Has the Visa Bulletin reached your date?

How the Visa Bulletin works

What the bulletin is

Congress caps how many immigrant visas may be issued each year — both in total per category and per country of chargeability. When more people want a category than the cap allows, a queue forms. Every month the U.S. State Department publishes the Visa Bulletin: a table of cut-off dates, one per visa category and chargeability column, giving the priority date the queue has reached. If your priority date is earlier than the cut-off, your turn has come in that chart.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is why a single date matters so much: it is the difference between waiting and being acted on, and it is republished, in full, once a month, with no explanation attached.

What a priority date is

A priority date is the date that fixes your place in the queue. For most family-sponsored categories it is the date the petition was filed; for employment-based categories requiring labour certification, it is the date that certification was filed. It is printed on the I-797 receipt or approval notice. Your priority date never moves — the cut-off moves toward it.

Chargeability is usually your country of birth

Not your citizenship, and not where you live. A country gets its own column only when demand from applicants chargeable to it exceeds the per-country limit; in the August 2026 bulletin those are China (mainland-born), India, Mexico and the Philippines. Everyone else falls into the column State prints as "All Chargeability Areas Except Those Listed" — which this site calls All other countries, because that is what it means. It is not a worldwide figure and it is not an average; it is the queue for every country without a column of its own.

The two charts are not interchangeable

Final Action Dates is when a visa can actually be issued or a green card approved. Dates for Filing is when the application may be submitted; it is usually the earlier and more optimistic of the two, and being past it does not mean a visa can be issued. Which chart U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will accept for adjustment-of-status filings is announced by USCIS each month and is not decided by State or by this site. The Dates for Filing chart was introduced in October 2015 and does not exist for any earlier bulletin — which is why the histories here are two different lengths, by design rather than by omission.

Current and Unavailable are states, not dates

Current (printed C) means there is no backlog at all: every priority date in the category is being acted on. Unavailable (printed U) means no visas are being issued in the category at all that month — usually because the annual limit has been reached. Neither is a date, and neither can be compared to one. This site never plots them on a date axis, never treats one as a very early or very late cut-off, and never projects from either. In the August 2026 bulletin, 29 of the 75 published cells are Current and 2 are Unavailable.

The cut-off can move backward

A cut-off is not a promise and does not only move forward. When more people apply than the annual limit allows — often after a period of rapid advancement draws in filings — State pulls the cut-off back to an earlier date. This is called retrogression, and it can undo years of progress in a single bulletin. It has happened 359 times across the whole published record this site holds. The largest on record is F3 for Mexico in August 2006, which moved back 12.79 years in one month. This is the single most important thing to understand about the numbers on this page, and it is why nothing here is presented as a schedule.

What this site will and will not tell you

It will tell you, exactly, what State published: the cut-off for your category and column, whether your priority date is earlier or later than it, and by how far. Those are comparisons of published numbers, and they are facts.

Where a cut-off has been advancing at a measurable pace, the tool will also project that pace forward and name the bulletin it would reach a given date in — as an estimate, and only as an estimate. Where the data does not support even that, it says so and shows nothing: a category that is Unavailable has no cut-off to project from; a category that has stopped moving would divide by zero; a projection that runs past a useful horizon is arithmetic rather than information. In the August 2026 bulletin, 41 of the 75 published cells are advancing at a pace that supports an estimate, and 34 are not.

It will never tell you what will happen to your case, what to file, or when to file it. No honest reading of this data can, and this site is not a lawyer.

Source and method

Every figure on this site is read from the U.S. Department of State's monthly Visa Bulletin — the August 2026 edition for the current cut-offs, and each bulletin's own edition for the history. The Visa Bulletin is prepared by federal employees in the course of their duties and is therefore in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. §105: no licence, no key, no vendor. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of State or any government agency.

The archive runs from December 2001 to August 2026 — 292 bulletins and 29,518 published cut-offs, normalized to one schema so a category can be followed across 24 years of relabelling. Every cell is stored with the exact text State printed for it, so every figure here is traceable back to the bulletin it came from without taking anyone's word for it.

5 months in that span are absent from the public record — March 2009, September 2009, October 2009, November 2009, October 2012. They are recorded as gaps and shown as breaks, never filled in from a neighbouring month. A missing month is a fact about the source, and this site says so rather than smoothing over it.

Data version visa-bulletin-derived-v1 · 292 bulletins, December 2001 to August 2026 · Next monthly bulletin. The State Department publishes one bulletin per month, typically mid-month for the following month; past bulletins are immutable once published.