• Final Action Dates: When your priority date reaches this cutoff, USCIS can approve your green card (I-485).
• Dates for Filing: When your priority date reaches this cutoff, you can submit your I-485 application (Adjustment of Status), but it won't be approved until the Final Action date is also current.

In most cases, people watch Final Action Dates as they determine when you actually get the green card. Filing Dates are useful if you want to file early to get work authorization (EAD) while waiting.

Your priority date is the date when your immigration petition was filed:

• Family-Sponsored: The date your sponsor filed the I-130 petition.
• Employment-Based: The date your PERM labor certification was filed (or I-140 if PERM-exempt).

The Visa Bulletin publishes monthly "cutoff dates." If your priority date is earlier than the cutoff, your case can move forward. This dashboard tracks how those cutoffs have moved over time.

The Bulletin Forecast Model works in two stages. For the next month's bulletin, it classifies the current state of each visa series — whether dates have been advancing, stalled, or retrogressing — and picks the most accurate strategy for that state. When a series is stalled or retrogressing, the model predicts no change (the historically safest guess). When a series is actively advancing, it applies historical seasonal patterns for that specific calendar month.

For 6–12 month horizon estimates, a gradient-boosted machine learning model trained on over a decade of bulletin history, I-140 demand data, and fiscal year cycles takes over. This catches structural patterns — like typical October fiscal-year resets and cross-series spillover — that simple trend extrapolation misses.

The model is backtested against historical bulletins. For the key India/China EB-2 and EB-3 series at 6-month horizons, it achieves mean absolute errors of 155–264 days — meaningfully better than simply assuming no change (~280 days). The model is deliberately conservative: it under-predicts large jumps to reduce false alarms, which means unexpected surges or October resets may be under-predicted. Immigration processing is also affected by unpredictable policy decisions and demand surges that no model can foresee. How the model works (full methodology) →  ·  Monthly accuracy analyses →

Retrogression happens when demand for visas exceeds the annual quota. The State Department moves cutoff dates backward to slow down visa issuance.

Common causes:

• Surge in new applications
• USCIS policy changes accelerating approvals
• End of fiscal year adjustments

You can see historical retrogressions on the chart (when the line dips downward). This helps you understand if your visa category is prone to volatility.

Parents, spouses, and unmarried children under 21 of U.S. citizens are Immediate Relatives (IR) and are not subject to Visa Bulletin quotas.

They don't appear in this dashboard because:

• There are no monthly cutoff dates to track.
• Visas are immediately available once USCIS approves the petition.
• Processing depends only on USCIS workload, not the Visa Bulletin.

This dashboard only tracks Family Preference categories (F1, F2A, F2B, F3, F4) and Employment-Based categories (EB1-EB5), which have annual quotas.

The dashboard automatically refreshes daily at 9 AM UTC to check for new Visa Bulletins from the State Department.

The official Visa Bulletin is typically published around the 9th-15th of each month for the following month (e.g., the December bulletin is published in mid-November).

All data comes directly from travel.state.gov.

Yes! The entire codebase is available on GitHub.

You can:

• View the source code
• Report bugs or request features
• Contribute improvements
• Run your own instance locally