Visas and the queue
Priority date
Also called PD, eb5 priority date, 排期.
A priority date is the date USCIS properly receives a complete, signed and paid Form I-526 or I-526E, and it fixes the investor's place in the visa queue for their country of chargeability and their EB-5 category.
What it decides
The definition is settled, but its usual citation is not. The text of 8 CFR 204.6(d) still printed in the CFR comes from the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program Modernization Rule, which Behring Regional Center LLC v. Wolf, 544 F. Supp. 3d 937 (N.D. Cal. 2021) vacated, and DHS confirms the vacatur reverted 8 CFR 204.6 to its 20 November 2019 text without yet removing the dead language from the CFR (91 FR 40676, 2 July 2026). The operative version fixes the date and says nothing more, so the familiar rules that a denied petition establishes no priority date, that a date is not transferable, and that an investor with several approved petitions takes the earliest of them all rest on vacated text. The practical consequence is that EB-5 has no general priority date retention today: 8 CFR 204.5(e) grants retention only in the first, second and third preferences, and DHS has so far only proposed extending it to EB-5. The retention that does exist is narrow. Under 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(M) an investor whose regional center, new commercial enterprise or job-creating entity is terminated or debarred keeps the original priority date under clause (v)(I), but only by taking the clause (ii) remedial step and filing an amendment within 180 days of USCIS notice, and clause (vi) withholds the benefit from an investor who knowingly took part in the conduct. Separately, a regional center need only file Form I-956F before an investor may petition, not have it approved (8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(F)(i)), so waiting for approval buys nothing and costs every month of queue position it consumes.
Where this is explained properly
Pages here that go into priority date rather than mentioning it.
Related terms
- Visa BulletinThe Visa Bulletin is the monthly Department of State publication that reports, by preference category and country of chargeability, which priority dates have reached the front of the immigrant visa queue.
- Final Action DateA final action date, shown in the Department of State Visa Bulletin as an Application Final Action Date, is the cut-off at which an immigrant visa may actually be issued or an adjustment of status approved for a given preference category and country of chargeability.
- Dates for FilingDates for Filing is the more permissive of the two cutoff charts in each monthly Visa Bulletin, and its date is normally later than the matching Final Action Dates cutoff, so it opens paperwork earlier in the queue than a visa number is actually ready. For Form I-485 it applies only in the months and categories USCIS designates; the State Department uses it separately to decide when the National Visa Center asks a consular applicant for documents.
- RetrogressionVisa retrogression is a Visa Bulletin cut-off date moving backward, so a priority date that was current one month is not current the next, because demand in a category or country outran the visa numbers available.
Checked against primary sources on . Back to the glossary