USCIS to conduct second H-1B lottery to meet FY25 limit

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Tuesday announced that it will be conducting a second round of random selections for the H-1B visa for the 2025 fiscal year under its regular annual 65,000 visa limit.

The selections will be made from among already submitted registrations for the FY 2025 cap season, USCIS said in a statement.

The H-1B visa is the US’s premier high-skilled worker visa, in high demand by Indian and Chinese origin professionals, among others, many of whom work in the tech sector.


Those with selected registrations for the FY 2025 cap season could file their petitions between April 1 and June 30.

“We recently determined that we would need to select additional registrations for unique beneficiaries to reach the FY 2025 regular cap numerical allocation,” the immigration authority said.

The USCIS will soon select additional registrations for unique beneficiaries from previously submitted electronic registrations using a random selection process and notify prospective petitioners of the second round that they are eligible to file an H-1B cap-subject petition, it added.

“We will announce when we have completed this second process of selections and notifications,” USCIS said, adding that this would show on applicants’ online accounts.

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In addition to the regular cap, the US allows for 20,000 H-1B visas for those who have a US master’s or higher degree.

The USCIS clarified, however, that there would not be a second round of selections under this advanced degree exemption as enough registrations were already selected and sufficient petitions were received for the master’s cap allocation.

For each cap season, the USCIS conducts a lottery to select beneficiaries for the H-1B visa.

Earlier this year, it implemented a unique beneficiary-centric registration process that it said would weed out abuse and fraud of the system.

It also rolled out fee hikes, increasing the registration fee by 2050% to $215 from $10 and application fee by 70% to $780 from $460 – a move that has raised concerns in the Indian IT industry.