USCIS announced that it has completed the "H-1B Cap Lottery" to select the number of petitions necessary to meet the H-1B cap for fiscal year (FY) 2019. This year, USCIS received 190,098 H-1B petitions during the filing period, which began on April 2, 2018.

The H-1B lottery is a computer-generated process that selects at random the number of petitions needed to meet the congressionally-mandated cap of 65,000 visas for the regular category and 20,000 under the advanced degree exemption.

USCIS conducted the selection process for the advanced degree exception first. Any petition not selected in the advanced degree category was then included in the random selection process for the regular category. USCIS has not announced when it will begin receipting the petitions that were selected in this year's process.

The H-1B cap and lottery does not impact H-1B petitions that are otherwise exempt from the cap, such as current H-1B workers previously counted against the cap who are seeking an extension of H-1B status or a change in the terms of their current employment.

CIS also recently suspended premium processing service for all cap-subject H-1B petitions. This means that any petition subject to this year's H-1B cap is not eligible for this expedited 15-day processing.