About Visa Bulletin Tracker

Visa Bulletin Tracker turns the State Department’s monthly Visa Bulletin into a searchable history, with charts, movement statistics and a transparent forecast, so you can see where a priority date sits in the green card queue and how fast the queue has been moving.

What and why

An independent project that tracks the official US Department of State Visa Bulletin data. It is non-commercial. The official bulletin is a single-month snapshot published as a web page; it is hard to see trends, retrogressions or seasonal patterns from it. This site keeps the full history in one clean dataset and draws it. It is not a law firm, it does not give legal advice, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by any government agency.

Methodology

Data

• Source: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs, Visa Bulletin, every monthly issue from December 2001 to October 2026 (299 bulletins).
• Parsing: a script reads the family-sponsored and employment-based tables (Final Action Dates, and Dates for Filing since the October 2015 bulletin) and stores one value per month, chart, category and country. Dates are kept exactly as published; C (current) and U (unavailable) are stored as such. Nothing is estimated or filled in; a missing country column in old bulletins stays missing.
• Checks: every build is validated against values read by hand from the official pages; the validation report is published with the dataset.
• Older bulletins: bulletins before October 2003 list fewer countries (no separate China column), and old two-digit years are interpreted so that a cut-off is never later than the bulletin month.

Movement and “wait”

Movement is the change in a cut-off date from one bulletin to the next, in days; the pace is the mean of the last 12 monthly changes between two dates (months involving C or U are skipped). The “wait” is the gap between the bulletin month and the cut-off date. Both describe the past, not your future wait.

Forecast

The forecast extrapolates the recent pace with a damping factor, and the uncertainty band comes from the errors that the same method made in the past. The factor and the band were chosen on bulletins up to December 2021 and tested on later ones. See the forecast page for the numbers, including the cases where the method barely beats “no change”.

Privacy and cost

The site is static: no accounts, no cookies, no third-party trackers or fonts. See the privacy page. There are no ads at the moment.

Corrections

Found a number that does not match the official bulletin? Please tell us with the month, category and country.