Check your priority date

Your priority date marks your place in the queue for your category and country.

• Family-sponsored: generally the date USCIS received the Form I-130 petition filed for you.
• Employment-based, with a labor certification (PERM): generally the date the Department of Labor received the PERM application.
• Employment-based, without one (for example EB-1, or EB-2 with a national interest waiver): generally the date USCIS received the Form I-140.
• EB-5 investors: generally the date USCIS received the Form I-526 or I-526E.

Look for it on the notices for the petition filed for you:

• Receipt notice (I-797C). For an I-130 filed with USCIS, the “Received Date” is usually the priority date.
• Approval notice (I-797). The approval notice for an I-130, I-140, I-526 or I-526E prints the priority date.
• National Visa Center. If your case has moved to the NVC, its welcome letter and online case status show the priority date.

If the petition was filed for a parent or spouse and you are included as a child or spouse, you share their priority date. When you are unsure, ask whoever filed the petition (for an employment case, usually the employer), or the attorney handling the case.

Each month the State Department’s Visa Bulletin publishes a cutoff date for every category and country. A priority date earlier than the cutoff is within the range the bulletin lists for that month; a later one is not yet. The checker shows the distance between your date and the current cutoff, and charts the category’s cutoff at every bulletin in the archive against your date.

It does not predict when a date will be reached. Cutoffs can advance, stand still, or move backward, and past movement does not set future movement. The pace figure describes what the archive recorded, and is withheld where the category has too little history to measure.

The bulletin has two charts. The approval date (from the official Final Action Dates chart) governs when a visa or green card can be issued. The filing date (from the official Dates for Filing chart) governs when documents or an adjustment of status application may be submitted, in months when USCIS says to use that chart. The USCIS chart designation says which applies each month.

Family-sponsored

F1

Unmarried sons and daughters, age 21 or older, of U.S. citizens.

F2A

Spouses and unmarried children under 21 of lawful permanent residents.

F2B

Unmarried sons and daughters, age 21 or older, of lawful permanent residents.

F3

Married sons and daughters of U.S. citizens.

F4

Brothers and sisters of adult U.S. citizens.

Employment-based

EB-1

Priority workers: people of extraordinary ability, outstanding professors and researchers, and certain multinational executives and managers.

EB-2

Professionals with advanced degrees, and people of exceptional ability.

EB-3

Skilled workers and professionals. “Other workers” is the part of EB-3 for jobs that need less than two years of training or experience.

EB-4

Special immigrants, with certain religious workers listed separately.

EB-5

Investors. The bulletin lists unreserved visas and three set-asides: rural, high unemployment and infrastructure.

The bulletin lists China, India, Mexico and the Philippines separately, and for some employment categories also Vietnam and El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Everyone else uses the date for most countries, and so does a country in any month the bulletin does not list it separately. The relevant country is usually the country of birth, not citizenship, though exceptions exist.

With JavaScript on, the calculation runs in your browser and your date is never sent to this site; only the category and country are requested, to draw the history chart. Without JavaScript the form is sent to the server, used once to build the answer, and not logged or stored.