How we check the data

We read every visa bulletin from December 2001 to October 2026 (299 bulletins) from the State Department's own pages, archived copies of those pages in the Internet Archive, or the official PDF of the bulletin when the page is not available. A program extracts each chart cell: bulletin, chart (final action or dates for filing), category, country and date.

Before publishing we run these checks:

• Every bulletin has the charts and categories it should have, and every value is a date, “C” or “U”.
• The F2A dates written in the bulletin's text match the F2A dates in its chart.
• Since October 2015 we compare our data, cell by cell, with the charts USCIS republishes every month for adjustment of status. They match in more than 99.6% of cells; we reviewed every difference by hand, and they come from the sources (for example, USCIS updating a chart after a law changed), not from our reading.
• Moves of more than three years in one month are flagged and checked against the bulletin. The ones you see on this site, such as EB-2 India going back to 2000 in 2009, are in the official bulletins.

The “when will it be my turn?” estimates are arithmetic: how far your date is from the current cutoff, divided by how fast the cutoff moved in the last 12 months and the last 3 years. They are not predictions, and we label them that way wherever they appear.

Last check: October 14, 2026. Found an error? Tell us.