United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that it will hold a second random selection process or lottery to fill the regular FY 2025 65,000 numerical allocation for new or cap-subject H-1B petitions. USCIS notes that it will not be holding an additional lottery to fill the 20,000 visa allocation for holders of advanced degrees from United States universities (“master’s cap”). USCIS states, however, that the second round of selection for the regular cap will include previously submitted registrations that indicated eligibility for the advanced degree quota along with those that indicated eligibility only for the 65,000 allocation.
In March of this year, USCIS held an initial set of lotteries (one for the 65,000 regular quota and one for the 20,000 U.S. advanced degree set-aside) among the electronic registrations received for the FY 2025 H-1B cap. Employers whose registrations were chosen in the lottery were then invited to file an H-1B petition with the USCIS during a filing period that ended on June 30, 2024. Of the 470,342 eligible registrations received, 120,603 were selected in the lotteries.
The fact that USCIS will be holding a second lottery means that not enough petitions were filed or approved by the agency during the filing period to fill the quota of 65,000 for new H-1B petitions. The second lottery will include all registrations that were received in March of this year but were not selected in the first set of lotteries, unless USCIS has disqualified the registration on the basis of an alleged misuse of the program. The USCIS has not indicated how many registrations will be selected in this second lottery, nor when the lottery will be held. It is anticipated that the number of additional selections will be lower than the number selected in 2023, the last time that further lotteries were held, since the number of filings that year was unusually high. Based on past practice, it is also possible that the second lottery will be held very soon and possibly as early as this weekend.
Employers whose registrations are selected in the second lottery will have their myUSCIS accounts updated with a selection notice and will be informed that they are eligible to file an H-1B cap-subject petition for the beneficiary named in the selected registration. Information about where the H-1B petition should be filed will also be provided, as will the time frame during which the petition must be filed. No action on the part of an employer that filed a registration that was not selected in the initial set of lotteries is required at this time.
T&S will be monitoring updates related to the second lottery and will communicate with selected beneficiaries once we are notified of any additional selections.
