On April 11, 2019, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it received a sufficient number of H-1B petitions needed to reach both the annual 65,000 regular cap and the 20,000 master’s cap. USCIS received 201,011 H-1B petitions during the period of April 1-5, 2019, which is an increase of nearly 11,000 petitions compared to the previous year’s H-1B cap filing window.
USCIS also announced that it completed the regular and master’s cap lotteries to select petitions for processing under the annual cap. USCIS will send receipt notices to petitioners and their counsel for those cases selected in the lottery and will return all unselected petitions along with their filing fees. Those mailings will likely take several weeks to complete.
Additional information related to H-1B cap-subject filings may be made publicly available via the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub in Q1 of Fiscal Year 2021, which begins in October 2020. This Hub, which was launched on April 1, 2019, provides information related to H-1B petitions processed by the agency, including information on the number of petitions filed, cases approved, and denials issued. USCIS has reported that the agency will provide cumulative quarterly updates and annual releases of H-1B petition data, and anticipates updating the H-1B Employer Data Hub quarterly.