New H-1B Lottery System; Electronic Registration

The festive season is over and for many working professionals hoping to secure an H-1B visa to the US; very soon the season of paperwork would arrive.

The H-1B season will officially kick off from March 1 and run through March 20, according to USCIS.

On Jan 9, USCIS formally announced the implementation of the new registration process for H-1B petitions for the fiscal year 2021.USCIS will notify the selected registrants no later than March 31.

Working of New Electronic Registration

Employers seeking to file an H-1B cap-subject petition for the year 2021 will be first required to electronically submit a registration request with the name of each of the sponsored employees and one application for each sponsored employee during a fiscal year. A $10 non-refundable registration fee will be levied for each registration.

In the electronic registration, the employer will fill out a form detailing basic information such as the employer’s name, job title, contact details as well as sponsored employee’s name, citizenship, passport number as well as qualifications.

Important Dates

The registration period will commence from March 1 and will continue through March 20. If the USCIS ends up getting more registrations than the intended numbers then there will be a random selection process for all applications.

The H-1B quota limit is 85,000 petitions per year including 65,000 for regular applicants and 20,000 with a US master’s degree.

Every year the quota gets filled within a few days of the opening of the registration process and a lottery process is needed to sort out the selected petitions.

The selected registrations will be notified by March 31, 2020, and the employers would only be able to file petitions for the candidates that they picked up during the registration process.

As this is the first year for the new electronic registration process, USCIS is expected to notify the employers about any other requirement.