Sources
The single source
Everything published here comes from the Visa Bulletin issued monthly by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs. Each issue on this site carries the URL it was read from, and every table links back to it so any figure can be checked against the original in one click.
What counts as a source
Only the bulletin itself. Not a mirror, not a law firm summary, not a forum post, and not an earlier version of this site. The build rejects any record whose source is not a travel.state.gov address, so an untraceable figure cannot reach a page.
How one issue is put together
Every issue has the same skeleton, which is what makes a machine-readable copy of it possible at all. There are two charts: Final Action Dates, the cut-off for a case actually being approved, and Dates for Filing, the earlier cut-off for sending the application in. Each chart is printed as two tables, employment-based and family-sponsored.
Each table carries one row per preference category and one column per chargeability area. There are five columns: China, India, Mexico, the Philippines, and all chargeability areas except those listed, which is the column everybody else reads. Every cell holds one of three things: a cut-off date, a C for current, or a U for unavailable.
The issue also carries notes in prose, about categories close to their annual limit or about what will happen when the fiscal year turns over. Those are read, but they are not part of the grid, and this site keeps them apart from it.
What is transcribed, and what is not
The stored record of an issue is small, and deliberately so. Everything else on this site is arithmetic over it, and there is no second source anywhere in the pipeline that could quietly disagree with the first.
- Transcribed: the state of every cell on both charts, for every category and every chargeability area, and the cut-off date where there is one.
- Transcribed: the address of the official issue the values were read from, and the date they were read on.
- Not transcribed by default: the month’s prose notes. They are entered by hand only where they change how a published figure should be read.
- Not transcribed by default: the monthly USCIS decision about which chart adjustment of status filings may use. It is published by a different agency, in a different place. Where it has been entered it appears on the issue page; where it has not, the page says so rather than guessing.
How a month is checked before it is published
- A schema check. Every cell has a state; a cell marked current or unavailable carries no date; a dated cell carries a real one; the issue carries a travel.state.gov address.
- A coverage check. Every category and every chargeability area is present on both charts. A missing column fails the build rather than rendering as an empty space nobody notices.
- A contiguity check. The published months form an unbroken run with no gap in it. A gap would make every movement figure measured across it overstate the pace.
- A retrogression review. Every backward step is raised as a warning and read back against the official issue, because a genuine retrogression and a transcription slip look exactly alike in a table.
A month that fails any of the first three is not published at all. The fourth does not stop a build, because retrogressions are real events and stopping on them would be stopping on the news. It exists so that no backward step reaches a page without somebody having looked at the source a second time.
Corrections
A value that disagrees with its linked issue is a defect. Corrections are made against the official issue and the whole month is re-transcribed rather than patched cell by cell.