With the new fiscal year nine days away and the October 2026 Visa Bulletin still unpublished, EB-1 applicants born in mainland China are doing what they usually do when the State Department goes quiet: building their own models.
A thread on the Chinese-language immigration forum 1Point3Acres has become the focal point. Posted about six days ago by a user going by bugcy, it compiles the past 14 quarters of mainland-China EB-1 I-140 filings and approvals — explicitly, in the author’s framing, to give the community a basis for predicting the new fiscal year’s priority dates. The thread has drawn roughly 1,827 replies and more than 525,000 views, which is a fair measure of how much attention the October reset is getting.
Where EB-1 China actually stands
The September 2026 Visa Bulletin left EB-1 China unchanged:
- Final Action Date: July 1, 2023
- Date for Filing: December 1, 2023
The Final Action Date did not move from August to September. For a category that is supposed to be the fastest employment-based route, a static cutoff more than three years in the past is the central frustration driving threads like this one.
Why October is the date everyone is watching
Fiscal year 2027 begins October 1, 2026, and with it the annual and per-country visa limits reset. That reset is the one predictable moment in the year when a category starved of numbers can move, because a fresh allocation becomes available. It is also why a category can sit frozen — or go unavailable — through late September and then jump.
As of today, the State Department has not published the October 2026 bulletin. Anything circulating about October EB-1 China dates is a projection, not an official figure.
What the underlying data does and does not tell you
Community aggregations of USCIS I-140 quarterly reports are genuinely useful: they show demand building in a category, which is the input that drives retrogression. They also have real limits. I-140 approvals are not the same as visa demand — a beneficiary may already hold an approved petition and be waiting on an available number, may have filed in multiple categories, or may never adjust status at all. Filing volume is a leading indicator of pressure, not a forecast of a cutoff date.
Separately, the quality bar is tightening independent of the queue. USCIS data for the third quarter of FY 2026 put the EB-1A approval rate at roughly 32% — a reminder that for many applicants the binding constraint is adjudication, not the bulletin.
The honest summary: wait for the official bulletin, treat projections as projections, and if you are considering EB-1A, assume the evidentiary standard is higher than it was two years ago.
Source: 1Point3Acres (一亩三分地) 移民绿卡 forum; September 2026 Visa Bulletin.
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Source: 1Point3Acres (一亩三分地)