USCIS has announced that the FY 2024 cap registration period will open on Wednesday, March 1, 2023, at noon ET.
USCIS has announced that the FY 2024 cap registration period will open on Wednesday, March 1, 2023, at noon ET.
Employers can start preparing and submitting cap registrations starting from that time. Any registrations submitted before March 1 will not be accepted. The registration period will conclude on March 17 at 12 PM Eastern Time, and no registrations will be accepted after that deadline.
Employers are allowed to submit an unlimited number of registrations, but each submission is limited to 250 registrations, with a fee of $10 per beneficiary required for each registration.
myUSCIS Account Required for Employers
An employer wishing to sponsor their employees for the upcoming H-1B lottery must first have a myUSCIS account. The myUSCIS account for your company must be maintained by an employee that is authorized to sign immigration benefit requests on behalf of the company.
Beginning February 21, 2023, new accounts may be created by the company for the upcoming registration period. Employers should not create their new “registrant” accounts earlier than this as it may cause issues with the account type.
What Information is Required for a Registration?
Although myUSCIS accounts cannot be created prior to February 21, 2023, and although H-1B registrations cannot be submitted prior to March 1, 2023, employers should work to identify and collect their employee’s information for the registration ahead of time. Employers will need to collect the following information for each beneficiary they would like to sponsor for the upcoming lottery:
Full name
Date of Birth
Country of Birth
Country of Citizenship
Gender
Passport number, and
Whether or not the employee is eligible for the Advanced-degree Cap
The H-1B Selection Process
It is anticipated that USCIS will receive well over the 85,000 available H-1B registration spots annually available for the upcoming FY as has been the case for past years.
Once the registration period has closed, USCIS will conduct its randomized computer selection process to select the 85,000 beneficiaries for the 2024 season. USCIS will select 20,000 master-level degree holders and 65,000 regular cap registrations to total the 85,000 available places.
As in past years, USCIS will notify employers of their selected H-1B Cap registrations on or in the few days before March 31, 2023. Employers will receive an email notification from USCIS that an update has been made to their registration. The employer should log in to their myUSCIS account to see the selection status of their sponsored employees.
Filing the H-1B for Selected Beneficiaries
If the employer received notification that one or more of their beneficiaries was selected in the annual lottery, they would be allowed to file an H-1B petition on that employee’s behalf during the H-1B petition filing period noted on the selection notice. Although no dates have been announced, it is likely that the employer will be able to file H-1B petitions for their beneficiaries who were selected between the first week of April 2023 and the last week of June 2023.
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