United States: USCIS Announces H-1B Cap Registration Schedule for FY 2026

USCIS will once again use an online registration system to conduct the H-1B cap selection. An employer account is necessary whether your organization will work with immigration counsel to submit registrations or will submit registrations on its own behalf. Your organization’s accounts must be maintained by an employee authorized to sign immigration benefit requests for your organization.

For the second year, USCIS is making available an organizational account system that will allow multiple people within an organization and their immigration counsel to collaborate on and prepare H-1B registrations. If your organization will be represented by immigration counsel during the registration process, you or your attorney will be able to associate your organization’s account with its attorneys’ accounts. USCIS has also announced some improvements to the organizational and representative accounts this year, including the ability to prepare a spreadsheet of H-1B beneficiary data and upload it to the registration system in order to pre-populate data in H-1B registrations.

Organizational and representative user accounts may be created or upgraded at any time. Because the system is complex, new users of the system and their counsel should carefully plan in advance before upgrading or creating new accounts. USCIS is expected to issue further instructions on the enhanced system in the coming weeks.

USCIS will open the cap registration period on Friday, March 7, 2025 at noon ET. Employers and their immigration counsel can begin to draft, review, sign, and submit cap registrations at that time. The USCIS system will not accept drafts or registrations before March 7.

The registration period will close on Monday, March 24, 2025 at noon ET. All registrations for the FY 2026 cap must be submitted by this time. Late registrations will not be accepted.

As part of DHS’s continued efforts to prevent misuse, the H-1B cap registration system will again use beneficiary-centric selection, rather than the registration-centric selection method that had been in effect before FY 2025. Under the beneficiary-centric system, a foreign national’s passport or valid travel document will be required for an H-1B cap registration submission on their behalf. The passport or travel document will be used as the beneficiary’s unique identifier, serving as the means for selection in the H-1B cap lottery. Each beneficiary will only be entered into the H-1B cap lottery selection process once, regardless of how many registrations were submitted on their behalf. Foreign nationals must use the same passport or travel document as an identifier for all of the registrations submitted on their behalf; if they are registered under more than one document, all of their registrations can be invalidated.

As in past years, USCIS is expected to receive far more H-1B cap registrations than needed to meet the annual quota of 85,000. At the end of the registration period, USCIS will conduct two lotteries to select enough beneficiaries to meet the 85,000 annual cap. The first lottery will include all registered beneficiaries and will select enough to meet the regular cap of 65,000. The second lottery includes registered U.S. advanced-degree holders who were not chosen in the first lottery and would select enough to meet the advanced-degree cap exemption of 20,000.

USCIS plans to notify employers and immigration counsel of winning beneficiaries by March 31, 2025. 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 a selection notice for each winning beneficiary. The selection notice is valid for the named beneficiary only; employers cannot substitute beneficiaries.

USCIS is expected to begin accepting H-1B cap petitions for selected beneficiaries on Tuesday, April 1, 2025. The petition filing period must remain open for at least 90 days.

Employers can 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, 2026 (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 untested in the scope and scale needed for the high volume of H-1B petitions and has other limitations and potential risks, employers should carefully consider with their immigration counsel whether it is advisable. Hard-copy submission remains USCIS’s predominant method of case filing.    

Though cap registration will not open until March 7, employers should work with their immigration counsel to identify H-1B cap needs and gather beneficiary data as soon as possible. For each beneficiary, the employer must provide the following: 

• Full legal name;
• Gender;
• Date of birth;
• Country of birth;
• Country of citizenship;
• Valid passport information (The beneficiary must use the same passport or travel document for all registrations filed on their behalf); and
• Whether the beneficiary is eligible for the U.S. advanced-degree cap or will be eligible for the advanced-degree cap at the time an H-1B cap petition is filed on the beneficiary’s behalf.

Your organization should also work with your Fragomen team to begin to gather supporting documentation and information required for the H-1B cap season. Advance preparation can minimize the risk of delay during the busy registration and petition filing periods. Employers should also work closely with prospective FY 2026 H-1B cap beneficiaries to ensure they have valid passports or travel documents and that they are aware of the parameters of the beneficiary-centric system.

Fragomen is closely monitoring the USCIS cap registration process and will provide updates throughout the FY 2026 cap season.