U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced it has reached the congressionally mandated H-1B cap for the fiscal year (FY) 2016.  USCIS will use a lottery system in order to randomly select the petitions needed to meet the caps of the 65,000 visas available for the general category.  The same lottery process will be used for the 20,000 petitions filed under the U.S. advanced degree exemption.

The advanced degree exemption petitions will be randomly selected by USCIS first.  All unselected advanced degree petitions will then become part of the random selection process for the 65,000 general limit.  Following this, all unselected cap-subject petitions, that are not duplicate filings, will be rejected and returned with the filing fees.  Due to the high volume of petitions, USCIS is unable to announce the date it will conduct the random selection process, as USCIS is still in the process of completing the initial intake for all the filings received during the filing period.