Once a month the State Department publishes a table of dates that decides whether an employment green card can move forward. That table is the visa bulletin. For a lot of people waiting, it ends up mattering more than anything the Department of Labor does, and it's the part of the process nobody explains to them.
Here's what's in it, how to read your own position against it, and what it honestly can't tell you.
Why there's a queue at all
Congress caps how many employment-based green cards get issued each year. It also caps how many of them can go to people born in any single country. No more than seven percent of the year's total, and that share is the same whether the country has a billion people or a hundred thousand.
Two things follow from that. Where more people from one country are sponsored than the share allows, a queue forms and keeps growing. And what puts you in a queue is your country of birth, not your citizenship, your passport, or where you live now.
When a category has no queue, everyone in it can proceed. When it has one, the State Department publishes a cutoff date each month and the queue is served in date order.
What a priority date is
Your priority date is your place in that line.
For a case that needed a labor certification, it's the date DOL received the PERM application. Where no labor certification was required, it's the date USCIS received the I-140.
It's fixed. It doesn't move as time passes, and it usually stays with you if you change employers or categories. Everything the bulletin says about you is a comparison between that one date and the cutoff for your category and country of birth.
If you don't know yours, the case status lookup takes a DOL case number and returns the record, including the filing date. No account needed.
Final action dates and dates for filing
The bulletin publishes two charts each month, and they answer different questions.
| Final action dates | Dates for filing | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | can this be approved now | can the application be submitted now |
| Always in force | yes | no |
| Usually sits | further back | further ahead |
Final action dates govern approval. Dates for filing govern whether the adjustment of status application can go in, and only in the months USCIS says it's honouring that chart. USCIS announces that separately, month by month, and its answer for employment-based cases can differ from its answer for family-sponsored ones in the very same bulletin.
The distinction is worth being clear about, because being current on dates for filing feels like progress and isn't the same thing. It gets the application accepted. Approval still waits on the final action date.
What C and U mean, and why they're opposites
Two entries in the table aren't dates.
C means current. The category was open to every priority date that month, however recent. There was no cutoff to be behind.
U means unavailable. No visa numbers were being issued in that category at all, so nobody qualified, however early their date.
⚠️ One letter each, and they mean the reverse of each other
C is the best state a category can be in. U is the worst. A category usually goes U when the year's numbers have run out, and it typically reopens at the start of the next fiscal year in October. Reading them as similar because they're both single letters is a genuine and common mistake.
Cutoffs move backwards
A cutoff isn't a countdown. It's the State Department's judgement about how much demand it can let through, and when demand turns out heavier than expected, the date goes back. That's retrogression.
A priority date that was current one month can stop being current the next. Nobody did anything wrong, and there's nothing to appeal. It happens often enough that a single month's number tells you very little on its own, which is why the priority date page shows the whole run it holds, 84 monthly bulletins going back to October 2019, rather than just the latest figure.
A cutoff moving forward is not the same as the wait getting shorter
This is the part that costs people the most, and the bulletin's own presentation does nothing to help.
Real time passes while a cutoff advances. So a cutoff has to move about thirty days every month just for the queue to stay exactly as long as it was. Anything slower and the line is getting longer, even though the number on the page went up and looks like good news.
Across the bulletins held here, most employment-based queues moved slower than that. The page measures each queue's pace against that one-month-per-month line for exactly this reason. It withholds a pace for any category that's currently shut, because a pace measured up to the month a queue stopped would describe a queue that no longer exists.
What this can't tell you
- When your green card will be approved. A cutoff is a position, not a schedule. Nothing in the bulletin is a date for you.
- How many people are ahead of you. The State Department sees the demand data it sets cutoffs from. It isn't published month by month, so nobody outside can count your place in the line. Any precise number you're given for that is an estimate wearing a suit.
- What next month will say. Movement isn't a trend you can extend. Pace figures describe what already happened, and retrogression is the reason they can't be projected forward.
- Whether the newest bulletin is here yet. The State Department's site refuses automated requests, so this history comes from a public archive of the same pages plus a mirror. The page states how far behind the live bulletin that leaves it, and the current month is one click away on State's own site. That's the honest trade: the history is the part nobody else keeps, and the current number was never scarce.
- Anything about your case's progress at DOL or USCIS. Different agencies, separate queues. For that, look the case number up directly.
Related
- Priority date calculator, for a date against the cutoffs and how they've moved
- The whole timeline, for where this sits against every step before it
- Waiting on an employer-sponsored green card, if the earlier steps are new too
