Visa Bulletin Tracker Calculator

Current Cutoff and Last Month Cutoff both come from the official monthly Visa Bulletin published by the U.S. Department of State — locate your specific category and country row in both this month's and last month's bulletin, then convert each published cutoff date to how many months before today it falls. Your Priority Date is the filing date on your own petition or labor certification, converted the same way, and Historical Avg Movement is an estimate you can build by tracking your category's cutoff over several past bulletins.

Not current means the published cutoff for your visa category still needs to move further forward before it reaches your priority date, and Distance to Cutoff shows how many months of movement (in cutoff-date terms) still separate the two. This does not mean progress has stopped — categories can move in fits and starts, and a single month's movement is not a reliable guide to the pace over the following months, which is exactly why Historical Avg Movement exists as an alternative reference point.

The projection uses This Month's Movement as its pace assumption only when that figure is positive, meaning the cutoff genuinely advanced compared to last month; if the category didn't move forward at all this month (zero or negative movement), the calculator falls back to Historical Avg Movement instead, since projecting forward using a stalled or retrogressing month would produce a meaningless or infinite estimate. This fallback is a modeling choice to keep the projection usable, not a claim that the category will necessarily resume moving at its historical pace.

Retrogression happens when a visa category's cutoff date moves backward instead of forward, typically because demand from applicants exceeds the annual numerical limit available that fiscal year, pushing the effective cutoff to an earlier (more senior-only) date than before. This calculator flags Retrogression Risk as elevated whenever This Month's Movement is zero or negative, or is running well below your entered Historical Avg Movement, as an early signal that the pace you're relying on for planning may not hold.