H-1B Cap Hit For Fiscal Year 2016

On April 7, 2015, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it has received more than enough H-1B petitions to meet the numerical limit for fiscal year 2016 cap-subject H-1B visas, which includes both the 65,000 general H-1B cap petitions as well as the 20,000 US master's degree H-1B petitions filed on behalf of individuals with US advanced degrees. This is the third year in a row that the cap was reached in the first five business days, triggering a lottery.

USCIS indicates it will soon begin executing the computer-generated random selection process for all cap-subject petitions received. First, USCIS will determine which US master's degree cases will be randomly selected toward the 20,000 limit. Once that is determined, the remainder of the US master's degree cases will be added to the pool of general H-1B cap petitions, and USCIS will execute the second random selection process to determine which cases are accepted toward the more general