Green card priority date FAQ

The priority date is your place in line. For family-sponsored cases it is normally the date USCIS received the Form I-130 petition. For employment-based cases that need a labor certification it is the date the Department of Labor accepted the PERM application; for cases without PERM it is usually the date USCIS received the I-140. Your approval notice (Form I-797) shows it.

The Final Action Date is the cut-off for a visa number to actually be issued or an adjustment of status to be approved. The Date for Filing is an earlier-in-the-process cut-off: it shows when applicants may start submitting paperwork. Each month USCIS says on its visa bulletin page which of the two charts adjustment-of-status applicants must use. Applicants abroad (consular processing) follow the State Department's National Visa Center instructions.

C (Current) means visa numbers are available to all qualified applicants in that category, regardless of priority date. U (Unavailable) means no numbers can be issued for that category and country for now, typically because the annual limit was reached. On this site a U month is drawn as a red cross and the line is broken; a C month is drawn as a hollow circle on the diagonal “no wait” line.

Visa numbers per fiscal year (October–September) are capped. If demand from people with earlier dates is higher than expected, the State Department can hold the date or move it back (retrogression) to stay within the limit, and categories often reset or retrogress late in the fiscal year (August–September) and move again in October. The bulletin itself usually explains the reason in its notes.

No. A priority date that is within the cut-off only means a visa number can be allocated once your case is ready. Your case still has to be pending and approvable (for example an I-485 that is adjudicated, or documentarily-qualified consular case), and processing takes time. Dates in the bulletin are not a prediction of when you will be approved.

The bulletin lists four oversubscribed countries separately—China (mainland born), India, Mexico and the Philippines—and puts everyone else under “All Chargeability Areas Except Those Listed”, shown here as “All other countries”. Chargeability is generally determined by country of birth, not citizenship; there are exceptions such as cross-chargeability through a spouse or parent. Check with an immigration attorney for your situation.

It is simply the distance between the bulletin month and the cut-off date for a category: if the October 2026 Final Action Date is 1 November 2013, the cut-off lags the bulletin by about 12.9 years. That is a snapshot of the backlog age, not the time you will personally wait, because the date can advance faster or slower—or go backwards—in the future.

Not reliably. The forecasts on this site extrapolate recent movement with a damping factor and show an uncertainty band measured from past errors; they are right within the band only about as often as the stated coverage, and they cannot anticipate policy changes, legislation, or demand shocks. See the forecast page for the method and the backtest.

Every number comes from the U.S. Department of State's monthly Visa Bulletin. A script parses each bulletin into a table, and the dataset can be downloaded from the data page. The Department normally publishes the next month's bulletin around the middle of the month; this site is updated after it appears. “C” and “U” are kept as published; nothing is estimated or filled in.

No. This is an independent information project, not a law firm, and it is not affiliated with the U.S. government. Always confirm dates in the official bulletin and consult a licensed immigration attorney about your case. See the disclaimer.