[co-author: Zoe Balkan]

On Tuesday, July 30, 2024, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it will conduct a second H-1B cap lottery. The agency will select an additional number of H-1B registrations from the remaining registrations submitted during the registration period, which ran from March 6 to March 22, 2024.  As of the time of this publication, lottery registration selection has not been completed by USCIS.

As previously reported by Mintz, USCIS held open the possibility of subsequent H-1B selection periods for registrations submitted in March if an insufficient number of H-1B petitions were filed with USCIS based on the initial lottery selections.

USCIS has determined that fewer H-1B petitions were filed as compared to selected H-1B registrations. As a result, USCIS will select additional registrations among the eligible, unselected registrations from March in order to ensure that enough petitions are approved to fill the annual quota of 85,000. USCIS received just over 470,000 eligible H-1B registrations in March. At this time, it is not known how many additional registrations will be selected.

It is important to note that USCIS will not be conducting a second selection for the advanced degree exemption (the master’s cap), as enough master’s cap registrations were already selected, and sufficient petitions were received based on those registrations as projected to meet the FY 2025 master’s cap numerical allocation.  However, all master’s cap registrations are eligible to be selected in the “regular cap” lottery that will be conducted shortly.

USCIS will announce when lottery selections are complete. Selected registrations will be updated in the USCIS online H-1B cap registration system.

For selected registrations, petitioners will have a 90-day filing window to submit an H-1B petition to USCIS.

Finally, USCIS has not yet rejected any H-1B registrations. Registrations that have not been selected are held “in reserve” in the event that USCIS does not receive an H-1B petition for each selected registration. There is still a possibility that USCIS will hold a subsequent lottery and select some of those registrations that are still held in reserve.

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