United States: FY 2027 H-1B Cap Registration Period Closes March 19

If your organization will be working with immigration counsel to draft and submit H-1B cap registrations, the company must do the following:

• Maintain an organizational account in the USCIS online system. Sponsoring employers must have an organizational account at USCIS.gov. The organizational account platform permits employers and counsel to collaborate more easily on registrations.
• Finish identifying prospective H-1B beneficiaries as soon as possible. If your organization has not finished identifying your H-1B cap needs, it must do so as soon as possible so that registrations can be submitted by the March 19 deadline.
• Ensure that prospective H-1B beneficiaries are aware of the registration rules related to passports and travel documents. Remind prospective H-1B beneficiaries that they must use the same valid passport or travel document for every FY 2027 registration that is filed on their behalf, or risk invalidation of all FY 2027 registrations filed for them. The passport or travel document that is used for the H-1B registration(s) should also be the same as the one that would be later used to support the foreign national’s H-1B petition filing, H-1B visa application, and H-1B entry to the United States, if the foreign national is selected in the cap lottery (with exceptions for renewed or replacement passports, legal name changes, and similar circumstances).
• Promptly review each registration drafted by immigration counsel. When your Fragomen attorney finishes drafting an H-1B cap registration for your organization, the company’s designated signatory (called an “Administrator”) will be notified to log into the USCIS system to review, approve, and e-sign the registration. This is the time to determine whether any changes need to be made to the company’s registrations. The registration period is brief, so the signatory should review registrations as soon as requested to do so by the Fragomen attorney.
• Prepare for possible technology issues. The H-1B cap registration platform can experience slowdowns and technical glitches, especially at times of high-volume use. Notify your Fragomen team and USCIS if your organization encounters any problems. The risk of potential glitches increases as the registration deadline approaches and log-ins and submissions increase. Prompt completion and submission of cap registrations can help to minimize last-minute problems.

New this year, the Department of Homeland Security is replacing the longstanding random H-1B cap lottery process with a new weighted lottery that increases the odds of selection for foreign nationals being offered the highest wages according to the Department of Labor’s four-level Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) prevailing wage system. When an employer registers a beneficiary for the FY 2027 cap, the employer will be required to state the OEWS wage level to which the offered salary corresponds for that occupation and geographic area of employment. A beneficiary whose offered wage corresponds to Level 4 (the highest tier) of the four-level OEWS wage structure will be entered into the selection pool four times. A Level 3 beneficiary will be entered three times; a Level 2 beneficiary, two times; and a Level 1 beneficiary, once. Employers should work closely with counsel in determining the proper wage level required for the H-1B cap registration.

As in past years, USCIS is expected to receive more H-1B cap registrations than needed to meet the annual quota of 85,000. After the registration period closes, USCIS will run two cap lotteries to select the beneficiaries on whose behalf H-1B cap petitions can be filed. The first lottery will contain all registered H-1B beneficiaries. USCIS will use this lottery to select enough beneficiaries to meet the regular H-1B cap of 65,000. The second lottery will contain all registered master’s cap beneficiaries who were not selected in the first lottery. USCIS will use this lottery to select enough beneficiaries to meet the H-1B cap exemption of 20,000 for holders of U.S. advanced degrees. The new weighted selection process will apply to both lotteries. Subsequent lotteries are possible if the number of H-1B petitions received for unique beneficiaries from the initial lotteries is insufficient to meet the FY 2027 quota.

USCIS plans to notify employers and immigration counsel of the lottery results by March 31, 2026. If a beneficiary is selected, each potential employer that filed a bona fide registration on that beneficiary’s behalf will be notified and each of those employers will be eligible to file an H-1B petition for the beneficiary. USCIS will provide selection notices for each winning beneficiary. The selection notice is valid for the named beneficiary only; employers cannot substitute beneficiaries. To learn the lottery results, your Fragomen attorney and your company’s authorized signatory will need to access their myUSCIS.gov account and review the status of each beneficiary. Make a record of your selected beneficiaries through screenshots or other means, to guard against any irregularities in the USCIS system.

USCIS will begin to accept H-1B cap petitions on behalf of selected beneficiaries on April 1, 2026. The petition filing period will end no earlier than June 30, 2026. USCIS will specify the exact end date of the petition filing period in cap selection notices. All FY 2027 H-1B cap petitions for beneficiaries selected in the initial lottery must be submitted during the designated filing period. 

Employers can generally file their petitions at any time during this period, but some cases might need to be filed by a specific date within the filing window. For example, an F-1 student with an optional practical training (OPT) employment authorization document (EAD) that expires before the end of the filing period must have their cap petition filed before the OPT EAD expiration date to ensure cap-gap work authorization benefits through the start date of their H-1B cap petition or April 1, 2027 (whichever is earlier). Your organization should work with your Fragomen team to identify beneficiaries with time-sensitive filing needs.

USCIS will again offer the option of online filing of cap and non-cap H-1B petitions and associated premium processing requests. However, because online filing remains unpredictable in the scope and scale needed for the high volume of H-1B petitions and has other limitations, employers should carefully consider with their immigration counsel whether it is advisable. Hard-copy submission remains USCIS’s predominant method of H-1B petition case filing.

New this year, prospective employers are reminded that if an H-1B change of status request cannot be approved for a foreign national – for example, a change of status request from F-1 or L-1 to H-1B – and the H-1B petition can only be approved for consular notification, the petition will be subject to a $100,000 fee in order for the H-1B cap petition to be approved, unless the employer has sought and obtained a national interest exception (NIE) to the new fee. Though liability for the $100,000 H-1B fee does not affect whether a candidate can be registered for the lottery, employers may want to assess whether they may be subject to the fee before registering a candidate.

Fragomen is closely monitoring the USCIS H-1B cap registration process and will provide updates throughout the FY 2027 cap season.