USCIS announced yesterday that it received 201,011 H-1B petitions the first week of April, and had reached the 65,000 limit for H-1B regular petitions and the 20,000 limit for the U.S. advanced degree H-1B petitions for fiscal year 2020.  Despite the surge in Requests for Evidence, denials, and processing times over the past year, the number of H1B petitions filed this year increased slightly from 199,000 last year.

USCIS also announced that, on April 10, it had completed the random lottery for the selection of the 65,000 regular H-1B petitions and 20,000 U.S. advanced degree petitions. Receipt notices for the selected petitions should start going out at the end of April. USCIS will return the petitions that were not selected with the filing fees over the summer.

As a reminder, USCIS will begin premium processing of H-1B petitions in this year’s lottery by May 20, 2019.

For those of you who like statistics, here are the numbers of H-1B petitions filed each of the last five years.  

·         2014:   124,000

·         2015:   172,500

·         2016:   233,000

·         2017:   236,000

·         2018:   199,000

We will continue to monitor the progress of H-1B petitions filed in this year’s lottery and post updates regularly.  

 This alert is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. If you would like to discuss this development further, please contact us.