EB Visa Bulletin History & Trends
Employment-based Final Action Dates move month to month as the State Department manages green card demand against annual limits: they can advance quickly, creep forward, hold steady, or even retrogress backward. Tracking that movement over time shows whether a category and country are speeding up or stalling. This page charts the last thirteen months of movement by category and country.
Thirteen months of employment-based Final Action Date movement, charted by category and country — pick a category, choose the countries you care about, and watch how the cutoffs actually moved.
Final Action Date trend
Choose one EB category and one or more countries. Each line shows how that cutoff moved across the last 16 monthly bulletins. A rising line means the date advanced; a falling line means it retrogressed. "Current" and "Unavailable" appear in their own bands, never as a date.
Lines overlap when countries share the same cutoff. In most EB categories, Mexico, the Philippines, and all other countries track the same worldwide date — so their lines sit exactly on top of one another. Only China and India usually have separate, later cutoffs; select just those two to see the gap clearly.
This page is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Past movement does not predict future movement. Always confirm dates against the official Visa Bulletin, which controls. For advice about your individual case, consult a licensed immigration attorney or accredited representative.
Trend data is being verified and will appear here soon.
What the last 16 months actually show
Charts are only as useful as the reading you bring to them, so here is our plain-English take on the employment-based movement from May 2025 through August 2026. This is our own analysis of the verified record above; the dates themselves are public, but the interpretation is ours. The headline story is uneven progress: a few categories sprinted, several crawled, and the two largest backlogs — China and India — behaved very differently from the rest of the world. The most recent bulletins add a sharp reminder that the direction is not always forward — by July 2026 both EB-2 India and EB-5 Unreserved India had moved all the way to Unavailable, and both remained there in August.
The clearest bright spot was EB-2 for the rest of the world. Through most of 2025 it sat in the second half of 2023, even slipping backward briefly in the late-summer bulletins — a textbook reminder that cutoffs do not only move forward. Then, as the new government fiscal year opened in October and fresh visa numbers became available, it advanced sharply and reached Current by the spring 2026 bulletins, where it has held since. Anyone reading only the latest month sees "Current" and assumes smooth sailing; the 16-month line shows it was anything but, which is exactly why the trend matters more than the snapshot.
China and India tell a structural story you cannot see in a single bulletin. In EB-1, the two countries started the window roughly a year apart, gradually converged, and by spring 2026 met at the same early-April-2023 cutoff — then split apart again: across the June and July bulletins India retrogressed from mid-December 2022 back to mid-October 2022, while China kept advancing past it, reaching July 2023 in the August bulletin. EB-2 India ran a similar round trip, climbing from early 2013 all the way to mid-2014 by spring 2026 before retrogressing and then going Unavailable in July, where it stayed in August; EB-3 India, by contrast, only crept from early 2013 to the start of 2014 across the entire window, and did not move at all in August. The contrast underlines a point we make often: the "higher" preference category is not automatically the faster one for a given country, and for India in particular the spread — between categories and between months — is measured in years, not weeks.
The fiscal-year boundary is the single most important rhythm in these charts. Several lines that looked stuck through summer 2025 jumped at the October bulletin, when the annual supply of numbers resets. EB-5's India line is the most dramatic example, stepping forward repeatedly across the rollover — from mid-2019 in summer to 2022 by the winter bulletins — rather than drifting. Yet the same line shows the flip side too: after holding at May 2022 for months, it fell to Unavailable in July 2026 and stayed there in August. If you only ever check the bulletin in August, you might conclude a category is frozen; the same category checked in October can look transformed, and checked again the next summer can look shut. Reading a full year or more of history is the only way to separate a genuine long-term stall from the normal late-year tightening that resolves when the new fiscal year begins.
Finally, the charts make retrogression and the "Unavailable" state concrete rather than abstract. EB-4 spent the first stretch of the window fully Unavailable — no numbers at all — before a cutoff date reappeared at the October 2025 bulletin and climbed steadily to October 2022 by August 2026, advancing another month in that latest bulletin. Other lines run the same movie in reverse: EB-2 India and EB-5 Unreserved India both crossed from a workable cutoff to Unavailable in July 2026 and were still Unavailable in August. We draw those Unavailable months in their own band below the date axis, never as a fake "zero date," and the line turns dashed when a category crosses between a real date and a status like Current or Unavailable. That way a status change never masquerades as smooth date movement. The lesson for applicants is sobering but useful: a category can go from a workable cutoff to Unavailable, or from Current back to a cutoff, and the only honest chart is one that shows those jolts as jolts.
One practical pattern ties all of this together: movement is not the same as predictability. A category that advances several months in a single bulletin is not necessarily on a faster trajectory than one that creeps forward a week at a time — the fast jump is often a one-time fiscal-year correction, while the slow creep can be the steadier long-run signal. When you read your own category on the chart, look less at any single step and more at the shape across the full window: whether the line trends up consistently, stalls on a plateau, or oscillates around a status boundary. That shape, not the latest data point, is the closest thing the bulletin offers to a forecast — and it is the reason we publish the history rather than only the current month.
How this data is compiled
We build this history one bulletin at a time. Each month, after the U.S. Department of State publishes the Visa Bulletin, we read the employment-based Final Action Dates table directly from the official page and record every category-and-country cell. Each cell is then checked by hand against the published table before it is allowed to appear on this page — unverified months and rows are structurally withheld from the charts rather than shown as guesses. The record is append-only: we never rewrite a past month to match a later correction, because the value of a history is that it reflects what each bulletin actually said when it was released. We collect only the Final Action chart here, not Dates for Filing, to keep the comparison consistent over time. The most recent verified bulletin in this dataset is August 2026; we add a new month after each official release.
What to do next
For a direct yes/no on your own priority date against the latest month, use the Priority Date Calculator. To see every category and country for the current bulletin in one place, open the Visa Bulletin Tracker, and to project a rough remaining wait, try the Green Card Wait Time Estimator. For a plain-English read of the newest bulletin, see our August 2026 Visa Bulletin analysis, and for the mechanics behind the charts, our guide on how the Visa Bulletin works.
Frequently asked questions
Each line traces the Final Action Date cutoff for one employment-based category and country across the last 16 monthly Visa Bulletins. A line rising over time means the cutoff is advancing and the wait is moving forward; a line falling means retrogression. Current and Unavailable months are shown in their own bands rather than as dates.
Current ('C') is drawn in a band above the date axis, because it means no backlog at all — a better state than any specific cutoff date. Unavailable ('U') is drawn in a band below the axis, because it means no numbers are being issued that month. We never plot C or U as a date, and the connecting line turns dashed across a status change so it is never mistaken for smooth movement.
Every data point is taken from the official U.S. Department of State Visa Bulletin for that month and checked by hand against the published Final Action Dates table. We keep the record append-only — past months are never rewritten — so the history reflects what each bulletin actually said when it was released.
No. A cutoff that advanced quickly for several months can stall or move backward without warning, especially late in the government fiscal year. These charts describe what has already happened; they are not a forecast, and we do not predict where any date will go next.
No. It is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Always confirm dates against the official Visa Bulletin, which controls, and consult a licensed immigration attorney or accredited representative about your individual case.
Sources
- U.S. Department of State — Visa Bulletin — the official monthly source for every Final Action Date in these charts; it always controls.
- USCIS — Adjustment of Status Filing Charts — official page where USCIS designates which chart applies to Adjustment of Status each month.