How to Read the Visa Bulletin: Priority Dates, the Two Charts, and When You Can File

What the bulletin does

Congress caps employment-based green cards at roughly 140,000 a year, divides them among five preference categories, and limits any one country to 7% of the total. When more people qualify than the numbers allow, applicants wait in line. The State Department’s monthly Visa Bulletin shows how far each line has moved. It comes out around the middle of each month for the following month.

To read it, you need three facts about your own case: your priority date, your category, and your country of chargeability.

The three facts you need

Your priority date

Your priority date is your place in line. Under 8 CFR 204.5(d), it is the date the labor certification was filed with the Department of Labor if your case needed one, and otherwise the date USCIS received your I-140. Self-petitions such as the EB-1A and the EB-2 national interest waiver get the I-140 filing date. Once an I-140 is approved, you can generally keep its priority date for a later petition, which is how someone with an approved EB-2 petition who later qualifies for the EB-1A carries their place in line forward.

Your category

The preference categories come from INA 203(b), each with a share of the annual limit.

Your country of chargeability

For employment-based categories, the bulletin lists separate dates for mainland China, India, Mexico, and the Philippines, the countries whose demand regularly hits the 7% cap (plus a few others in the EB-4 rows), and one column for everyone else, often called rest of world. You are charged to your country of birth, not your citizenship. Under INA 202(b), an applicant can generally be charged to a spouse’s country of birth instead, which can shorten the wait considerably for someone born in India or China who is married to someone born elsewhere.

The two charts

Each category has two tables. Final Action Dates show when a green card can be approved. Dates for Filing show when you can submit the application, which is usually earlier, so that paperwork is ready when the final action date arrives.

Each month USCIS announces which chart applicants inside the US must use to file Form I-485, on its adjustment of status filing charts page. When it designates Dates for Filing, as it did for employment-based cases in October 2026, more people can file. Filing early still matters even though approval must wait for the final action date, because a pending I-485 brings a work permit, travel permission, and in many cases the ability to change jobs.

Reading a cell

Each cell holds one of three things. A C means the category is current: anyone in it can proceed, whatever their priority date. A U means it is unavailable that month. A date is a cutoff: you can proceed if your priority date is earlier than that date.

Here is how four applicants would have read the October 2026 bulletin.

The India example shows why category matters as much as date. The same applicant filing under EB-2 would have faced an October cutoff of November 1, 2013 for final action and January 15, 2015 for filing, a decade further back.

Why dates move backward

Dates usually advance, but not always. When demand outruns the numbers left in a fiscal year, the State Department can move a cutoff earlier or make a category unavailable, which is called retrogression. The fiscal year starts on October 1 with a fresh allocation, and the October bulletin often resets cutoffs. In October 2026, EB-2 rest of world went from Current in September to a final action date of January 1, 2025. Unused family-based numbers from the prior year are added to the employment-based limit, which can make the early months of a fiscal year move faster than the end.

Because a date that applies this month may not apply next month, an applicant whose date is current should treat it as a window and file while it is open.