H‑1B: Cap Met, Filing Open

A visa lottery that decides who gets to work in the United States as a high-skilled temporary employee has already moved past the luck phase for fiscal year 2027. On March 31, 2026, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it had received enough electronic registrations to meet the annual H-1B cap and had notified employers with selected beneficiaries that they may now file full petitions. (uscis.gov) That filing window opened on April 1, 2026, and it is not open to everyone. Only employers whose registrations were selected may submit cap-subject H-1B petitions, and each petition must match a valid registration tied to a specific worker and job. (uscis.gov) The H-1B program itself is the main route many United States employers use to hire foreign professionals for specialty jobs like software engineering, data analysis, accounting, and research. Congress set the regular annual cap at 65,000 visas, with another 20,000 reserved for workers who earned qualifying advanced degrees from United States institutions. (federalregister.gov) For employers, the process now works in two stages. First comes a short electronic registration period with a per-person fee, and only after selection can the employer submit the full petition with job details, wage evidence, and supporting records. (uscis.gov) For fiscal year 2027, that registration period ran from noon Eastern on March 4, 2026, to noon Eastern on March 19, 2026. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services required employers and their lawyers to use online accounts and pay a $215 registration fee for each beneficiary. (uscis.gov) What changed this year is that the lottery is no longer a simple random drawing once registrations exceed the cap. The Department of Homeland Security put a weighted selection rule into effect for the fiscal year 2027 season, and that rule generally favors registrations tied to higher Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics wage levels. (uscis.gov; uscis.gov) In plain terms, the government is no longer treating every eligible registration like an identical lottery ticket. Under the new system, a registration connected to a higher offered wage has better odds of selection than a registration at a lower wage level for the same occupation and area of intended employment. (uscis.gov; federalregister.gov) That shift helps explain why filing strategy now matters almost as much as selection itself. If an employer chose a wage level during registration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services now says the later petition must include evidence supporting the basis of that selected wage level as of the date the registration was submitted. (uscis.gov) The agency also tightened the paperwork link between the registration and the petition. The filed petition must use the same identifying information for the worker, the same position information listed in the selected registration, and a copy of the selection notice, and it must be filed during the filing period listed on that notice, which will be at least 90 days. (uscis.gov) There is also a new form requirement that makes routine clerical mistakes more dangerous. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said that beginning April 1, 2026, it would accept only the 02/27/26 edition of Form I-129 for fiscal year 2027 cap-subject H-1B petitions. (uscis.gov) The broader policy backdrop has been shifting for two years. In 2024, the government already moved to a beneficiary-centric registration system, which was designed to reduce the advantage of flooding the system with multiple registrations for the same person through related employers, and that rule took effect on March 4, 2024. (federalregister.gov) A separate modernization rule then took effect on January 17, 2025. That rule revised H-1B requirements more broadly, added flexibilities in some areas, and increased integrity measures that affect how employers document specialty occupations and bona fide job offers. (federalregister.gov) Put together, those changes make the post-selection stage less like mailing in a standard packet and more like defending every line of an application under audit. Bigger employers often have in-house immigration teams, compensation data, and standardized job architecture ready to support wage-level choices, while smaller employers are more likely to need outside counsel and more time to assemble the same record; that is an inference from the new wage-evidence requirement and weighted selection design, not a direct government finding. (uscis.gov; uscis.gov) For selected employers, the practical question is no longer whether they “won the lottery.” The real question is whether the petition they file now can prove that the wage level, passport record, job description, and form version all line up exactly with what was entered during registration in March 2026. (uscis.gov; uscis.gov)