On Friday morning the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that for Fiscal Year 2027 (“FY2027”), the Service has received enough petitions to meet the annual 65,000 H-1B regular cap and the 20,000 H-1B U.S. advanced degree exemption, known as the master’s cap. Therefore, there will not be a second round of selections in the annual H-1B lottery.  This is the second year in a row that USCIS has not needed to conduct a second round of the lottery in order to meet the cap, suggesting that the agency has improved its ability to select the appropriate number of registrations during the initial lottery selection.

The FY2027 H-1B Cap season was different in several ways—this was the first year that USCIS implemented a weighted, wage-based selection process instead of a random lottery. Individuals who were offered higher salaries relative to their occupation and area of employment had greater chances of being selected. In addition, some employers would have had to pay $100,000 per H-1B petition for any individuals outside the US or H-1B petition requesting consular approval. This likely led to the smaller number of overall registrations in FY2027: approximately 211,600 compared to almost 344,000 the preceding year (FY2026).

USCIS has not yet released specific data about how many registrations it selected in the first round, but we expect more information to be available in the coming months—including details about how the weighted lottery affected the odds of selection.

Petitioners’ myUSCIS accounts are expected to be updated in the coming days to reflect a status of “Not Selected” for all remaining FY2027 registrations. Eligible individuals who were not selected this year can be registered in the FY2028 H-1B cap lottery that will open in March 2027.