H-1B Cap Reached for OPT/CPT Students

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that the congressionally mandated H-1B quota for this year is reached. USCIS has also received more than the limit of 20,000 H-1B petitions filed under the U.S. masters quota.

USCIS will use a computer-generated process, also known as the lottery, to randomly select the petitions needed to meet the caps of 65,000 visas for the general category and 20,000 for the advanced degree exemption. USCIS will first randomly select petitions for the masters quota. All unselected masters petitions will become part of the random selection process for the 65,000 general limit. The agency will reject and return filing fees for all unselected cap-subject petitions that are not duplicate filings.

Before running the lottery, USCIS will complete initial intake for all filings received during the filing period, which ended April 7, 2015. Due to the high number of petitions, USCIS is not yet able to announce the date it will conduct the random selection process.