On December 12, 2023, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it has received a sufficient number of H-1B petitions to reach the annual quota of 85,000 new H-1B filings for the FY2024 H-1B cap for H-1B registrations submitted in March 2023.

This means that any H-1B registration that USCIS did not select in the March 2023 lottery or the July 2023 lottery will not be eligible to file an H-1B cap petition this year. The next opportunity to sponsor an individual in the H-1B cap lottery will be in March 2024 for the FY2025 H-1B cap. As was recently reported by Mintz, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published proposed regulations that may modify the FY2025 H-1B registration process. Mintz will publish a client alert if these regulations become final.

As previously reported, USCIS conducted a lottery due to receiving 758,994 eligible registrations for the FY2024 H-1B cap. USCIS completed its initial lottery selection process in March 2023, which afforded employers with selected H-1B registrations 90 days to submit complete H-1B petitions to USCIS for adjudication. USCIS announced a second lottery on July 27, 2023, as it had determined that there were fewer filed H-1B petitions as compared to selected H-1B registrations. Overall, the selection rate for eligible registrations for FY2024 was 24.8%.

Unlike the FY 2022 H-1B cap, there will be no third lottery this year because USCIS has received a sufficient number of H-1B petitions to fill the FY2024 quota.