Three green-card lines have not moved one day in 2026 — the Visa Bulletin movement data

Three green-card lines have not moved one day in 2026

The finding: across all 8 US Visa Bulletin releases from January to August 2026 — 7 month-to-month comparisons covering 150 category-and-country lines — three Final Action lines held the exact same cut-off date every single month:

F4 Mexico is the one to sit with. That cut-off date is April 8, 2001. A US citizen who filed a petition for a Mexican sibling in the spring of 2001 is only now reaching the front of the line — and across eight consecutive bulletins in 2026, that line did not advance by a single day.

Meanwhile the same eight bulletins moved other lines a long way: F2A (spouses and minor children of permanent residents) advanced 902 days. The State Department publishes one bulletin at a time and never publishes the change between them, so neither of these facts is visible without banking every release and differencing it.

How much each bulletin moved

Computed from 8 official bulletins (7 month-to-month comparisons). Cells listed "C" (current) or "U" (unavailable) have no date to difference and are never counted as zero movement. Last computed: 2026-07-22. Official bulletin

March-to-April was the year’s biggest month, moving 9,112 total days across all categories and countries. The August bulletin was the year’s third-biggest at 6,706 days — the fiscal year ends September 30, and the State Department advances dates late in the year to use the annual visa numbers before they expire. The quietest stretch was January-to-February at 938 days.

Only three cells retrogressed all year: 2 between May and June, 1 between June and July.

Every Final Action line, ranked by how far it moved

Family-sponsored — Final Action Dates

Employment-based — Final Action Dates

Computed from 8 official bulletins (7 month-to-month comparisons). Cells listed "C" (current) or "U" (unavailable) have no date to difference and are never counted as zero movement. Last computed: 2026-07-22. Official bulletin

What the data shows

• Movement is extremely uneven. Of 75 Final Action lines, 50 moved at least one day over the window, 21 were current (“C”) the whole time and had no date to move, and 3 were frozen at a fixed date.
• One line ended behind where it started. EB-1 India went from 01FEB23 on the January bulletin to 15OCT22 on the August bulletin — a net 109 days backward. It is the only Final Action line with negative net movement in the window.
• The biggest single jump was EB-4, which advanced 657 days between the February and March 2026 bulletins.
• A category can move fast and still be slow. F2A’s 902 days of movement in eight bulletins looks dramatic, but F4 Mexico’s zero days is the more consequential number for the people in that line.
• “Current” is not the same as “moved.” A line marked C has no cut-off date to difference. Counting those as zero movement — a common mistake when people diff the bulletin by eye — would understate the year’s movement badly, so this dataset counts them separately.

What this means in practice

If your category and country appear in the frozen table above, the honest read is that the line did not get shorter this year. That is information worth having before you make plans around it. If your line advanced past your priority date, the current full bulletin has the live tables and the month-over-month tracker shows what changed in the latest release specifically.

Two mechanics matter regardless of which row you are in. Final Action Dates control when a green card can actually be approved; Dates for Filing control when you may submit adjustment-of-status paperwork, and USCIS announces each month which chart applies. And retrogression does not undo a pending case — if you already filed Form I-485 while your date was current, the case waits rather than dies, and keeps its work and travel benefits. The I-130 guide covers the protections that hold your place across years of waiting.

Method and caveat

Each bulletin is captured as published and stored unmodified; the movement is the calendar distance between the cut-off date on one bulletin and the same cell on the next. Three distinctions keep the numbers honest. First, cells marked “C” (current) or “U” (unavailable) have no date to difference and are counted in their own buckets — never as zero movement, and never as an advance. Second, “days moved” is calendar distance, not waiting time: a line advancing 60 days in a month clears one month of the queue only if demand behind the cut-off is evenly distributed, which it is not. Third, the window is what we have banked — January 2026 forward — so “has not moved in 2026” means exactly that, not “has never moved.”

Download the data: visa_bulletin_movement_series.json — every banked bulletin, every category-and-country line, per-step and cumulative movement.

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An immigration newsroom, a legal-aid org, a forum for people in one of these lines: drop in the movement panel and it stays current on its own. Every month the State Department posts a new bulletin, we bank it and recompute, and your copy updates with it — including the part nobody else publishes, which lines are going nowhere:

<iframe src="https://migrantusa.com/embed/visa-bulletin-movement/" width="100%" height="560"
        style="border:1px solid #e2e8e4;border-radius:8px;max-width:640px"
        title="Visa Bulletin priority-date movement" loading="lazy"></iframe>
<p style="font-size:.85rem">Visa Bulletin movement — data by
  <a href="https://migrantusa.com/datasets/visa-bulletin-movement/">MigrantUSA</a></p>

Please keep the credit line — a link back to this page is the only thing we ask in return.

Suggested citation: MigrantUSA, “Visa Bulletin priority-date movement series,” migrantusa.com/datasets/visa-bulletin-movement/, retrieved [date], computed from US Department of State Visa Bulletin releases.

Related

• Current Visa Bulletin priority dates — the live tables for the month
• Month-over-month movement tracker — what changed in the latest bulletin
• USCIS processing times — the other half of the wait, after your date is current
• All open datasets — everything we publish for download and citation