The USCIS received 199,000 petitions for the FY-2018 H-1B visas that will become available on October 1, 2017. The lottery was held on April 11, 2017, for both the master’s cap cases (20,000 H-1B visas) and the regular cap cases (65,000 H-1B visas). The USCIS is in the process of sending receipt notices by regular mail to those whose petitions were selected in the lottery. We expect that the process to mail all of the notices will take several weeks to complete. Petitions that were not selected in the lottery will be returned (with the uncashed filing fee checks) over the next few months.
