The first Visa Bulletin for DV2026 has been released. For those of you new to visa buletins please read the article linked at the end of this post which will explain how to read the visa bulletin. Now – the numbers have started with very high numbers across all the regions. This will be interpreted as a sign that the visa bulletin will move very fast this year – but I can tell you that this early high start does NOT tell us anything about later progress. The first 2 or 3 visa bulletins are just “guesses” on the part of the government, they have no feedback from the embassies to know how they should be spreading their workload out. However, some of you may want to compare this to other years and you can do so at my link here showing historical visa bulletin numbers.

A BIG surprise for me is not seeing the selectee per country information in this visa bulletin. That is normally published in this visa bulletin or the one before it. However, I suspect they took it out at the last minute before publication when they realized the numbers are flawed due to the errors they have made in the selection process. Those errors have been pointed out in my lawsuit against the government which already caused a public admission of the errors for DV2025 at the end of last week. You can watch my recent videos about the lawsuit if you want to know more about that! In any case, it seems like we will have to wait another month for the selectee numbers – which sucks!

Those that are current, and have forms processed early enough, can normally expect their 2NL in the next 2 to 3 weeks from now. This is supposed to be the same every month. VB from the 8th to the 15th of each month, and 2NLs in the second half of the month. For the last few months there have been 2NLs in daily batches, but we seem to be moving to a more normal procedure where almost all the 2NLs are sent before the end of the month, with just a handful being sent earlier this month. I would normally expect all the interview 2NLs to have all been sent by the end of this month, but we can see recently they are exceeding that to try and get as many interviews in as possible. They can be sent right up until the last day of the month, and even the first few days of the following month during exceptional times.

To those new to looking at VBs, let me explain what the “except” XXX country means – and you can also read this post on how to read the visa bulletin.