I-485 queue position

A count USCIS publishes each month of every employment-based adjustment of status application it has on hand and hasn’t decided, broken down by country of chargeability, preference category and priority date. It’s a count of the queue, taken from USCIS’s own records.

USCIS replaces any cell holding between 1 and 10 applications with the letter D, to avoid identifying the people in it. So the exact total genuinely isn’t in the release. The low figure counts every withheld cell as 1 and the high figure counts every one as 10, and the truth is somewhere between them. Other tools resolve each D to 5 and publish a single number, which isn’t a figure USCIS released.

No, and that's the one gap worth knowing about. An I-485 can only be filed once the Dates for Filing chart reaches your priority date, so this inventory is the filed cohort. Anyone with an earlier priority date than yours is past that same gate by definition, so they're counted. Anyone who's eligible and hasn't filed isn't, and USCIS publishes nothing that would size that group.

Usually because filing hasn’t opened for your priority date yet. USCIS publishes each category only as far as the priority dates it holds applications for, and it holds none past the Dates for Filing cutoff, because nobody past that cutoff has been allowed to file. India’s EB-2 chart stands at January 15, 2015 and its published inventory stops at 2015, which is the same boundary seen from two sides.

No. It tells you how many applications sit in front of yours. Turning that into a date needs the rate at which visa numbers are issued in your category and country, which is set annually by statute and rationed month to month through the visa bulletin. The priority date calculator covers that half.

Yes. A spouse and each child file their own I-485, and each one is a separate pending application in this inventory. That’s why these figures are larger than the number of households waiting.

USCIS publishes the inventory monthly and every figure here carries the release date it came from. USCIS keeps no archive of past releases, so the release-by-release comparison can only grow forward from the ones already captured.