H-1B Lottery Registration Period Announced
USCIS has announced the registration window for this year’s H-1B Lottery will open on March 7, 2025 at 12pm (EST) and will close on March 24, 2025 at 12pm (EST). During this period, US employers can register foreign nationals for the annual H-1B lottery online with information on their valid passport or travel document. Registrations can only be prepared and submitted online when the registration window opens on March 7, 2025.
The government fee for each registration will increase this year from $10 to $215.
Once the registration window closes on March 24, 2025, USCIS will not accept any new registrations. Employers will be notified of selected registrations by April 1, 2025.
The agency will continue the beneficiary-centric selection process for H-1B registrations introduced last year to reduce potential fraud. This process ensures that foreign nationals with multiple registrations filed on their behalf by different employers won’t have a better chance of selection. Each beneficiary who has a registration submitted on their behalf will be entered into the lottery once, regardless of how many employers submit registrations for them. 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 for that beneficiary.
The beneficiary-centric model relies on the beneficiary’s valid passport details to create the foreign national’s profile, so 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.
Employers that are submitting a registration for the first time will need to create an organizational account here. Please make sure to record the email address and password used to set up the account.
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 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, 2025, and have 90 days to file a complete H-1B petition on behalf of the selected foreign national.
We would be happy to help you with registering in the annual lottery. If you would like to learn more about the H-1B lottery, please join our webinar on February 12th, where we will be going over H-1B requirements, how the lottery works, alternative visa options, and the latest developments in immigration. Please RSVP here. We look forward to seeing you there!
