H-1B Cap Reached for FY2026

Today, July 18, 2025, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the H-1B Cap for fiscal year 2026 has been reached. Consequently, there will be no second lottery drawing this year. The next lottery registration period will likely take place in March 2026 for FY2027.

Over the last several years, the USCIS did not announce that the lottery had been reached until well within the fiscal year. For FY2025, for example, the USCIS made the announcement in the first quarter of the year, on December 2, 2025. Also, for most of the last several years, there has been at least one additional lottery drawing, usually in late July or August. This is only the second time since the USCIS implemented the new pre-filing registration process in 2020 that there has been one draw. The likely reason that there were not multiple draws is the much higher number of registrations selected. This year, the USCIS selected 120,141 registrations from a total of 343,981 eligible registrations – an overall selection rate of 34.9%. By comparison, last year the USCIS initially selected 120,603 registrations from a total of 470,342, which reflects a 25.6% overall selection rate.