The trip itselfQuestion 2 of 11
“How long will you stay?”
The short answer
A 10-year visa is not a 10-year stay. The State Department says the expiration date on your visa "does not reflect how long you are authorized to stay." The CBP officer at the port of entry decides that, each time you travel. Stay past that date and the visa is voided, and you may be ineligible for future visas.
The advice going around
A ten-year visa sounds like ten years
The date printed on a visa is how long you may keep arriving at the border. How long you may stay once you are through it is decided separately, by a different officer, on each trip. Parents who answer this question with the visa's own number are answering a question nobody asked.
At the window
The same question, answered two ways
What most people say
“Sir, the visa is for ten years, isn’t it… so, ten years!”
What works
“Sir, two months. Our daughter-in-law’s baby is due in March. Then we come back home.”
A ten-year visa isn’t a ten-year stay. The officer at the airport decides how long.
His inner voice · episode 2
So give the officer a length that fits the reason for your trip.
Check it yourself
What the embassy actually publishes
A US visa's expiry date is not how long you may stay
does not reflect how long you are authorized to stay within the United States
Read 13 October 2026
A border officer sets the length of each stay, not the visa
Entry and the length of authorized stay[ … ] are determined by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officer at the port-of-entry each time you travel
Read 13 October 2026
Staying past the date can make you ineligible for later US visas
may also make you ineligible for future visas
Read 13 October 2026
The rule behind it
What the law actually says
A US visa application starts from the assumption that you intend to stay
The officer does not start from neutral. The law tells them to assume you intend to stay, and the burden is on you to show otherwise. That is why almost every question is a way of asking the same thing: what brings you back.
Every alien [ … ] shall be presumed to be an immigrant until he establishes to the satisfaction of the consular officer, at the time of application for a visa [ … ] that he is entitled to a nonimmigrant status.
What we can and cannot do
We are licensed for Canada (RCIC R710507). We help with US visitor visa applications, and for US legal advice a US-licensed immigration attorney is the person to ask.
Where this stops
What this page does not claim
This page does not say how long a US visitor visa issued in India runs for. Ten years is what Papa believes in the episode, said by him, and it is not stated as a fact on screen or in the caption.
Keep going
The rest of the interview
Before the window
Send us the file before the interview, not after.
We read the DS-160 against what the officer will ask, tell you which answers are doing you harm, and say plainly where the gaps are. If the honest answer is that nothing is wrong, we say that too.
Three fields · about 30 seconds