USCIS Announces Second H-1B Cap Lottery for FY2024 Will be Run ‘Soon’
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced yesterday that it will soon run a second lottery for H-1B registrations that were submitted for the FY2024 annual cap in March of this year. The announcement confirms that after processing all of the H-1Bs from the first lottery, the USCIS still has available numbers for both the regular and ‘master’s cap’ allocation. The USCIS has not indicated how many additional H-1B numbers will be available, or when exactly the second lottery will be run.
Background
The immigration law establishes a limit on the number of new H-1B petitions that may be approved for a given fiscal year (‘the cap’). Since 2004, this limit has been set at a total of 85,000, with 20,000 reserved for graduates with US advanced degrees (the ‘master’s cap’), and 6,800 allocated to citizens of Singapore and Chile pursuant to treaties with those two countries. Since 2020, the USCIS has employed a pre-registration lottery selection process whereby employers submit electronic registrations through a web portal in March for the upcoming fiscal year starting on October 1st of that year. Where there are more registrations than available numbers, the USCIS runs a lottery, and announces the result of the lottery by April 1st of that year. For registrations selected in the lottery, the employer may then file an H-1B petition during the three-month initial filing period which starts on April 1st. Because some employers do not follow through with filing a petition for their selected registrations, and some petitions that are filed are ultimately denied or revoked, the USCIS may determine that there is a surplus of available H-1Bs under the cap, after the filing period ends. When this happens, the USCIS runs a second, and possibly third lottery to ensure that all of the available H-1B numbers are allocated. For last year’s selection process, FY2023, there was only one lottery run in March 2022. For FY2022, there were three lotteries run in March 2021, August 2021, and November 2021. For FY2021, there were two lotteries run in March 2020 and August 2020.
What This Means for our Clients
The H-1B cap registrations for FY2024 that were not selected in March of this year may be selected in the upcoming second run of the lottery announced by the USCIS yesterday. In years past, the available numbers in the second lottery were much lower than the first lottery. There is some hope that the odds of selection in the second lottery this year will be better. As mentioned in our previous alert, the unprecedented high number of H-1B registrations submitted for FY2024 is likely due in part to many workers having multiple registrations submitted for them by different employers. Because some of these workers may have been selected multiple times, but would presumably only proceed with filing a petition with one of the employers, the available number of H-1B numbers in the second lottery this year could be significantly higher than it was in FY2022 and FY2021. We expect the second lottery will likely take place in the next few weeks based on experience in previous years.
We will update our clients as soon as we have additional information.
