F3: a U.S. citizen’s married son or daughter, and the whole family behind them

A queue for households, not individuals

An F3 petition starts with one Form I-130 from the citizen parent for a married son or daughter. Every visa issued in the case, though, counts against the F3 numbers: the beneficiary’s spouse and each child under 21 take one too. That is why a single F3 priority date can represent four or five immigrants, and why the CSPA age rule matters so much here: children born after the filing can grow past 21 during the wait.

Fifteen years of slow progress, then a jump

In October 2011 the worldwide cutoff was September 8, 2001. A decade later, in October 2021, it was November 22, 2008, and a year after that it had not moved at all. It reached September 8, 2011 in October 2025. The bulletin of September 2026 then added 890 days in one step, and today’s date is October 22, 2014; the latest bulletin left it unchanged. F3 has retrogressed only 2 times since 2001, most sharply by about 17 months in January 2011.

Mexico and the Philippines

A married son born in Mexico waits on a separate line at July 1, 2001, some 13.3 years behind the worldwide date; a married daughter born in the Philippines is at July 22, 2006. Country of birth of the beneficiary decides the column, and a derivative spouse born elsewhere can sometimes change it through cross-chargeability, explained in the chargeability guide. The F3 Mexico and F3 Philippines pages follow those two lines.

What moves a case into or out of F3

• Marriage of an F1 beneficiary converts the case to F3 with the original priority date.
• Divorce or widowhood converts it back to F1 if the beneficiary is 21 or older, to immediate relative if under 21.
• A resident parent has no F3 at all; the category begins on naturalization.

Paperwork while the date is far

USCIS lists 53.5 to 64.5 months at the National Benefits Center for this I-130 type. Most F3 families finish at a consulate abroad; the consular processing costs are paid per person, which adds up in a family of five. A beneficiary already in the United States in a status that allows adjustment can instead file Form I-485 once the Date for Filing, November 1, 2014 this month, is later than the priority date, in a month when USCIS designates that chart on its filing-charts page. For priority dates four years behind the cutoff, our back-test missed by a median of 10 months and the range caught 46 % of outcomes.

F3 in the October 2026 bulletin

Every October since 2002

How our forecast did for this case