Every month the U.S. State Department publishes a set of tables called the Visa Bulletin. For many Vietnamese families it is the only document that says how much longer a sponsorship petition has to wait. It is also very nearly unreadable: in English, laid out as a grid, and explained nowhere.
This piece is about how to read it. It contains none of this month's numbers, because those change monthly and would be wrong within weeks. What does not change is the method, and the method is worth learning once.
First: you may not be in a queue at all
The law caps how many green cards are issued each year. Family-sponsored immigration has a floor of at least 226,000 a year; the employment-based total is 140,000, plus whatever the family categories left unused the year before.
But one group sits outside those caps entirely: the spouse, the parents, and the unmarried children under 21 of a U.S. citizen. They are called immediate relatives, and according to the Congressional Research Service they are not subject to numerical limits. No limit means no queue, and the Visa Bulletin says nothing about their cases.
This is the first thing to establish, because it removes a great deal of unnecessary worry. If the sponsor is a U.S. citizen and the beneficiary is a spouse, parent, or young child, the rest of this article does not apply to you.
Four family categories, five employment categories
Everyone else falls into a preference category, each with its own allocation.
On the family side the law sets four categories: unmarried sons and daughters over 21 of U.S. citizens (23,400 visas); spouses and young children of permanent residents (114,200, of which at least 77% is reserved for spouses and children); married sons and daughters of U.S. citizens (23,400); and brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens aged 21 or over (65,000).
That last one holds more Vietnamese families than any other, and it waits the longest. Sixty-five thousand places a year, split across the whole world, for a category in which nearly every immigrant family has someone who qualifies.
On the employment side the law sets five categories, the first three at 28.6% of the total each, the last two at 7.1% each.
The 7% country ceiling
This is what makes the wait different depending on where you were born. The law provides that visas issued to people born in any single country may not exceed 7% of that year's total.
Seven percent applies to every country identically, whether it is large or small, whether it sends many applicants or few. The consequence is that a country with more applicants has a longer queue — not because it is treated differently, but because the same ceiling is divided among more people.
In the Visa Bulletin this appears as columns. A handful of high-demand countries get their own column and everyone else shares a general one. Which countries have their own column changes over time, so the first thing to do on opening the tables is check whether Vietnam has a separate column that month or falls in the general one. Read the wrong column and everything after it is wrong.
The priority date: your place in line
Every petition has a marker called the priority date. It is your place in the queue, and it does not move.
For a sponsorship petition, the federal regulation states that the priority date is the filing date of the petition that was later approved. The filing date, that is — not the approval date. A petition filed in 2015 and approved in 2019 still holds its 2015 place.
Employment cases work slightly differently: the priority date is the earlier of two dates — when the Department of Labor received the labor certification application, or when USCIS received the immigrant petition.
The priority date is printed on the receipt notice. It is the one number you need in hand before opening the tables.
Two tables, not one
This is where most confusion starts, and it is the part most worth understanding.
The Visa Bulletin publishes two tables per category. The first is Final Action Dates. A case can receive its green card once its priority date is earlier than the date shown in that table.
The second is Dates for Filing. Since 2015 the State Department has published this alongside, with more recent cutoffs, and according to the Congressional Research Service it can only be used by people already in the United States waiting to adjust status. Anyone interviewing at a consulate does not use it.
There is one more layer: each month USCIS announces which of the two tables it will accept for adjustment of status. When it determines that more visas are available than there are known applicants, it allows the filing-dates table, and people can file earlier. So before opening the Bulletin you need to know which table USCIS is honouring that month — otherwise you have the tables but not the one that is yours.
The two tables do different jobs. The filing table lets paperwork go in and opens the door to a temporary work permit; the final-action table is the one that issues the green card.
The letters C and U
Sometimes a cell holds no date at all, only a letter.
C means current: the category is open, anyone may file, no comparison of priority dates needed. U means unavailable: the category has no places for the time being, and nobody may file until further notice.
When the dates move backwards
People tend to picture a queue that only advances. It does not.
Dates in the tables generally move forward over time, but demand rises and falls month to month, so some months they hold still and some months they slip back. When more people file in a category than there are places left, the State Department may have to retrogress the dates to keep the queue orderly.
A date moving backwards does not mean a case has lost its place. Your priority date is untouched. It is the marker you compare against that has moved, so the wait gets longer.
What the tables do not answer
The Visa Bulletin tells you exactly one thing: whether a visa number is available for your priority date.
It does not say whether the petition will be approved. It does not say how fast the agency is working. It does not say what documents are missing. A case whose turn has come can still be refused for other reasons, and a case that qualifies still has to wait its turn.
Why this increasingly concerns Vietnamese families
The employment categories used to contain almost no Vietnamese nationals. According to the Congressional Research Service, drawing on Department of Homeland Security figures, Vietnam accounted for 458 employment-based green cards in fiscal 2013, ranking 46th. By fiscal 2023 the figure was 3,330, the 12th-largest source country.
More than sevenfold in a decade. Which means more Vietnamese families now have someone in an employment-based queue rather than only a family one — and those are different tables, read in different ways.
Four things to do
- Find your priority date on the receipt notice and write it down. Without that number the tables cannot be read at all.
- Identify the right category and the right column. Getting either wrong gives a wrong answer, and people go wrong here far more often than in reading the date itself.
- Check which table USCIS is honouring that month before comparing dates, if the case is an adjustment of status inside the United States.
- Do not pay anyone to look this up. The Visa Bulletin is published openly at travel.state.gov every month, free, with no account needed.
Who this is written for
For readers in the United States sponsoring a relative: this is how to answer the question that comes every year — how much longer. The honest answer is often unwelcome, but knowing how to look it up beats guessing.
For readers in Vietnam already in a queue: your case has a specific number and a specific place. Learn to read the tables once and you will know where you stand without asking anyone, and without paying anyone.
And for both: these are tables of numbers, nothing more. Whether a case is approved is a separate question, and that one belongs to an immigration attorney or a representative accredited by the Department of Justice.
Bảo Nguyễn
Bảo Nguyễn founded Saigon Sentinel to give the Vietnamese diaspora truly independent, in-depth community coverage at a time when misinformation moves faster than fact-checks and the language barrier makes verification harder than it should be. He sets the editorial standards and quality controls that govern the reporting, chooses the subjects, writes and edits each article, reads it against its sources before publication, audits published output, and handles corrections.