On August 1, 2023, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that they selected a total of 188,400 H-1B cap registrations to reach the annual 85,000 quota. In March 2023, the agency first selected 110,000 registrations in its initial drawing. The second lottery selection was drawn from the initial pool of 758,994 eligible registrations filed with USCIS for the fiscal year 2024 H-1B cap season. The selection rate for eligible registrations increased to 24.8% from the initial rate of 14.6% after the first drawing.

USCIS selects an excess number of registrations since it must account for cases for which no petition is filed by U.S. petitioning companies, as well as those petitions that might be denied, rejected, withdrawn, or revoked.

The fiscal year 2024 submission rate was extremely high; 758,994 submissions were received, representing an increase of 60% over last year’s eligible registration pool. USCIS determined that 408,891 registrations were submitted for individuals who benefited from multiple sponsors submitting cap registrations on their behalf, and concern about misuse, fraud, and collusion in the H-1B pre-registration filing process resulted in this year’s second H-1B lottery selection. USCIS indicated that it believes that there is a decreased filing rate for the fiscal year 2024 H-1B cap pre-registration filings as compared to the three previous fiscal years, taking into account the fraud investigations that are ongoing.

For cases selected in the second H-1B lottery, USCIS will permit filings until October 31, 2023.

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