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The answer to this question changed on September 15, 2026, and older guidance on the subject is no longer reliable. For many years F-1 students were admitted for duration of status, which meant there was no end date at all: you could remain as long as you were enrolled full time and making normal progress. A final rule published on July 17, 2026 replaced that with a fixed date of admission.
You may stay until the date shown on your electronic Form I-94, and no longer. That date is built from the program end date on your Form I-20, subject to a maximum of four years, with a further thirty days added so that you can wrap up and depart. It is not the expiration date printed on the visa in your passport, which controls travel to the border and nothing else.
Note that the departure period is thirty days. Students have long been used to sixty, and that is one of the changes most easily missed.
The four-year maximum runs from your program start date. Two periods sit outside it. The thirty days before your program start date, during which you are permitted to enter the country, do not count against the four years, and neither does the thirty-day departure period at the end. The effect is that a genuine four-year program does not lose time at either end.
Plenty of programs do, and doctoral candidates in particular should assume they will need more than one period of admission. The four-year cap is not a limit on how long you may study; it is a limit on how long a single admission lasts. When it runs out you either apply to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to extend your stay or travel abroad and be readmitted for a fresh period. The same pattern applies to a student at an SEVP-certified private school covering several grades, who will need to renew roughly every four years. The mechanics are set out on the page about extending your stay.
This is the trap most likely to catch a well-organized student. If you complete your studies or training before the date on your I-94, that date stops protecting you. Your school should shorten the program end date in the system, and you then have thirty days from actual completion to depart or to put something else in place. Advanced credit, summer coursework or simply finishing a dissertation ahead of schedule can therefore bring your deadline forward by months.
Post-completion practical training extends the time you can spend in the United States, and the STEM extension can add a further period on top of it. The allowances themselves were not changed by the 2026 rule: broadly, twelve months of optional practical training for each higher educational level you complete, and a further twenty-four months for graduates in qualifying science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.
What did change is that the employment authorization document no longer carries your stay with it. If your admission period ends when your studies end, you will generally need to apply to extend your stay at the same time as you apply for the training, or else depart and be readmitted. The thirty-day departure period then runs from the end of the training rather than the end of the course. See work authorization for how the two applications fit together.
Time is no longer the only constraint. A student who completes a program at one educational level may only move on to a higher one. Finishing a bachelor’s degree and then starting another bachelor’s degree, or an associate degree, is no longer permitted in F-1 status. The limit applies prospectively, so programs completed before September 15, 2026 do not count against you. The rule also restricts transfers and changes of major or level, particularly during the first academic year and at the graduate level, and the Department of Homeland Security has reserved the ability to delay those provisions, so their timing should be checked.
Students who were properly maintaining F-1 status on that date, having been admitted for duration of status, were not cut off. They may remain until the later of the program end date on the I-20 or the expiration of an employment authorization document, subject to an outside limit of four years from September 15, 2026 plus the sixty-day departure period that applied under the old system. That limit falls on November 14, 2030. One caution: travelling abroad during the transition period ends the arrangement, because you will be readmitted with a fixed date like everyone else.
Diarize the date on your I-94 the day you receive it, and check it again after every entry, since each re-entry generates a new record. Missing it leaves you out of status, and the route back is reinstatement rather than a simple extension.
Related pages: extending your stay, traveling outside the United States and the general requirements for F-1.
This page is general information, not legal advice. The framework described here took effect in 2026 and remains subject to further guidance, so confirm the current position against government sources and discuss your own circumstances with an attorney.