Processes & Forms

Priority Date

The date that establishes an immigrant's place in the visa waiting line for a green card, typically the date the petition was filed.

What It Means

The priority date is the single most important number in an employment- or family-based green card case because it determines when the beneficiary can file for adjustment of status or consular processing. For family-sponsored petitions (F1 unmarried adult children of citizens, F2A spouses/minor children of LPRs, F2B unmarried adult children of LPRs, F3 married children of citizens, F4 siblings of citizens), the priority date is the receipt date of Form I-130. For employment-based petitions in EB-2 and EB-3, the priority date is the filing date of the PERM labor certification (ETA Form 9089) with the Department of Labor, unless the case is Schedule A or National Interest Waiver-based, in which case it is the I-140 receipt date. For EB-1 and EB-5, the priority date is the I-140 or I-526/I-526E receipt date. A priority date becomes "current" when it is earlier than the date listed in the applicable column of the monthly Visa Bulletin. Because of the 7% per-country cap under INA section 202(a)(2), applicants chargeable to India, China, Mexico, and the Philippines face far longer waits than the rest of the world. EB-2 India and EB-3 India priority dates have at times been backlogged to 2012 or earlier, representing more than a decade of wait even after approval of the underlying petition. Beneficiaries who change jobs or employers may port their priority date to a new I-140 filing under AC21 section 106(c). Cross-chargeability under INA section 202(b) allows spouses to use each other's country of chargeability, sometimes dramatically shortening waits.

Priority Date is one of the immigration-law or USCIS-process concepts that recurs across VisaTracker. The definition above is the technical answer; below is the practical context for how it shows up in the USCIS data behind the site.

In the VisaTracker Pipeline Score, this concept feeds either the processing-time, approval-rate, or backlog-trend factor weighting. The methodology page describes how the inputs combine into the headline per-field-office score.