Methodology

GreenCard Radar publishes statistical projections, not legal advice. This page explains exactly where our numbers come from and how we hold ourselves accountable for them. If something here is unclear, that is a bug — tell us.

1. Data sources

Visa Bulletin cutoffs are parsed directly from the U.S. Department of State’s monthly bulletins. We have backfilled and committed 202 consecutive months (October 2009 – July 2026) of Final Action Dates and Dates for Filing for every employment- and family-based category and country. Each month’s snapshot is stamped with the bulletin month it represents, not the date we fetched it.

2. The velocity model

For a given category and country we:

1. take the trailing 24 months of cutoff values;
2. measure the advance, in days, between each consecutive pair of dated cutoffs (months marked Current or Unavailable break the chain and are skipped);
3. take the median monthly advance as the expected pace and the standard deviation as its volatility;
4. project forward from the current cutoff at the median pace until it reaches your priority date — that is the point estimate;
5. re-run the projection at the median ± one standard deviation to produce the optimistic / pessimistic range.

3. When we refuse to give a number

If the trailing window shows no net forward movement — a stall or repeated retrogression — we say so instead of inventing a date. If the category is Unavailable, we cannot estimate and we tell you that plainly. A confidence range is a statement about cutoff movement, never a promise about your individual case.

4. How we track accuracy

Because we hold the full historical series, we can replay the model as it would have run in any past month and compare its projection to what actually happened. We publish that hit rate — misses included — on the accuracy scorecard. Going forward, every live prediction is written to an append-only log before the corresponding bulletin is published, so the record cannot be edited after the fact.

5. Limits

Cutoff movement is driven by demand, per-country limits, spillover and policy changes that no purely historical model can foresee. Fiscal year-end (August–September) routinely brings retrogression. Treat every estimate as one input, and verify your situation with a licensed immigration attorney.