Transferring a SEVIS Record Between Schools

What actually moves when a student transfers?

One electronic record moves from one certified school to another. It is not a copy, not a new file and not an application to any agency. The record keeps its identification number, its history and its attached dependent records. What changes is which school has custody of it and which school is responsible for reporting on you.

Because it is a single record, two schools cannot hold it at once. That is the source of nearly every transfer problem: the sending school still controls it until the agreed release date, and the receiving school cannot issue anything before that date arrives. Students who ask the new school for a form in advance are told no, and conclude something has gone wrong when nothing has.

Nothing about a transfer changes your visa, your admission record or your underlying status. It changes the school named on your student form and the official responsible for your file.

Who is eligible to transfer?

A student who is maintaining status can transfer. So can a student inside the grace period that follows completion of a program, and a student currently authorized for practical training, though the second group pays a price described below.

A student who has already fallen out of status cannot simply transfer. The record has to be restored first, either by applying for reinstatement or by leaving and reentering on a new record. Schools sometimes describe this as needing a new record, which is accurate but obscures the fact that it is a substantive application rather than an administrative step.

There is also a timing limit at the far end. The transfer has to result in the student beginning classes at the new school within the period the regulation allows, measured from the release date or the last date of attendance. Take a year off and the transfer route closes; you would be applying for a new record instead.

None of this reaches exchange visitors. A J-1 record lives in the same system but under different rules, and moving to another exchange sponsor turns on the category and the objective of the program rather than on a release date agreed between two schools.

One situation deserves separate mention. If your school loses its certification, students are given a defined period to transfer out, and the ordinary requirement that you be maintaining status is applied with more flexibility. If that happens to you, act immediately and keep the school's notice, because the concession has an end point and the schools receiving those students are dealing with many at once.

What is a transfer release date and who sets it?

It is the date on which custody of the record passes from one school to the other, and the current school sets it after discussion with you. Before that date the old school reports on you. On and after it, the new school does.

Choosing it well is the whole exercise. Set it too early and you may finish the term at the old school with your record already released, which the system reads as a student who stopped attending. Set it too late and the new school cannot issue a form in time for you to register. The usual answer is the end of the current term, or the day after your last final examination.

Ask both officials to confirm the date in writing before it is entered. Once entered, changing it requires the receiving school's cooperation and is not always possible, which is why an emailed agreement between three parties is worth the five minutes it takes.

What must happen after the record arrives?

The clock starts. After the release date the new school issues a student form showing the transfer, and you must report in person to the designated school official there and be registered within the window set by regulation, counted from the program start date on the new form. If you do not, the record terminates and you are out of status without anyone having decided anything.

Do these things in the first week:

• Collect the new student form and check the program level, start date and funding details on it.
• Report in person to the designated school official and ask them to register you in the record system.
• Collect new forms for any dependents at the same time.
• Update your address with the school, since the school reports it on your behalf.
• Ask the official to confirm the record shows active status before you stop worrying about it.

Keep every version of the student form you have ever held. They document your status history, and that history is what later applications are built on, in the same way your admission record documents each entry. Neither set of documents can be reconstructed later from memory.

What happens to practical training and to pending applications?

This is the expensive part. Post-completion practical training ends on the transfer release date. Not on the date the training was scheduled to end, and not when you start classes; on the release date. A student working under an approved card who transfers loses the authorization and must stop, and the remaining months are not recoverable at the same education level.

There is one narrow exception worth knowing. A student who has completed a program and is moving straight into a new one at another school, without having applied for training, loses nothing, because there is no authorization to lose. The penalty falls only on students who have already secured or applied for post-completion training and then move.

A pending training application fares no better. If the record is released while the application is pending, the application is generally denied or abandoned, and the fee is gone. Students in this position should decide deliberately which they value more and set the release date accordingly, rather than letting a school calendar decide for them.

Route	What triggers it	Effect on the record
Transfer	Moving to a different certified school	Same record moves, same identification number
Change of education level	Moving up a degree level at the same school	Same record, new program on it
New record	A long absence, or a school that cannot receive a transfer	New identification number and a new program fee
Reinstatement	Status already lost	An application decided by the agency, not the school

Does a transfer affect the visa or the program fee?

The program fee follows the identification number, and a transfer keeps that number, so no new fee is due. A student who is issued a brand new record instead of a transfer does pay again, which is one more reason to keep the transfer route open by acting before the timing limit expires.

The visa is a separate document with a separate expiration. A valid visa naming the old school still works for reentry when presented with the new form; officers expect that combination. An expired visa means a consular appointment abroad, where the new form is the document you present. Errors in the entry record after any trip should be corrected promptly through the process for fixing an admission record, because a record showing the wrong category quietly undermines everything built on it.

What if the student is already out of status?

Then the transfer conversation is premature. The choice is between applying for reinstatement, which asks the agency to restore status on defined grounds, and leaving the country to reenter on a new record, which is faster but restarts eligibility clocks and creates a travel history that invites questions. Both have consequences for later applications, and because reinstatement is discretionary and the alternative is effectively irreversible, this is the point at which many students take the question to a student visa attorney rather than deciding on an adviser's general impression.

Where the loss of status followed an authorization problem, look closely at how it arose before choosing, since training authorized outside the rules is treated as unauthorized employment and that characterization matters more than the transfer does. Where it followed a drop below full-time enrollment, check whether a reduced course load could have been authorized and simply was not requested, because that fact shapes a reinstatement request.