The Parent Visit Clock

A B-2 visitor for pleasure who is otherwise admissible and issued a Form I-94 will be admitted for a minimum period of six months, and exceptions to that minimum may be made only in individual cases on the specific approval of the district director for good cause. No B-1 or B-2 visitor may be admitted for more than one year at a time. Extensions of stay are granted in increments of not more than six months each.

A visa's expiry date says until when a person may ASK to be admitted at a port of entry. The authorised period of stay is the date recorded on the Form I-94 at admission, and that is the date every rule below counts from. A ten-year visa does not authorise a ten-year stay, and a visa that expires during a lawful visit does not shorten it. Confusing the two is the single most common way a family believes they are lawfully present when they are not.

An application to extend a period of stay must be filed before the authorised stay on the Form I-94 expires. Filing late does not extend anything: once the date passes, the person is no longer in the status the extension would have prolonged. This is why the I-94 date matters as a filing deadline weeks before it matters as a departure date — the paperwork takes time that a family watching only the departure date will not have left.

An individual unlawfully present in the United States for more than one hundred and eighty days but less than one year, who then voluntarily departs before removal proceedings begin, is inadmissible for THREE years from the date of that departure. An individual unlawfully present for one year or more who then departs is inadmissible for TEN years. The bar is triggered by the DEPARTURE, not by the overstay itself — which is why the discovery so often comes too late to do anything about.

Where a person was lawfully admitted or paroled, filed a non-frivolous application for a change or extension of status BEFORE their period of stay expired, and has not worked without authorisation, the unlawful-presence calculation is tolled while that application is pending — but the tolling is capped at one hundred and twenty days. A pending application is therefore real protection with a real ceiling: past that ceiling the clock resumes even though no decision has arrived.

No period of time in which an individual is under eighteen years of age is taken into account in determining the period of unlawful presence. A child's overstay does not accrue toward the three-year or ten-year bars while they remain a minor — a relief that applies to grandchildren travelling with grandparents, and one that does not extend to the accompanying adults.

The regulation sets a minimum and a maximum for each admission and an increment for each extension. It sets NO cumulative annual limit across repeated visits, and no ratio of time in to time out. That absence is not permission: admission is decided by an officer at each entry, and a pattern of long or near-continuous visits can lead to a shorter admission or a refusal even where no single stay broke any rule. Anyone told a specific number of days or months is 'the rule' for repeat visits has been told something the regulation does not contain.