The visa number is not printed anywhere on a green card. That eight-character code—one letter followed by seven digits, printed in red ink—appears only on the immigrant visa foil that a U.S. consulate placed inside your passport before you entered the country. The Permanent Resident Card (Form I-551) carries several other numbers, but the immigrant visa number is not one of them. If a form is asking for your visa number, you need your passport, not your green card.
Why the Visa Number Is Not on Your Green Card
The immigrant visa number identifies a specific travel document issued by the Department of State. It served its purpose the moment you were admitted to the United States, and it does not carry over onto the card USCIS later produces. Once you are inside the country as a permanent resident, your A-Number takes over as the primary identifier for nearly every domestic immigration process.
People land on this question because government forms sometimes ask for a “visa number” and they assume the answer must be somewhere on the card. It isn’t. And if you adjusted status inside the United States rather than going through a consulate abroad, you were never issued a visa foil in the first place, so there is no immigrant visa number to report. That is normal and doesn’t indicate a problem with your status. Many forms allow you to leave that field blank or write “N/A” when you adjusted status domestically; check the specific form’s instructions to be sure.
Where to Actually Find Your Visa Number
Pull out the passport you used when you entered the United States as a permanent resident. Look for the full-page visa foil (a sticker glued to one of the passport pages). The immigrant visa number sits in the lower right area of the foil and is printed in red. The format is a single letter followed by seven digits.1U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Immigrant Fee Payment: Tips on Finding Your A-Number and DOS Case ID
The same foil also displays two other identifiers that people frequently mix up with the visa number:
- The Registration Number, which is your A-Number. This remains valid for life even after the visa foil itself expires.
- The IV Case Number (the DOS Case ID), a separate identifier consisting of three letters followed by nine or ten digits. When reading it from the foil, drop the last two digits.1U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Immigrant Fee Payment: Tips on Finding Your A-Number and DOS Case ID
The red eight-character code is the visa number. Everything else on the foil is something different.
What Numbers Are on the Green Card
Knowing what the card does carry helps you avoid handing an employer or a form the wrong string of characters.
Front of the Card
The front carries the number you’ll use most often: the USCIS Number, also called the A-Number or Alien Registration Number. On cards issued after May 10, 2010, it appears labeled as “USCIS#” and consists of nine digits assigned by the Department of Homeland Security. On older cards, the same number appears as the “Alien Registration Number” or “A-Number” and may be seven, eight, or nine digits. These are the same number. If yours is fewer than nine digits, add a leading zero after the “A” to bring it up to nine.2USCIS. USCIS Number3U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. A-Number/Alien Registration Number/Alien Number
The A-Number stays with you for life, even after you naturalize. Think of it as your immigration social security number.
The front also shows a short category code (like IR1, CR1, or F2A) that identifies the immigration pathway through which you got your green card. IR1 means spouse of a U.S. citizen married more than two years; CR1 means the same but married less than two years. Employment-based, family-preference, and diversity visa categories each have their own codes. Also on the front: your date of birth, country of birth, the “resident since” date, and the card’s expiration date.
Back of the Card
Flip the card over. Along the top of the back is a card number: on newer editions, a 13-character string of three uppercase letters followed by ten digits. The letters indicate the USCIS service center that processed your case (LIN for Nebraska, SRC for Texas, WAC for California). This is essentially the receipt number from your green card application and tracks the specific card issuance rather than you as a person.4U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 13.1 List A Documents That Establish Identity and Employment Authorization On older card versions, this number may appear in a different spot or may not be present at all.
Below the card number are three lines of tightly spaced characters: the machine-readable zone (MRZ) that scanners read at border crossings and secure facilities. The first line encodes your residency type (C1 for U.S. resident, C2 for a border commuter living in Canada or Mexico), the issuing country, your A-Number, and the card number. The second line contains your date of birth, gender, and card expiration date. The third line holds your name. Each line is exactly 30 characters, with angle brackets filling unused spaces.
Your A-Number also appears in the MRZ, so if the front of your card is worn or damaged, you can still pull the same number from the back.4U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 13.1 List A Documents That Establish Identity and Employment Authorization
Notice what isn’t there: no visa number. Nowhere on the front, nowhere on the back, nowhere in the MRZ.
Which Number Does the Form Actually Want
Most of the time, a form asking about immigration identifiers wants your A-Number, not your visa number. Here’s a quick cheat sheet to keep the two straight:
- Form I-9 (employment verification): Your employer records the document number and expiration date from the front of the card. The document number is your USCIS Number (A-Number).5U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification
- Form N-400 (naturalization): The application asks for your A-Number. If it also asks for a visa number and you adjusted status inside the United States, the form’s instructions typically allow you to leave that field blank or enter “N/A.”
- Form I-90 (green card renewal or replacement): You’ll need your A-Number. If you can’t find your card, the same number appears on your visa foil as the “Registration Number.”1U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Immigrant Fee Payment: Tips on Finding Your A-Number and DOS Case ID
- USCIS Immigrant Fee payment: You’ll need both your A-Number and your DOS Case ID (the IV Case Number from the foil, minus the last two digits).1U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Immigrant Fee Payment: Tips on Finding Your A-Number and DOS Case ID
- Any form asking for the “visa number”: Look at the visa foil in your passport for the red eight-character code (one letter, seven digits). If you don’t have a visa foil because you adjusted status inside the United States, check the form’s instructions for what to enter in that field.
The short version: green card questions are almost always A-Number questions. The visa number is a passport thing, printed in red, and if you don’t have a passport foil, you probably don’t have a visa number to give.