October 2026 Visa Bulletin: Tricks and Treats to Start the New Fiscal Year

Foreign nationals and their sponsoring US employers eagerly await the monthly release of the US Department of State (DOS) Visa Bulletin, to confirm when they will be eligible to apply for permanent residence in the US: the ultimate goal of a green card and a path to US citizenship. Updates announced in the October 2026 Visa Bulletin—the first Visa Bulletin of the 2027 fiscal year that usually coincides with the release of new visa availability—are a Halloween-candy mixed bag of good news and disappointment, with both advancement (Twix!) and “retrogression”/backlogs (Milk Duds…) in the various case processing queues, depending on the foreign national’s country of birth, category of employer-sponsored status, and whether the case will be processed as an immigrant visa at a consulate abroad or as an application for Adjustment of Status (AOS) to permanent residence in the US.

In short: Extraordinary-ability workers and multinational executives or managers (EB-1) born in India, and all categories of sponsored employees born in China, took the most significant steps forward in case processing queues and permanent residence eligibility (full size Snickers!). Processing queues for professionals and skilled workers in most other categories and countries of birth remained static or retrogressed by more than two years (candy corn, stale gummy bears). Below is a high-level summary of the movement in each category, focusing on the “Dates for Filing” chart that USCIS is utilizing for adjustment of status (I-485) filings in October. Note that immigrant visa issuance and actual permanent residence approval depends on a separate chart (“Final Action”) which can be found at the link below.

• EB-1: All countries other than India or China remain current for filing
  • India and China filing dates advanced to July 1, 2024
• EB-2: All countries other than India or China retrogressed from current to establish a cut off date for filing of March 15, 2026
  • Filing date for China advanced to January 1, 2023
  • Filing date for India is January 15, 2015, after being unavailable in September
• EB-3: All countries other than India, China, or the Philippines retrogressed to August 1, 2024
  • Filing date for Philippines is January 1, 2024
  • Filing date for India is the same as EB-2, January 15, 2015
  • Filing date for China advanced to April 1, 2024

To review the full Visa Bulletin, including Final Action dates and other employment-based categories, visit: DOS October 2026 Visa Bulletin

Looking back over the past fiscal year, many sponsored employees with 2023 priority dates filed I-485 applications or obtained immigrant visas and relocated to the US as permanent residents, especially following issuance of the April 2026 Visa Bulletin, when priority dates in certain EB-2 and EB-3 categories became “current” for the first time in years, and many other EB-2 and EB-3 categories advanced by up to a year in the Dates for Filing chart of the Visa Bulletin. USCIS complicated matters starting in May 2026, when it announced that it would be using the Final Action Dates chart to determine who is eligible to file an AOS application, which brought US-based case processing to an abrupt halt only two weeks after the May 2026 Visa Bulletin was released, and then remained static for the next four months.

Because the popular EB-2 and EB-3 categories encompass a wide range of sponsored professions held by individuals born in every country, there is good reason to expect that their processing queues will continue to retrogress and advance over time. U.S. employers are urged to continue sponsoring foreign nationals and trust the process, because although the visa processing queues ebb and flow, like the annual appearance of your favorite Halloween candy, the ultimate goal of permanent residence is worth the wait.

For more information on how employer-sponsored case processing may be impacted by the Visa Bulletin, please contact a member of the Clark Hill Immigration team. For a detailed background on the Visa Bulletin and priority dates, visit: Priority Date and Visa Bulletin Explainer

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