F2A — All other countries, China (mainland-born), India, Mexico and Philippines

Which columns this page covers

State prints a separate column only for countries whose demand exceeds the per-country limit. For F2A it printed the same cut-offs for All other countries, China (mainland-born), India, Mexico and Philippines, so they are one published queue and are kept on one page rather than repeated as 5 near-identical ones.

• All other countries — 291 bulletins on record from December 2001 · never differed from All other countries in any published month
• China (mainland-born) — 254 bulletins on record from January 2005 · never differed from All other countries in any published month
• India — 280 bulletins on record from December 2001 · never differed from All other countries in any published month
• Mexico — 291 bulletins on record from December 2001 · never differed from All other countries in any published month
• Philippines — 291 bulletins on record from December 2001 · never differed from All other countries in any published month

How to read this page

What a priority date is

A priority date is the date that fixes your place in the queue for an immigrant visa number. For most family-sponsored categories it is the date the petition was filed; for employment-based categories that require labour certification, it is the date that certification was filed. It is printed on the I-797 receipt or approval notice. Your priority date does not move — the cut-off moves toward it.

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, and State publishes a cut-off date each month: the priority date it has reached. If your priority date is earlier than the cut-off, your turn has come in that chart.

Chargeability, and why some countries have their own column

Chargeability is normally your country of birth — not your citizenship or where you live. A country gets its own column in the bulletin 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 is counted together in the column State prints as "All Chargeability Areas Except Those Listed", which is not a global average and not a worldwide figure.

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.

What Current and Unavailable mean

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, so this site never plots them on a date axis and never projects from them.

Retrogression: 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. Retrogressions on this page are marked on the chart with a ▼ mark and listed in the movement tables with a ↓ glyph — never by colour alone.

Source and method

Every figure on this page 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 a work of the U.S. Government prepared by federal employees in the course of their duties, and is therefore in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. §105. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of State or any government agency.

This page carries 131 published cut-off cells and 53 recorded changes across the chart published for it this bulletin. Each cell is stored with the exact text State printed for it (the C shown above is the source's own), so every figure here is traceable back to the bulletin it came from.

5 months in the December 2001 to August 2026 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 in the charts above, never filled in from a neighbouring month.

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.

Every category in the August 2026 bulletin →