Do Global Entry Appointments Really Open on the First Monday? Two Years of Data Say: At Some Centers

Omaha: 9:00 AM on the first Monday, for two years

Each dot below is a batch release at the Omaha enrollment center. The column is the month, the position within the column is the day of the month, and the height is the time of day. Blue dots landed on the first Monday of the month.

That row of blue dots is not a coincidence. Of the 24 first Mondays we were watching that weren't Labor Day, Omaha released new appointments on 23, every time within a few minutes of 9:00 AM Central. The one exception was July 2024, when the release came the next morning. On Labor Day the office is closed and the release is simply skipped. In January 2026 our own monitoring was down that morning, so we can't say either way.

Each release is small, usually 50 to 120 appointments, stretching about three months ahead. Omaha also adds a handful of next-few-days appointments at 9:00 AM on some other Mondays (the orange dots on the same line).

Knowing the time is only half of it, though, because everyone else who knows it is there too. On October 5, 2026, the earliest new dates (early December) were gone by 9:13 AM, and nearly all of the release was booked before lunch. In February 2025 the whole release was gone by 9:05.

Richmond: 8:00 AM, and it plans around Labor Day

The Richmond, VA, enrollment center is the most regular center we track.

Richmond released new appointments on every one of the 24 non-holiday first Mondays we watched since July 2024, between 7:58 and 8:24 AM Eastern and usually within five minutes of 8:00. A 25th, January 2026, fell during an outage on our side; the new appointments were there when we came back that evening, so it almost certainly released on schedule too.

Labor Day is where Richmond stands out. Omaha skips the release when the office is closed. Richmond moves it to the Friday before, at the same 8:00 AM, and has done so three years running: August 30, 2024, August 29, 2025, and September 4, 2026.

Its releases are also different in kind. Each one is about 130 to 300 appointments, but they start the next day and run only three to four weeks out, so a release is essentially the coming month's calendar. Our forecasts for Richmond have been right every time we've graded one: 10 of 10 over the past year.

Bradley: a new schedule, then a wobble

The Bradley International Airport center near Hartford, CT, tells a different story.

Until mid-2025 Bradley released about once a month, but on no fixed day: around the 13th of the month in early 2025, then on the first or second Tuesday. Then in August 2025 it switched to the first Monday and stuck to it for 13 months in a row, even releasing on Labor Day 2025. (January 2026's release came during an outage on our side; we saw it that evening, so it isn't plotted.) Each release is big, about 1,000 appointments, and lands three to four months out. The time of day is looser than Omaha's: anywhere from about 8:30 AM to just after noon.

Then September 2026 came. The first Monday was Labor Day, and this time Bradley released on the Wednesday after it instead. On the first Monday of October there was no release at all, at least as of this writing on October 7. Our forecast said Bradley would release that day, and it was wrong. We don't know why yet. We'll know more when the next one lands.

This is why we never treat a pattern as a promise. Centers change their routines, often with no announcement, and the only way to notice is to keep watching.

Most centers don't release on the first Monday

Omaha, Richmond and Bradley are the exceptions. To check the rule everywhere, we took the 113 centers that put out batch releases in at least half of the past 12 months (October 2025 to September 2026) and looked at each month's biggest release: the one you'd most want to be ready for. If the first-Monday rule held, nearly all of them would sit on the blue bar below.

They don't. The biggest release landed on the first Monday in only 124 of 1,101 center-months (11%). In 60% of them it came a week or more away from the first Monday, and the typical distance was 9 days. The bumps at one, two and three weeks after it show that plenty of centers do favor a particular weekday, just not that one.

Center by center, it's even clearer:

• Only 3 of the 113 centers (Omaha, Richmond and Bradley) had their biggest release on the first Monday in 9 or more of the 11 months. Just 5 managed it in at least 6.
• 65 centers, more than half, never had their biggest release of the month on a first Monday, not even once in a year.
• Mondays in general are busy: 24% of all batch releases came on a Monday, more than any other day. But only 8% of weekday releases fell on a first Monday, barely more than the 5% you'd expect if centers picked a weekday at random.

Here are some of the busiest centers in the country:

Months are those with at least one batch release; a center that released nothing big in a month isn't counted for it. "Typical distance" is the median number of days between the first Monday and that month's biggest release.

So if your center isn't one of the few with a real schedule, waking up early on the first Monday mostly means watching nothing happen. The appointments do come, just on a different day each month.

Forecasts, not promises: think weather report

At most centers, appointments arrive in irregular batches and a steady trickle of cancellations, with no calendar we can find. For the few that do keep a rhythm, we built a forecaster. Every night it reviews each center's release history, works out how likely a batch is the next day, and checks how it did the day before.

When a center that has earned our confidence is likely to release, customers watching it get a heads-up the day before: which day, roughly what time to be ready, and how far out the new appointments should be. Like a weather forecast, it's a probability, not a guarantee. In our tests on the past year of data, forecasts at centers that pass our bar were right about 70% of the time. Since the forecaster went live in late September 2026, 9 of the 13 forecasts it has graded so far were right. We grade every forecast, and a center that stops following its pattern stops getting forecasts until it earns them back.

Here's our next call, made in public:

We'll update this post after November 2 with how all three calls turned out.

What to do with this

To see whether your center follows a schedule, open its page from our enrollment center list. Each one has its own release history and charts. For the difference between big batches and single cancellations, see batch releases vs. one-off openings.

How we measured this

Global Entry Spotter checks the official scheduler at every enrollment center around the clock and records each time an appointment slot appears or disappears. A batch release is 50 or more new slots at one center within two hours. Times are the center's local time, taken from the first check that saw the new slots, so they can trail the true release by a minute or two. When our own checks were interrupted, we don't plot the release, because we can't say when it happened. For Omaha we also counted the two first-Monday releases that were smaller than 50 slots (October 2024 and February 2025), which we found by looking for new appointments months out that appeared that morning. Data runs from July 2024 to October 7, 2026.