On December 2, 2024, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) announced it had received enough H-1B petitions to reach the statutory H-1B visa cap of 65,000, plus the 20,000 “master’s cap” for applicants with a U.S. master’s degree. Registrants who have not yet been selected will be sent non-selection notices through the online system. This action completes the Fiscal Year 2025 (“FY2025”) H-1B Cap lottery, selection and petition process. Given the timeline from FY2025, individuals looking to register for next year’s H-1B visa lottery should be on alert as early as mid-February of 2025 for updates to the system. FY2025’s registration opened on March 6, 2024, after significant changes to the rules were finalized in late January, and USCIS’s organizational accounts were released in late February.
As a brief overview of the process, eligible foreign nationals are registered by their employer to be selected for the H-1B lottery. Because the H-1B visa category is congressionally capped, USCIS selects a group of registered foreign nationals to submit H-1B petitions. The employers then have a certain amount of time to file their H-1B petitions for the next fiscal year. If visas remain, then USCIS performs additional rounds of selection until the cap is reached.
This year, 470,432 eligible registrations were submitted to the USCIS. Because of the new rule that gives each registrant one chance to be selected, rather than multiple chances based on multiple registrations, the number was predictably lower than last year, which saw 758,994 eligible registrations. The number of registrations for beneficiaries with multiple registrations went down from 408,891 to 47,314 as a reflection of that rule change. During the first H-1B cap lottery, 120,603 registrations were selected, with an additional 14,534 chosen from the second and final lottery.
The new rule and organizational accounts were certainly the reasons for the reduced number of registrations during FY2025. For FY2026, the registration fee will increase from $10 to $215 per registration. This fee increase has the potential to cause the number of registrations to plateau or decrease for the second consecutive year. Given the increased fee, and low chance of success in the lottery, employers should consider other creative ways to employ immigrant workers, such as concurrent H-1Bs, L-1 visas, O-1 visas or country-specific options like H-1B1 or E-3 visas.
Looking to the future, the H-1B cap lottery will remain a highly competitive process, especially for individuals coming from countries with extensive backlogs for employment-based immigrant visas. The USCIS expects the online organizational accounts system to have increased functionality in the coming years, with greater emphasis on online filing. Overall, the H-1B lottery process should run more smoothly in FY2026, notwithstanding potential changes from the incoming administration.
