USCIS has announced the registration window for this year’s H-1B Lottery will open on March 6, 2024 at 12pm (EST) and will close on March 22, 2024 at 12pm (EST).  During this period, US employers can register foreign nationals for the annual H-1B lottery with information on their valid passport or travel document. Registrations can only be submitted online. Once the registration window closes, USCIS will not accept any new registrations. 

The agency has made several updates to the H-1B lottery program to improve efficiency and minimize fraud. Most notably, the agency will be implementing a beneficiary-centric selection process for H-1B registrations so that foreign nationals with multiple registrations filed on their behalf by different employers won’t have a better chance of selection. Over the last few years, USCIS noticed an alarming trend of foreign nationals having more and more employers registering them for the H-1B lottery. According to USCIS, in 2020, 700 foreign nationals had more than five registrations filed on their behalf and one individual had 18 registrations submitted on their behalf; in 2022, 9,155 foreign nationals had more than 5 registrations filed on their behalf and one individual had 83 (!) registrations filed on their behalf. The agency also noticed that the same 13 companies were largely responsible for the multiple registrations. 

In an effort to reduce potential fraud, this year, instead of selecting by employer registration, USCIS will now select registrations by unique beneficiary. Each beneficiary who has a registration submitted on their behalf will now be entered into the lottery once–regardless of how many registrations are submitted on their behalf–rather than one entry for each employer registration on behalf of the beneficiary. If a beneficiary is selected in the lottery, each employer that submitted a registration on that unique beneficiary’s behalf will be notified of the selection and will be eligible to file a petition on that beneficiary’s behalf. With this change, DHS expects the registration and selection process to be greatly enhanced, ensuring fairness of selection by reducing the ability to game the process. 

Because the beneficiary-centric model will rely on the beneficiary’s valid passport details to create the foreign national’s profile, the agency expressly prohibits a beneficiary from being registered under more than one passport or travel document. Doing so will result in the revocation of the selection or H-1B petition. 

In addition to improvements to the lottery process, USCIS has announced increased filing fees. Effective April 1, 2024, the government filing fee for the H-1B petition will increase from $2,460 to $2,780 for employers with 26 or more full-time employers.  Employers with less than 26 employees will not see a fee increase. Their filing fees will remain $1,710. Nonprofit organizations also will pay $1,710 regardless of employee number.  While the $10 lottery registration fee will remain the same for this year’s H-1B lottery, it is expected to increase to $215 per registration next year.  As a reminder, the premium processing fee for H-1B petitions will increase from $2,500 to $2,805 on February 26, 2024. The fee increases are expected to address the agency’s budget deficits and allow the agency to hire more staff to decrease backlogs and improve efficiency.   

By way of background, there is an annual limit to the number of H-1B visas available each year. There are approximately 65,000 H-1B visas available and an additional 20,000 H-1B visas available for individuals with a US Master’s degree or higher. Because the demand for H-1B visas typically surpasses the annual allocation, USCIS opens a registration period in March for nearly three weeks. At the end of the registration window, USCIS then runs a random lottery to select the first 65,000 H-1B visas. It then pulls all the US Master’s degree holders from the pool of registrations that were not selected, and runs a second lottery for the remaining 20,000 visas. Employers whose registrations are selected in the lottery are notified by April 1. 

If you would like our assistance with the H-1B lottery, please contact us.  We look forward to helping you through this process.