Ten ways the Visa Bulletin is commonly misread

Reading the wrong chart

Dates for Filing is earlier and therefore more appealing, and it is the one people quote. It governs when an application may be lodged, where the relevant agency accepts it. Approval runs on Final Action Dates, always, in both routes.

Reading the wrong column

Chargeability follows country of birth, not citizenship or residence. Reading the general column when you are chargeable to India or China produces an answer that is wrong by years.

Treating a date equal to the cut-off as current

The priority date has to be earlier than the cut-off. A date that matches it exactly is not current. This is a one-issue wait rather than a disaster, but it produces a lot of premature celebration.

Treating movement as a schedule

A category that advanced six months last year is not thereby committed to advancing six months next year. Past movement is a record of decisions already made under conditions that have since changed. It is the best information available and it is still not a forecast.

Assuming a cut-off only moves forward

Cut-offs retrogress, and the archive on this site records how often. Any plan that has no answer for a backward step is a plan with a hole in it.

Comparing October against September

The fiscal year resets on 1 October. A large jump in the October issue measures the calendar, not the queue, and reading it as acceleration will mislead you again in July.

Confusing current with approved

Being current means visa availability is no longer what is holding the case up. Processing, background checks and agency workload continue to apply, and none of them are in the bulletin.

Assuming USCIS uses Dates for Filing every month

It is decided monthly, published separately from the bulletin, and made independently for the employment and family charts. Last month’s determination says nothing about this month’s.

Reading C as a guarantee and U as a delay

C means no cut-off this month, not permanently. U means no numbers at all, not a long queue. They are the two ends of the scale and neither is a prediction.

Expecting the bulletin to explain itself

The bulletin publishes cut-offs. It does not publish demand figures, the size of any queue, or the reasoning behind a particular month’s movement. Anyone offering you the reason a cut-off moved is inferring it, and should say so.

Everything here is transcribed from an issue or calculated from transcribed values, and the build rejects anything that is neither. What this site refuses to publish