USCIS To Conduct Second H-1B Lottery To Meet Fiscal Year 2025 Cap (image-X/parthpareek)
On Tuesday, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that a second round of random selections for the H-1B visa will be conducted for the fiscal year 2025 under its regular annual 65,000 visa limit.
The agency held its initial lottery in March allowing selected employers to submit full H-1B petitions by June 30 for 85,000 visas will be available next fiscal year. In its statement, the USCIS said that the selections will be made from among already submitted registrations for the 2025 FY.
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In the US, the H-1B visa is the country’s high-skilled worker visa and is in high demand by Indian and Chinese origin professionals and others primarily in the tech sector.
Those selected for the second round of registrations could file their petitions between April 1 and June 30.
USCIS announced an additional round of FY2025 H-1B regular cap selections! Check out our website for more details. https://t.co/hI0Ls9hhCm
As always, if you have questions about the FY2025 H-1B regular cap visa or any other immigration issues, contact us. pic.twitter.com/xTnEBCoXdC
— ImmigrationUSA (@ImmigrationUSA_) July 30, 2024
Prospective petitioners will be notified of the second round if they are eligible to file an H-1B cap-subject petition. The agency further added, “We recently determined that we would need to select additional registrations for unique beneficiaries to reach the FY 2025 regular cap numerical allocation.”
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Along with adding the regular cap, the country allows for 20,000 H-1B visas for those with a US master’s or higher degree. However, the agency clarified that there would not be a second round of selections under the advanced degree exemption as enough registrations were already selected and sufficient petitions were received for the master’s cap allocation.
The agency received under 480,000 lottery submissions this year after it changed the annual lottery process. Following which, there was a steep decline in the number of duplicate submissions for workers.
