USCIS Completes H-1B Lottery

USCIS has announced that it completed selection of the registrations submitted in this year’s H-1B visa lottery. If your registration was selected, you should have received an email notification from USCIS to the email address associated with your myUSCIS account.  We also will be in touch with you this week regarding next steps.

For the current status of your registration(s), please log into the sponsoring employer’s myUSCIS account. It now will show one of the following statuses for each beneficiary registered: Submitted, Selected, or Denied.  “Submitted” registrations will remain in consideration for selection until the end of the fiscal year on September 30, 2024, at which point they will become either Selected or Not Selected. 

If we submitted a registration on your behalf, and it continues to show Submitted, unfortunately, your registration was not selected.  USCIS may select additional registrations later this year if it does not receive enough petitions based on the registrations selected. While USCIS did not select any additional registrations last year, USCIS has completed additional selections in prior years, so the same may happen this year. We definitely will keep you updated about further selections by USCIS.  If you would like, we also would be happy to set up a call to discuss alternative visa options. 

For those with selected registrations, we have 90 days from April 1, 2023, to file the complete H-1B petition with USCIS. Online filing of the H-1B petition(s) is not available, so the petitions will need to be filed by paper with a print out of the lottery selection notice.  USCIS anticipates delays in sending out receipt notices, so use of a delivery service, like UPS or Fedex, is highly recommended to document receipt of the petition by USCIS.  The agency will not accept prepaid mailers with which to mail approval notices because its process for mailing out approval notices through first-class mail is fully automated. 

The agency’s announcement is available here. 

We look forward to working with you over the next few months either with the preparation and filing of your H-1B petition or discussion of alternative visa options.  

This alert is for informational purposes only.  Please contact us if you would like to discuss this development further.