Visa Bulletin for October 2026: final action dates, dates for filing and what moved

How to read the Visa Bulletin

The Visa Bulletin is the monthly list the U.S. Department of State publishes to ration green cards in the preference categories. Congress caps family-sponsored preference immigration at about 226,000 a year and employment-based immigration at about 140,000, and no country may take more than 7 % of the total. Where more people qualify than the cap allows, a queue forms, and the bulletin tells you how far that queue has moved: everyone whose priority date is earlier than the date shown can be given a visa number this month.

Find your line. Your category is on your petition (I-130 for family, I-140 for employment): F1, F2A, F2B, F3 or F4, or EB-1 to EB-5. Your column is your country of chargeability – normally your country of birth, not your citizenship. A spouse or a parent born elsewhere can sometimes let you use a faster column (cross-chargeability).

Compare your priority date. If your priority date is earlier than the final action date in chart A, your green card can be approved this month. If it is earlier than the date for filing in chart B, you can file (when USCIS uses chart B for that month) but you will wait for chart A before the approval.

Watch the trend, not one month. Lines move unevenly: several months without change, then a jump, sometimes a step back near the end of the fiscal year in September. The category pages below show every bulletin since 2002 so you can see how a line has really behaved – how many months of priority dates it clears per year, how often it has retrogressed and how long the wait has been for people who filed when you did.

Final action dates and dates for filing: which one counts

Since October 2015 every bulletin has two charts. The final action dates (chart A) decide when a case can be approved – by a consular officer abroad or by USCIS for adjustment of status. The dates for filing (chart B) are the State Department's estimate of where the final action dates will be within about a year; the National Visa Center uses them to ask applicants abroad for documents, and USCIS decides each month whether people already in the U.S. may file an I-485 based on chart B or must wait for chart A.

Filing early matters for people in the U.S.: a pending I-485 lets you apply for a work permit (I-765) and travel permission (advance parole), and for many employment cases it opens AC21 job portability after 180 days.

Why some lines barely move

The per-country limit is the main reason. India accounts for a large share of all employment-based demand but is held to 7 % of the numbers in each category, so EB-2 and EB-3 India move a few months per year while the same categories for most countries are current or close to it. F4 (siblings) has the longest family backlog everywhere, longest for the Philippines, India and Mexico. Unused family numbers move to employment categories the next year, which is why employment lines sometimes jump in October.

Retrogression is the other surprise. When more applications become ready than numbers remain, the State Department moves a date back – sometimes by years – to stop issuing for the rest of the fiscal year. The category pages list every retrogression since 2002 for each country.