Applicants ahead of you
—at least
- Your priority date
- —
- Category
- —
- Same-month cohort
- —
- Data vintage
- —
Where this number comes from
Years covered by the table:
This is US federal government data in the public domain. We archive each monthly release so the series can be compared over time — USCIS overwrites some of these files in place, so past months are otherwise unrecoverable.
How it has moved
| Release | Ahead of you | Change |
|---|
Email me when this moves
One email per USCIS release, and only when your position moves by more than 250 — these counts jitter by a few dozen on their own, and an alert that fires every month regardless is an alert you would mute.
Get told when it moves
USCIS republishes this file every month and overwrites some of what came before. We keep every release, so we can tell you when a new one moves your position and show you the movement instead of describing it.
- One email per release, when your position actually moves
- Every archived release side by side, with the month-to-month change
- Your trailing 3-month rate, measured — not modelled
See membership Create a free account
The number above stays free, always. It is public federal data and you should not have to pay to see where you stand.
Why we will not tell you a year
Every competitor sells an estimated date. Here is the whole of the archived series for an EB-2 India priority date of June 2021, so you can see why we do not:
| Release | Ahead | Change |
|---|---|---|
| May 2026 | 28,179 | — |
| June 2026 | 30,305 | +2,126 |
| July 2026 | 27,952 | −2,353 |
| August 2026 | 27,736 | −216 |
The net change across those three months is −443, about −148 a month. Divide 27,736 by that and you get roughly 187 years — a number that is arithmetically correct and completely meaningless. The month-to-month swings are around fifteen times the size of the trend, and the queue moved backwards in one of the three months, because when a filing window opens, applicants with earlier priority dates join the line ahead of you.
So we report the series and the size of the swings, and we stop there. A date fitted through this would sell better and tell you nothing.
What this is not
- It is not a prediction of your date. It is a count of people ahead of you in a published file. Nobody can tell you when your date will be current.
- It is a lower bound. USCIS suppresses cells with small counts, so the real number is higher by an amount they do not publish. We show you how many cells were suppressed.
- It counts applicants with a pending I-485, not everyone in line. People who have an approved I-140 but have not yet filed are not in this file.
- It is not legal advice, and we are not attorneys.