The Visa Bulletin is a monthly notice from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. It sets the cutoff dates that decide which family and employment green card applicants can move forward in the coming month.
When it comes out
Each bulletin covers one calendar month and is published during the month before, usually around the middle of it. Release dates are not fixed; some bulletins appear in the last week of the month. The bulletin for a month stays in force for that whole month, and USCIS publishes its choice of filing chart for adjustment cases shortly after each release. Once a bulletin is out, the priority date calculator compares your priority date with its cutoffs.
What is in it
A bulletin has the same sections every month:
- Family-sponsored preferences: F1, F2A, F2B, F3 and F4, each with a final action date and a date for filing for each country column.
- Employment-based preferences: EB-1 to EB-5, including the EB-3 Other Workers line, the EB-4 religious workers line and the EB-5 set-asides, with the same two charts.
- Diversity visa: the rank cutoff numbers for the DV lottery by region.
- Notes: explanations of changes, warnings about likely retrogression, and statutory deadlines such as program expirations.
In the charts, a date means applicants with an earlier priority date qualify, “C” means the category is current, and “U” means no numbers are available that month. Final action date vs date for filing explains the two charts.
Why October is different
The U.S. government’s fiscal year starts on October 1, and the annual visa limits reset with it. The October bulletin is the first of the new year. Categories that ran out of numbers in August or September and were marked unavailable often come back with a date in October, and dates that were advanced to use up the old year’s numbers are sometimes moved back.
The latest bulletin on this site:
In the October 2026 Visa Bulletin, the largest final action advance was F2B Mexico, up 454 days to May 15, 2010. Against September 2026, seven dates moved back, two returned from unavailable and 47 did not change. The bulletin page lists every change.
How this site records each bulletin
When a new bulletin is released, it is captured from the State Department’s page by a person and checked against the published tables before it goes on this site. Older bulletins, back to December 2001, were recovered from archived copies of the State Department’s pages. Every bulletin page links to its own source, and the methodology page describes how each figure is computed.
Each month’s page opens with a short summary of what moved, followed by every final action date and date for filing as printed. Each category and country also has its own green card wait page with its full history since 2001.