B status and the spouse currently in H-4 status.

Which means the approved petition is not only the green-card position. It is the household's second income, and the two questions are the same question.

One change already in force is worth knowing before it bites. Since 30 October 2025, filing to renew a work permit no longer extends the old one automatically. For the categories that cover an H-4 spouse, the document expires and the authorisation ends the day after the date printed on the card. Cards already automatically extended before that date are unaffected. If a renewal is sitting with the agency and the card is close to expiring, that is a date to know now rather than in arrears.

Benching: the employer still owes you the required wage

A plan that arrives while you have no project is a particular situation, and there is a rule about it that is easy to be talked out of.

Where an H-1B worker is not working because of a decision by the employer — no assignment, no project, no client — the employer must still pay the required wage set out in the labour condition application. Time you are not working at your own request is the exception, and calling an involuntary bench a voluntary leave does not make it one. The obligation runs until employment genuinely ends, which means notifying the immigration service and offering return transportation home.

If that is your situation, a dated note of each week without an assignment, what you asked for and what you were told, is worth keeping. Not as a grievance. It is the same record that makes an hour with a lawyer cheap instead of exploratory, and you would keep it whether the plan ends well or badly.

What to ask for, and the order to ask in

The visa page's rule holds and comes first: for somebody on a work visa, a later termination date can be worth more than a larger payment, so settle the date before the number. This page adds two asks that cost an employer almost nothing.

1. The I-140 receipt number and approval date, in writing, with a copy of the notice. Nothing obliges an employer to hand it over, and some do not. A records request to the immigration service, which is free, returns the filing with its receipt number, priority date and approval date. Immigration practitioners report that the agency accepts its own response in place of the original notice. Ask your employer while you are still employed, though, because it is a two-minute favour then and a slow process afterwards.
2. The intended timing of each withdrawal, named separately. The H-1B petition and the immigrant petition are two documents and two dates. An employer that has thought about it can tell you both.

Everything else on the table is on the severance page.

Things you have read about that do not apply here

The rules around this visa have moved a great deal, and most of the frightening headlines are about petitions that are subject to the annual cap. A change of employer for somebody already counted against that cap is not one of those, which means it does not re-enter the lottery and sits outside the fees below. Stated as of the date at the top of this page:

• The weighted selection rule, in force since 27 February 2026, changes how registrations are picked for cap-subject petitions. Registration is not something you do again.
• A proposed fee of $103,265, published on 25 August 2026 with comments closing on 24 September 2026. Its own text says it would apply only to cap-subject petitions and not to cap-exempt filings. It is a proposal, not a rule, and it is a separate charge from the one below rather than a replacement for it.
• The $100,000 payment under the September 2025 proclamation reached people entering from abroad, never a change of status or an extension for somebody already in the country. A court struck it down in June 2026 and an appeals court declined to revive it in July. The government's appeal is still pending, and the proposal above notes that the payment could be collected again if the order were lifted.
• A proposal to remove the sixty-day grace period was published on 11 September 2026, and comments on it close on 10 November. It is still a proposal, so it has no effective date and no effect yet. A proposal to end work permits for some H-1B spouses has been announced and, as at the date on this page, has not been published, so it has no comment period and no effect either.

If you are reading this months later, check the current position rather than trusting the list. That is true of the whole page and unusually true of this part of it.

What this changes about the plan itself

Not much, which is the point, and it cuts both ways.

If you are working the plan and hoping to pass, none of the above is in play, and the one thing worth doing this week costs you a single email: get the I-140 approval date into your own records. That is filing, not pessimism. You would keep a copy of your own payslip.

If the plan is going the way you fear, the order changes rather than the content. The visa page says the search starts on day one whatever you are hoping for, and the reason is the short window. What this page adds is that the thing you have spent years accumulating mostly comes with you, and that a new employer can build on the paperwork the old one filed. People accept worse exits than they need to because they believe the queue resets. It does not.

This is a map, not the territory

Fairhanded is not a law firm, and immigration is not an area to work out from a website. This page is a map, not the territory, and a regulation quoted correctly can still be the wrong regulation for your facts.

Talk to an immigration attorney early, before an exit is agreed rather than after. The things worth changing here are which extension a new employer files and what date appears on your termination letter, and both are only negotiable while there is still a negotiation.