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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 January 2026 Visa Bulletin indicate the slow and steady advancement of visa processing queues over time – more a trot than a gallop – and gradual relief from visa availability "retrogression."
The DOS sets the number of permanent resident "spots" available in a given fiscal year for most employer-sponsored and some family-sponsored cases, allocated based on the foreign national's "priority date" (the date on which a petition was filed on their behalf) in both the category of employment-based sponsorship (graduate degreed professional, skilled worker) or family-based sponsorship (spouse of permanent resident, adult son or daughter or sibling of US citizen) and the foreign national's country of birth. When the number of sponsored foreign nationals exceeds the number of permanent resident spots available in each category, the DOS establishes processing queues to manage the backlog. The monthly Visa Bulletin indicates the queues for priority dates in each category. Since May 2023, the Visa Bulletin has been in "retrogression" (backlogged) in the employment-based categories through which most sponsored foreign nationals qualify (EB-2 and EB-3), resulting in delays in most foreign nationals' ability to apply for permanent residence in the US or to obtain immigrant visas abroad, even if the underlying sponsorship case has been approved.
Looking back over the past calendar year, many sponsored employees whose priority dates became current between April and December 2025 were scheduled for immigrant visa interviews, obtained their immigrant visas, and have relocated to the US as permanent residents. The Visa Bulletins issued at the start of the 2026 fiscal year (October, November, December) provided additional relief from retrogression by advancing priority dates and thereby reducing the projected wait times for immigrant visas abroad by up to a year in certain categories. In the January 2026 Visa Bulletin, priority date advancement in all employment-based categories for those residing abroad reduced those wait times even further.
We hope to see significant priority date advancement throughout 2026, and if the dates advance by even one more week in most EB-3 categories, many more sponsored employees' priority dates will become current, including those whose cases were filed after EB-3 retrogression began in May 2023, rewarding U.S. employers that continued to sponsor foreign nationals despite alarmist predictions about the impact of retrogression.
Because the popular EB-3 category encompasses a wide range of sponsored professions – from software developers to teachers to engineers to registered nurses – there is good reason to expect that its processing queues will continue to retrogress and advance over time. U.S. employers are urged to continue sponsoring foreign nationals and trust the process.
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