Three green-card lines froze for nine straight bulletins, then moved by days — the 2026 Visa Bulletin movement data

Three green-card lines froze for nine straight bulletins, then moved by days

The finding: across all 11 US Visa Bulletin releases from January to November 2026 — 10 month-to-month comparisons covering 150 category-and-country lines — three Final Action lines held the exact same cut-off date on every bulletin from January to September, then moved by days on the October bulletin:

All three held the October cut-off again in November: 0 additional days each; their January-to-November advances remain 14, 30 and 44 days, respectively.

F4 Mexico is the one to sit with. Its cut-off date on the November bulletin is 22APR01, unchanged from October. A petition a US citizen filed for a Mexican sibling in April 2001 is only now reaching the cut-off — and across the nine bulletins before October, that line did not advance by a single day.

Over the same eleven bulletins, other lines moved years. F4 for all countries except India, Mexico and the Philippines (China included) advanced 1,749 days, from 08JAN08 to 22OCT12. F2A for Mexico (spouses and minor children of permanent residents) advanced 1,176 days, from 01FEB23 to 22APR26. 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 11 official bulletins (10 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: 2026-10-23. Official bulletin

September-to-October was the largest step in the window, 13,995 net days summed across all four charts, and most of it was on the Dates for Filing charts, not Final Action: the largest single move of the window, 1,461 days, was EB-5 Unreserved for China on the Dates for Filing chart, from 01MAR17 to 01MAR21. The quietest stretch was January-to-February, at 938 days across all four charts. The October bulletin is the first of fiscal year 2027; the fiscal year runs October 1 to September 30.

Ten cells retrogressed across the window: 2 between May and June, 1 between June and July, and 7 between September and October — four on the Final Action charts and three on the Dates for Filing chart for Other Workers; October-to-November had 0 retrogressions. November advanced 29 Final Action lines, held 25, and left 21 current.

Every Final Action line, ranked by how far it moved

Family-sponsored — Final Action Dates

Employment-based — Final Action Dates

Computed from 11 official bulletins (10 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: 2026-10-23. Official bulletin

What the data shows

• Movement is extremely uneven. Of 75 Final Action lines, 21 were current (“C”) on all eleven bulletins and had no date to move, 53 advanced on at least one bulletin, and 1 — EB-5 Unreserved for India — never recorded a bulletin-to-bulletin advance: it held at 01MAY22 from January to June, was unavailable (“U”) from July to September, and returned at 01DEC23 in October, holding that date in November.
• The family lines moved furthest. F4 for all countries except India, Mexico and the Philippines moved 1,749 days (08JAN08 to 22OCT12); F1 for the same countries 1,536 days (08NOV16 to 22JAN21); F3 for all countries except Mexico and the Philippines 1,505 (08SEP11 to 22OCT15); F2B for those same countries 1,360 (01DEC16 to 22AUG20); F2A for Mexico 1,176 (01FEB23 to 22APR26).
• The biggest single Final Action jumps came late in the fiscal year. F3 advanced 890 days between the August and September bulletins, F4 for all countries except India, Mexico and the Philippines 781 days in the same step, F2B for all countries except Mexico and the Philippines 598 days in the same step, and F2A 567 days between July and August (568 for Mexico).
• October went both ways. EB-3 for all countries and for Mexico went back 109 days (01SEP24 to 15MAY24), and Other Workers for the same two columns went back 90 days (01APR22 to 01JAN22). EB-2 for all countries, Mexico and the Philippines, current from April through September, returned to a cut-off date of 01JAN25 in October and advanced 90 days to 01APR25 in November. EB-1 for India came back to 01FEB23, the date it held in January, after dropping to 15OCT22 by July — a net of zero days over the window.
• A category can move fast and still be slow. F2A Mexico’s 1,176 days look dramatic, but F4 Mexico’s 14 days in eleven bulletins 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 window’s movement badly, so this dataset counts them separately.

What this means in practice

If your category and country appear in the table above, the honest read is that the line got shorter by days, not months, over the eleven bulletins. 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 “held still from January to September 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