It is this time of year again: H1B Visa Lottery for FY 2024. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that the registration period for the sought-after H1B visa program for fiscal year (FY) 2025 will open on Wednesday, March 6, 2024, at noon ET and run until noon ET on Friday, March 22, 2024. Because there is only a limited number of H1B visas available each year, USCIS uses a lottery system to determine who is selected to apply. To learn more visit our H1B visa page.
To register for the H1B visa lottery, a prospective H1B employee and their sponsoring employer needs to create online accounts with USCIS. If the prospective employee already has a regular USCIS online account, they still need to create a separate special H1B visa lottery account for the registration process. The process includes providing basic information about the sponsoring company, as well as basic biographical details about the registrant. The employer or prospective employee must pay the $10 H1B visa lottery registration fee.
For the fiscal year 2025, USCIS will implement a new beneficiary-centric system to ensure all prospective employees have the same chance of selection for the H-1B visa lottery.
The new system shifts the selection process from selecting a registration to selecting an applicant. In other words, even if an applicant makes multiple registrations with multiple employers, it will not increase the chance of selection. This change is intended to reduce fraud in the H1B registration process and is in response to the significant increase in beneficiaries with multiple registrations in the prior fiscal years.
For example, USCIS received a total of 780,884 registrations for FY 2024, of which 408,891 registrations were submitted for employees with multiple registrations with different employers. While current regulations do not prohibit multiple registrations by different employers on behalf of a single applicant, USCIS was concerned that it creates the potential for fraud and abuse of the system.
Another change from the H1B visa lottery in previous years is that now prospective applicants must provide a valid passport and cannot skip this requirement. The USCIS states that the passport or travel document should be the one the prospective employee intends to use to enter the United States if selected for the H1B visa lottery.
If you are interested in applying for H1B work visa, contact us or book a consultation with our immigration lawyers in Miami, Florida USA to get the process started.
Malescu Law P.A. – Business & Immigration Lawyers
