How to tell whether a priority date is current

Step one: know your priority date

Your priority date is a fixed historical fact about your case, printed on the receipt or approval notice for the petition that established it. It does not change as the queue moves, and it is not the date you filed anything else.

If you are not certain which filing set yours, this is the guide that says so. How priority dates are established

Step two: know your category and your country of chargeability

The bulletin publishes a separate cut-off for every combination of preference category and chargeability area. Getting either wrong produces a confident, precise, wrong answer, and the country column is where this goes wrong most often, because chargeability normally follows country of birth rather than citizenship or residence.

The bulletin gives China, India, Mexico and the Philippines their own columns because demand from those countries regularly exceeds the per-country limit. Everyone else reads the "All Chargeability Areas Except Those Listed" column. Someone born in India who has been a citizen of somewhere else for thirty years still reads the India column, unless cross-chargeability applies.

Country of chargeability, and when it can be changed

Step three: know which chart applies

If the question is whether an application can be submitted, the answer may come from the Dates for Filing chart, but only where the relevant agency accepts that chart for that month and that route. If the question is whether a case can be approved and a visa issued, the answer always comes from the Final Action Dates chart.

Step four: compare, strictly

A priority date is current when it is earlier than the published cut-off. Earlier, not equal to it. A priority date that falls on exactly the cut-off date is not current, and this catches people every month, because it looks like it ought to count and it does not.

• Priority date before the cut-off: current.
• Priority date the same as the cut-off: not current. Wait for the next issue.
• Priority date after the cut-off: not current.
• The cell says C: current, for everybody in that category and country, with no cut-off at all.
• The cell says U: unavailable, for everybody in that category and country. Nothing can move that month.

What C and U mean

What being current does and does not mean

Being current on the Final Action chart means a visa number is available to your case in that month. It does not mean the case will be adjudicated that month, that the agency has reached it in its own workload, or that the date will still be current next month. Cut-offs move backwards, and a case that was current in August and is not current in September is in exactly the position the queue says it is in, however unfair that feels.

Why cut-off dates move backwards

The checker on this site runs the comparison above against every bulletin in the archive, in your browser, without sending the date anywhere. Where a priority date sat in every published issue