On July 30, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced it will conduct another drawing for the FY 2025 H-1B lottery. Earlier this year, the USCIS conducted an initial drawing from the pool of registrations for the FY 2025 lottery and recently determined it needed to select additional registrations to reach the FY 2025 regular cap numerical allocation.
The USCIS announced on Aug. 5 it had conducted the additional drawing and have notified employers whose registrations were selected. Selected registrations received filing instructions through their USCIS online accounts. Only previously unselected registrations were eligible for the second drawing.
The USCIS did not conduct a second selection for the advanced degree exemption (the master’s cap) because it had initially selected a sufficient number of master’s cap registrations to meet the FY 2025 H-1B allocation of 20,000 visas. Instead, the USCIS conducted a second drawing for the regular allocation of approximately 65,000 visas. The second drawing included previously submitted registrations that indicated eligibility for the master’s cap along with those that indicated only eligibility for the regular cap.
As background, H-1B visa classification allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in occupations that require the theoretical and practical application of a body of specialized knowledge normally acquired via a bachelor’s degree or higher in the specific specialty, or its equivalent. H-1B occupations may include fields such as accounting, analytics, architecture, education, engineering, information technology, and mathematics.
The H-1B visa classification is generally in high demand and some employers are subject to an annual limitation of 65,000 visas with an additional 20,000 visas for holders of a U.S. master’s degree or higher. In 2020, the USCIS implemented an electronic registration process for H-1B petitions subject to the annual limitation.
For FY 2025, the USCIS announced that they received approximately 442,000 registrations during the registration period and selected 114,017 to meet the annual quota of 85,000 visas. The USCIS normally selects more registrations than needed to meet the annual quota, to account for situations where no H-1B petition is filed after selection, as well as for cases that are ultimately not approved.
