What C and U mean in the Visa Bulletin

C: current

C means there is no cut-off for that category and country. Every priority date qualifies, however recent. The queue has caught up with demand, so the Department of State does not need a cut-off to ration numbers.

C is not a promise about next month. A category that is current can acquire a cut-off in the next issue, and does, particularly late in the fiscal year when annual limits start to bind. It also does not mean a case will be adjudicated quickly: it means visa availability is not the thing holding it up.

U: unavailable

U means no visa numbers are available for that category and country at all in that month. Not "a long wait": none. No case in that cell can be approved while it says U, whatever the priority date.

U appears for two quite different reasons, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.

• The annual limit for that category has been consumed. This is the common one, it clusters in the last months of the fiscal year, and it normally resolves on 1 October when the new year’s numbers become available.
• The category itself has no current legal authorisation. Some categories depend on periodic reauthorisation by Congress, and a category can go unavailable because the authority to issue in it has lapsed rather than because the numbers ran out. That does not resolve on a calendar.

A category that goes from a date straight to U has not moved backwards in the ordinary sense. It has closed. When it reopens, the cut-off it reopens at is a separate question, and it is frequently earlier than where it closed.

Why the difference matters on a chart

Collapsing C and U into "no date" loses the difference between no wait at all and a complete stop. They are opposite situations that happen to be typographically similar, and any chart or tracker that treats both as an empty cell will draw a line that is wrong in one of the two directions.

Every cell here is stored as one of current, unavailable, or dated, and the build refuses a cell whose state and date disagree. How this site stores the three states