On 15 September 2026, admission for F, J and I nonimmigrants stopped being open-ended. That is not a forecast and no longer a countdown — the final rule took effect on that date, and you can read it yourself.
Two further DHS proposals are open for comment right now, and both land on the same population. Dates and links are in the table below. We re-check this page's regulatory facts against the Federal Register and the eCFR, and state when we last did so.
The rule, cited so you can check it
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Title | Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure for Nonimmigrant Academic Students, Exchange Visitors, and Representatives of Foreign Information Media |
| Agency | Department of Homeland Security |
| Type | Final rule |
| Published | 17 July 2026 |
| Effective | 15 September 2026 |
| Federal Register document | 2026-14439 |
| Codified at | 8 CFR 214.1(m)(1) — the transition provision the dashboard above implements |
| Status as last checked | In effect. We found no Federal Register correction, delay or stay of this rule published after 17 July 2026. Litigation status is not something we check — the Federal Register would not show it. |
Still open: two DHS proposals on the same population
These are proposed rules, not final ones. Nothing has changed yet, and the comment periods below are the dates that matter if you intend to respond.
| Proposal | Published | Comments close | What it would do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eliminating the Discretionary 60-Day Grace Period (2026-18631) | 11 September 2026 | 10 November 2026 | Remove 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2), ending the up-to-60-day grace period after employment ends for certain nonimmigrant classifications and their dependents. |
| Optional Practical Training Fees (2026-20660) | 8 October 2026 | 9 November 2026 | Introduce new fees for each F-1 student engaging in OPT through an SEVP-certified school. |
Both rows were read directly from the Federal Register API on 9 October 2026. Follow the links and check them yourself — that is why they are here.
What AUD Watch is intended to do
Hold your F-1 and J-1 population, compute each person's fixed admission end date under the rule, and tell you which deadlines are close — the work above, over your roster instead of a simulated one. It ingests a spreadsheet you already hold and export yourself; it does not connect to SEVIS and does not file anything.
Where it actually is today
Plainly, because this touches people's legal status and vagueness here would be a bad thing to sell:
- It holds no real data. Every record in the system is synthetic test data. No institution's population is in it.
- Real-data ingestion is deliberately switched off. Loading real records requires an authorisation that has not been granted. Until it is, every row loads flagged as synthetic — by design, not by oversight.
- Per-customer data isolation is now built and tested. As of 15 August 2026, row-level security policies scope every row to one institution, and they were verified with two test institutions: each could read only its own rows, an attempt to write a row belonging to the other was refused by the database, and a session presenting no institution claim sees nothing at all. This was the outstanding item on this list; it is done.
- There is no customer login yet. The data layer enforces separation, but the web sign-in a DSO would use to reach their own roster has not been built. Today an institution would be onboarded by hand.
- It does not email you yet. Deadlines are computed nightly, but automated notification to a DSO is not built. Until it is, this is a dashboard you look at, not a system that pages you.
- It is read-only. It does not file anything, submit anything, or transmit anything to any government system, and it is not intended to.
- It is not legal advice and is not a substitute for counsel or for SEVIS.
We would rather show you this list than a demo that implies otherwise. When the remaining items are done, this page will say so and will carry a price.
If this would be useful to you
Tell us. If you run an F-1 or J-1 population and this is the shape of the problem you are facing on 15 September, we would rather build it against a real institution's requirements than guess at them.