Your priority date is your place in the queue for a visa number. The visa bulletin says where that queue currently stands. One cutoff in one month doesn't tell you much on its own. The useful part is which way it has been moving, and how fast.
PERM Tracker holds every bulletin since October 2014, and its free priority date calculator draws the whole run for the category and country you pick, including the months the cutoff went backwards. Here's how to read it, and what it still can't answer.
Where your priority date comes from
For an employment-based case it's the date DOL received your PERM application. If your case didn't need a labor certification, it's the date USCIS received the I-140.
If you don't have it written down, your PERM record does. Paste your case number into the case status lookup and the received date is on the result. No account is needed for that, or for anything else on this page.
Setting it up
Enter your priority date in the calculator, pick the category and your country of birth, and choose the chart.
Enter the date
Open the priority date calculator and put the date in the first field. The comparison runs in your browser against the bulletins already loaded on the page.
Pick the category and country
EB-1 through EB-5, including EB-3 other workers. The country field is your country of birth. Your citizenship and where you live or work don't count. That distinction changes the answer more than anything else on the form.
Choose the chart
Final action dates govern when a green card can be approved. Dates for filing govern when the adjustment application can be submitted, and only in months when USCIS says it's honouring that chart. USCIS announces that separately, month by month.
What the chart is actually showing
Bulletin month runs along the bottom. The cutoff each bulletin published runs up the side. Every month gets its own column, and the shaded part of the column is the range of priority dates that qualified that month, so a taller column is a month more people were current in.
Not every month has a date to plot, and that's the part most charts get wrong. A category can be Current, open to every priority date, or closed, with no visa numbers being issued at all. Those two states are opposites, so they're drawn as two different things rather than two shades of one thing.
The cutoff line breaks at both. Joining a line across a run of closed months would draw a smooth rise through a period when the category was shut and nothing moved. A gap in the series is a break, and the chart doesn't interpolate through it.
Why a cutoff moving forward isn't always progress
A cutoff has to advance about thirty days every calendar month just for the queue to stay the same length, because a month of real time passes while it moves. Anyone holding a fixed priority date only gains ground when the cutoff advances faster than that.
The page measures that as a pace figure. At 1.00 the queue is holding station. Below it, the number on the page went up while the wait got longer.
| Queue | Cutoff in the November 2026 bulletin | Pace, October 2014 to November 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| EB-1, rest of world | Current | 1.43 |
| EB-2, rest of world | April 1, 2025 | 1.09 |
| EB-3, rest of world | June 15, 2024 | 1.05 |
| EB-3, India | January 22, 2014 | 0.84 |
| EB-2, India | November 1, 2013 | 0.37 |
| EB-5, China | December 1, 2016 | 0.31 |
The table is a reading of the November 2026 bulletin, taken on November 2, 2026. Each month's board on the page is the current one, and it says how many queues lost ground: 13 of the 27 with a pace, in that reading. A category that's closed in the newest bulletin gets no pace figure at all, because a pace measured up to the month it shut would describe a queue that no longer exists. EB-2 India was closed from July to September 2026. It opened again in October at November 1, 2013, and held there in November.
Hearing about it without checking
Under the chart there's an alert. Pick a category and a country, leave an email address, and when a new bulletin changes that final-action cutoff you get one email with the before and the after. Nothing arrives in the months it doesn't move.
It's double opt-in, so you confirm the address first and nobody else can sign you up. One click in any of those emails stops them.
What this can't tell you
- When your date will become current. Nobody can. The State Department sets cutoffs from demand data it doesn't publish, and it revises them monthly. Past movement is a record. It doesn't forecast anything.
- That a cutoff will keep going forwards. Retrogression is normal. EB-2 India advanced by more than four years across this run and then closed outright.
- A bulletin published in the last few hours. State's site has turned away automated reads since November 2, 2026, so each new bulletin is copied from State's own page in a browser once a day, and can trail State by up to a day. The page names the newest bulletin it holds and links straight to State's own. Check there before acting on anything.
- Anything about your case's progress. The bulletin is about visa numbers. It says nothing about where your PERM or I-140 sits. Those live on the case lookup and the queue pages.
- A date, on this page. Elsewhere on the site, where an estimated decision date is given, it's labelled as an estimate and graded on the estimate scorecard. Here there's no prediction to label, on purpose.
Family-sponsored categories aren't covered. Everything here is employment-based.
Related
- Green card timeline, for where the visa number wait sits against every stage before it
- Where your filing month sits, for the DOL queue rather than the State Department one
- Waiting on your green card
