Green Card Priority Date Calculator

U.S. immigration law caps green cards per country at a fixed percentage of the annual total regardless of how many qualified applicants a country has, so countries with very high demand relative to that fixed per-country allocation — historically India and China in the employment-based categories — accumulate enormous backlogs while countries with lower demand relative to their allocation see much shorter waits or none at all in the same category.

The built-in defaults are illustrative estimates based on typical historical patterns for each category and country combination, but actual visa bulletin backlogs shift over time as demand and annual allocations change, sometimes significantly within a single year. If you know your specific category and country's actual current backlog from the State Department's monthly Visa Bulletin, entering it directly will produce a meaningfully more accurate estimate than relying on this calculator's generic defaults.

Yes — this is called retrogression, and it happens when demand in a category or country surges faster than the annual allocation can absorb, forcing the cutoff date to move backward even though time keeps passing. This calculator assumes steady, positive monthly forward movement, so it can't account for a period of retrogression, which means real-world wait times can end up longer than a simple average-movement projection suggests.

It expresses how much of the estimated total backlog your priority date has already worked through, calculated as months already waited divided by total estimated backlog. A progress figure near 100% means you're likely close to the front of the queue for your category and country, while a low percentage means most of the estimated wait, based on current assumptions, still lies ahead.