The December 2026 visa bulletin, and every December before it

Each row is one country. The cutoff is the newest final action date we hold. The moves are every December bulletin in the archive, measured against its own September. A median is printed only when there were date-to-date moves to take it over. “Ahead of the cutoff” is USCIS's newest monthly inventory: pending adjustment applications with an earlier priority date than the cutoff, a floor because USCIS withholds small cells.

Bulletin figures are the State Department's, one row per published bulletin since June 2005. Inventory figures are USCIS's monthly pending I-485 counts. Every month-by-month cutoff, both charts, is on the priority date page, and the queue ahead of your own date on the I-485 queue position tool.

The year before is counted, with nothing estimated. In fiscal year 2024, 215,959 family-sponsored and 167,394 employment-based numbers were used, by Table V of the Department's Report of the Visa Office 2024. The 10,041 family numbers left unused against the 226,000 floor are what fell to the employment side for fiscal year 2025.

Both figures are read from the Department's own PDFs, the annual numerical limits and the annual report, and nothing here is a forecast. The spillover for the fiscal year about to open isn't published on bulletin day. This page prints it when the Department posts its sheet, usually in the first weeks of the fiscal year.