The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that it will conduct a second lottery for the fiscal year (FY) 2025 H-1B for the regular cap category.
This will allow an initial selection process that took place in March this year, VisaGuide.World reports.
Through a statement, the USCIS expressed the need to select additional registrations for unique beneficiaries in order to reach the fiscal year 2025 regular cap numerical allocation.
Soon, we will select additional registrations for unique beneficiaries from previously submitted electronic registrations using a random selection process, and we will notify prospective petitioners with selected registrations from this second round of selection that they are eligible to file an H-1B cap-subject petition for the beneficiary named in the applicable selected registration.
In March this year, USCIS conducted an initial random selection on registrations for the FY 2025 H-1B cap, including for beneficiaries eligible for the advanced degree exemption, on this second lottery selections for the master’s cap will not be included.
We will not be conducting a second selection for the advanced degree exemption (the master’s cap), as enough master’s cap registrations were already selected and sufficient petitions were received based on those registrations as projected to meet the FY 2025 masters cap numerical allocation.
2nd Round of Selection for H-1B Visas Won’t Include Master’s Cap
According to the agency, the second round of selection for the regular cap will consist of previously submitted registrations that indicated eligibility for the master’s cap along with those that indicated only eligibility for the regular cap.
The USCIS announced that those with selected registrations will receive a selection notice on their USCIS online accounts, consisting of details of when and where to file.
Similar to last year, this year the agency also announced the conduction of a second lottery for FY 2025 H-1B visas. Last year, the agency registered a notable increase or 61 per cent increase in H-1B applications, with a total of 780,884 submissions for FY 2024.
The H-1B visa permits employers in the US to bring in this territory international qualified workers if they can’t find employees in the US, in order to fill in labor shortage gaps.
Applications for H-1B visas open every year in spring. The agency approves about 65,000 petitions per year from October 1, until September 30 of the following year. Of the total, 6,800 petitions are reserved for H-1B visas for Chile and Singapore nationals.
From the visa cap, the applications of the first 20,000 applicants with a master’s degree.