Why visa bulletin dates retrogress

A retrogression is a bulletin in which a cutoff date moves to an earlier date than the month before, or a category with a date becomes unavailable. People who were eligible, or about to be, go back to waiting. It happens because the number of green cards in each category is fixed by law and the State Department adjusts the dates to keep issuance within it.

The limits behind the dates

Congress sets annual limits. The family-sponsored preference categories share at least 226,000 visa numbers a year, and the employment-based categories at least 140,000. Each category gets a fixed share of its total.

On top of that, no single country can use more than 7 percent of the combined family and employment preference numbers in a year. Countries whose demand runs past that limit, currently India, China (mainland born), Mexico and the Philippines, get their own column in the bulletin and their own, usually earlier, cutoff dates.

Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens are outside these limits, which is why they never appear in the bulletin.

How the State Department sets each date

Each month the State Department’s Visa Office looks at how many applicants are documentarily qualified (their paperwork is complete and their priority date is close to current), counting both consular cases and adjustment cases reported by USCIS. It then sets the cutoff so that the people it lets through can be served with the numbers left in the fiscal year.

When that estimate turns out to be too generous, the date has to come back. The common causes are:

• Demand arrives late. Applicants who filed years ago become documentarily qualified all at once, often after a date advances quickly.
• Numbers run out before September 30. The fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30. Late in the year a category may use up its numbers, and the bulletin makes it unavailable or moves the date back until the new allocation in October.
• Unused numbers stop flowing in. Some categories advance in a given year because numbers left over from other categories fall to them. When that stops, the date retreats.

An example from the record

EB-2 India shows the pattern clearly. Its final action date advanced from September 1, 2011 in the October 2021 bulletin to December 1, 2014 by June 2022. In the October 2022 bulletin, the first of the next fiscal year, it moved back to April 1, 2012, and it fell further to January 1, 2011 in April 2023. The EB-2 India wait history shows what this meant for each priority date: many dates in 2012 to 2014 were reached in 2022 and then pulled back. To see every time the cutoff reached and left your date, enter it in the priority date calculator.

Which categories go backwards most

Counted across every bulletin on this site since December 2001, these are the category and country pairs whose final action date has moved back most often:

A retrogression count measures how unstable a category has been, not how long its wait is. A category can be slow without ever moving back, and a short queue can retrogress several times in a year. Each pair’s page lists its own retrogressions under “When this category went backwards”.

The State Department does not announce future dates in advance. Some bulletins include notes about likely movement, and those notes are the only official indication of what may happen next. This site reports what was published and does not forecast.