Find and print your I-94 arrival record

Your I-94 is the electronic record Customs and Border Protection creates every time you enter the United States. It shows the date you arrived, the status you were admitted in, and the date your permitted stay ends.

Nobody hands you a paper copy. Most travellers arriving by air get no stamp at all. You have to download it yourself.

Cost

Free

Where

The CBP I-94 website

When

Available within a day or two of arrival

You need

Passport number, country of issue, date of birth, arrival date

Why this matters more than the visa in your passport

A visa is permission to ask to enter the country. The I-94 is the record of what you were actually granted once you were let in — and it is the I-94 date, not the visa expiry date, that determines how long you may lawfully stay.

Those two dates are often different. A visa can be valid for ten years while the admission it produced lasts six months.

Reading the record

Four fields matter, and it is worth checking each one rather than glancing at the date:

• Admission (I-94) number — the eleven-digit number every later form asks for
• Class of admission — the status you actually hold, which should match the visa you travelled on
• Admit until date — when your authorised stay ends. Some records show D/S instead, meaning "duration of status": permission lasts as long as you continue the activity you were admitted for, with no fixed end date. That is normal for students and some exchange visitors, and it means the relevant end date lives on your I-20 or DS-2019 rather than here
• Date of entry

How to get it

1. Go to the official CBP I-94 site (linked below).
2. Choose "Get most recent I-94".
3. Enter your name exactly as it appears in your passport, your passport number, country of issue and date of birth.
4. Download the PDF and save a copy somewhere you will still have it in five years.

If the site cannot find your record, check for these common causes: a middle name typed into the wrong field, names entered in a different order from the passport, a passport number with the letter O instead of a zero, or a record that has not synced yet if you arrived within the last 48 hours. Travellers who entered by land or sea sometimes have no electronic record at all and hold a paper I-94 instead.

Download a new one after every trip

The record is replaced each time you enter the country. A short holiday abroad produces a new I-94, sometimes with a different admit-until date from the one before it. Downloading it on return takes two minutes and is the only way to notice a change that shortens your stay.

What to do with it

You will be asked for the I-94 by:

• the Social Security office when you apply for a number
• the DMV when you apply for a driver's licence or state ID
• your employer when completing Form I-9
• your school when enrolling

Keep a PDF on your phone and a printed copy with your passport — see the documents to protect from day one.

Travel history

The same site shows your last ten years of U.S. entries and exits. That history is what immigration forms mean when they ask for your travel dates, so it is worth downloading before you fill in any application — reconstructing it from memory and old boarding passes is how discrepancies get onto forms.

The admit-until date also belongs on the list in tracking when your documents expire, because it is the date that governs status even when a visa in the passport runs longer.