How a priority date is established, and when it can be kept

Family-sponsored cases

The priority date is the date the I-130 petition was properly filed with USCIS. That is the receipt date on the notice, not the approval date, and approval much later does not move it.

Employment-based cases

It depends on whether the category requires a labour certification.

• Where PERM labour certification is required, the priority date is the date the labour certification application was filed with the Department of Labor. That is usually earlier, sometimes by a year or more, than the I-140 that follows it.
• Where no labour certification is required, the priority date is the date the I-140 petition was filed with USCIS. This covers the categories that skip PERM.
• For investor cases, the priority date is set by the filing of the investor petition.

If your case went through PERM, your priority date is older than your I-140 receipt date. Reading the I-140 date off the notice and comparing that against the bulletin will consistently understate how far along you are.

Keeping an earlier date

In employment-based cases, an approved I-140 generally allows a later petition to retain the priority date of the earlier one. This is why changing employer, or being upgraded from one preference category to another, does not necessarily mean starting the queue again — the new petition can carry the old date with it.

The retention is not unconditional. It can be lost where the earlier petition is revoked for reasons such as fraud or material misrepresentation, or where the approval is withdrawn in circumstances that defeat retention. Whether retention is available in a particular case is a question about that case, and this is the point at which a general explanation stops being useful.

What the priority date is not

• It is not the date the petition was approved.
• It is not the date you entered the United States, started a job, or filed an I-485.
• It is not something that improves with time in the queue. It is fixed; what moves is the cut-off.
• It is not a place in a numbered line. Nobody is told they are 40,000th. The cut-off is the only visible measure of position.

Once you know your date, the history pages will locate it in each bulletin in the archive, calculated in your browser. Where a priority date sat in every published issue