H-1B Lottery Registration Period Announced
USCIS has announced that the registration window for this year’s H-1B Lottery will open on March 4, 2026 at 9 AM PST / 12:00 PM EST and will close on March 19, 2026 at 9 AM PST / 12:00 PM EST. During this period, U.S. 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 4, 2026. Once the registration window closes on March 19, 2026, USCIS will not accept any new registrations. Employers will be notified of selected registrations by March 31, 2026. The government fee for each registration will remain $215 this year.
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.
For this year’s H-1B lottery season, the Department of Homeland Security has replaced the long-standing random selection process with a selection system that favors registrations tied to higher paid roles. Under the new framework, H-1B lottery registrations will be entered into the selection pool a number of times based on the offered wage level (there are four wage levels with level four being the highest). More details on this process can be found here.
Moreover, a federal court upheld the Trump Administration’s $100,000 H-1B fee in December 2025. As a result, foreign nationals whose H-1B registration have been selected and who are outside the U.S. will be subject to the $100,000 fee. Beneficiaries who are already in the United States in another valid status and file an H-1B petition requesting a change of status will not be subject to this fee. Additional information on the $100,000 H-1B fee is available here.
The agency will continue the beneficiary-centric selection process for H-1B registrations introduced in 2024 to reduce potential fraud. This process ensures that foreign nationals with multiple registrations filed on their behalf by different employers will not have a better chance of selection. Each beneficiary who has registration submitted on their behalf will be entered into the lottery once (depending on the level of the offered wages), 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.
The annual limit to the number of H-1B visas available each year will remain the same. There are approximately 65,000 H-1B visas available (minus 6,800 H-1B1 visas for citizens of Chile and Singapore) and an additional 20,000 H-1B visas available for individuals with a U.S. Master’s degree or higher. Because the demand for H-1B visas typically surpasses the annual allocation, USCIS is opening the registration period in March for about two weeks. After the selection for the first 65,000 H-1B visas, USCIS 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, using the new selection process for both lotteries. Employers whose registrations are selected in the lottery are notified by March 31, 2026, 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!
