The September 2026 Visa Bulletin closes out fiscal year 2026 with employment-based numbers frozen and one category already shut off entirely. EB-2 India is unavailable — not merely retrogressed to an early date, but with no Final Action Date at all — and the State Department has said it will remain unavailable through Sept. 30.
Across the rest of the employment-based chart, September brought no movement. The Final Action Dates are: EB-1 — Current worldwide, July 1, 2023 for China, Oct. 15, 2022 for India. EB-2 — Current worldwide, Sept. 1, 2021 for China, unavailable for India. EB-3 professionals and skilled workers — Sept. 1, 2024 worldwide, Jan. 1, 2022 for China, Jan. 1, 2014 for India. Every one of those dates is unchanged from August. USCIS confirmed it will honor Final Action Dates, not Dates for Filing, for adjustment-of-status filings in September, so an applicant needs a priority date earlier than the Final Action Date above to file or be approved this month.
The more urgent warning sits in the bulletin’s notes. The State Department cautioned that three categories may hit their annual limits and become unavailable before Sept. 30 arrives: EB-1 India, EB-2, and the EB-5 unreserved categories. Note that the EB-2 warning is not limited to India — it reaches the worldwide category that currently shows as Current. A category that exhausts its FY2026 allocation simply stops issuing numbers for the remainder of the fiscal year, which means an adjustment application sitting at USCIS cannot be approved even if the applicant is otherwise fully documented and interview-ready.
This is the annual end-of-year squeeze, and it resolves on a predictable schedule. Fiscal year 2027 begins Oct. 1, 2026, at which point a fresh allocation of employment-based numbers becomes available and the categories that ran dry in September reopen. The October 2026 Visa Bulletin, which will show where those dates land for the new fiscal year, is typically released in the second week of September.
For NIW and EB-2 applicants, the practical read is this. If you are India-born and waiting in EB-2, September is a dead month — nothing will be approved, and the question worth asking is where the October bulletin sets the date. If you are in the worldwide EB-2 category and currently show as Current, do not assume that state persists for the next four weeks; an approval that does not issue before the category exhausts will wait for October. And if you have an I-140 approved but have not yet filed adjustment, watch the October bulletin release rather than the September one, since it governs the fiscal year you will actually be filing into.
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