U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on July 17, 2026 that it has received enough petitions to meet the congressionally mandated H-1B visa cap for fiscal year 2027. That covers both the 65,000 regular cap and the 20,000 advanced degree exemption, commonly called the master's cap.
The announcement closes out the FY 2027 cap season. The petition filing window ran from April 1 to June 30, 2026, and USCIS has confirmed it will not conduct any additional rounds of cap registration selections.
If you were not selected in this year's lottery, there is no second chance for FY 2027. The next opportunity is the FY 2028 registration period, expected in March 2027.
The agency said it received sufficient H-1B cap petitions during the April-to-June filing period to meet the full 85,000-petition annual limit. Registrations that were not selected will not be pulled in a later round.
This is the second consecutive year without an additional selection round. USCIS also conducted only one lottery for FY 2026, after running two selection rounds in fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
USCIS has not released data on the FY 2027 registration selection rate, so it is not yet known how the odds compared with prior years.
USCIS will continue to accept and process petitions that are not subject to the cap. That includes extension petitions, amendment petitions, change of employer petitions for current H-1B workers, and petitions filed by cap-exempt employers such as institutions of higher education, nonprofit research organizations, and governmental research organizations.
FY 2027 was the first cap season run under the new weighted selection process. Instead of a purely random lottery, the system assigned additional entries to beneficiaries based on the offered salary and the corresponding Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics wage level. Thus, increasing selection odds for higher-paid positions.
Petitioners this year also filed a new edition of Form I-129, which requires more detailed disclosures about the terms and conditions of the H-1B position. Cap petitions had to include the source material supporting the wage level selected at registration.
Here is what we see happening now that the FY 2027 cap is closed.
For candidates who were not selected, the H-1B route through a cap-subject employer is paused until the FY 2028 registration in March 2027, with an earliest start date of October 1, 2027. That is a long runway, and for many people it will not match the timeline of a job offer or an expiring work authorization.
Cap-exempt employment is one path that stays open year-round. Universities, affiliated nonprofits, and research organizations can file H-1B petitions at any time without entering the lottery.
The other set of options does not involve the H-1B at all. The O-1A nonimmigrant visa for individuals with extraordinary ability has no annual cap and no lottery. The same is true on the immigrant side for the EB-1A extraordinary ability category and the EB-2 National Interest Waiver, both of which can be self-petitioned without employer sponsorship. Whether any of these fits depends on the strength of an individual record, and that is a case-by-case judgment to make with counsel.
The weighted lottery adds one more situation worth watching. Because selection odds now favor higher wage levels, early-career candidates at lower wage levels face longer odds in future lotteries than they did under the random system. We expect that to push more strong-credential candidates toward the cap-free categories over the next few cycles.
For employers, the immediate housekeeping is simpler: confirm which registrations were selected and filed, calendar the March 2027 registration window, and review whether any non-selected candidates have status or work authorization expiring before October 2027.
