This is for anyone waiting on a priority date who wants to know when the next visa bulletin will show whether it moved.
The short answer
The State Department publishes each month's bulletin during the month before, and it doesn't announce the day. On October 17, 2026, its visa bulletin page listed the next one as "Coming Soon". The best evidence of the day is when each past bulletin was already out, which the chart below counts.
Of the 96 bulletins the archive caught before their month began (January 2018 to July 2026), half were out by the 13th of the month before, and nine in ten by the 22nd. The earliest came out by the 6th.
When past bulletins were first seen online, by day of the month: a floor, from the Internet Archive. More
Each bar is the share of those 96 bulletins the Internet Archive had captured by that day of the month before. A capture only shows the page was up by then, so the real share is at least this high. 46 more were first captured only after their month began, mostly because the archive didn't crawl these pages before December 2017, so they say nothing about the day and aren't counted. A bulletin published in a month's last days could be missed the same way, which makes these days read a little early. Measured 2026-09-26; the archive has captured no bulletin since July 2026, when the State Department began refusing its crawler.
Each bar is the share of past bulletins the Internet Archive had captured by that day of the month before. A capture shows a bulletin existed by then, so each one was out on that day or earlier, and the real days run a little ahead of the chart.
What happens after it comes out
A bulletin carries two charts for each category and country. Final Action Dates say whose green card can be approved that month. Dates for Filing say who can file an I-485 early, if USCIS allows it.
USCIS decides each month which chart people adjusting status in the US use, and says so on its own page. In its words: "We anticipate designating one of the two charts each month and linking to the relevant chart below within one week of DOS's publication of the Visa Bulletin." For October 2026 it chose the Dates for Filing chart for every employment-based category (its page was updated October 1, 2026).
State publishes the bulletin
During the month before, on a day it doesn't announce. The chart above shows when past ones were out.
The new dates apply
From the first day of the bulletin's month.
October's bulletin starts the government's fiscal year, when the yearly visa numbers reset under that year's limit. The visa bulletin page shows what every earlier bulletin for the same month did, and how the State Department set the year's employment limit.
How to hear when it lands
- The visa bulletin page reads the State Department's own pages every day and shows each category's cutoff the day a new bulletin is stored.
- Leave an email on that page for your category and country, and you'll get one email when a new bulletin moves it.
- The priority date calculator checks your own date against every bulletin since 2014.
- This site records its estimate of each bulletin's release day before the bulletin lands and grades it after, on the estimate scorecard.
What this can't tell you
- The exact day. The State Department sets it and announces nothing ahead.
- Whether your category will move. The chart above is about timing only. What earlier same-month bulletins did is on the visa bulletin page, and it isn't a forecast.
- Which chart USCIS will name for the coming month, until it names it.
