USCIS Announces it has Reached H-1B Cap for FY 2023

August 23, 2022

Today, the USCIS announced it has “received a sufficient number of petitions needed to reach the congressionally mandated 65,000 H-1B visa regular cap and the 20,000 H-1B visa U.S. advanced degree exemption, known as the master’s cap, for fiscal year (FY) 2023.” 

FY 2023 will begin on October 1, 2022. In its announcement, the USCIS indicated that they have sent notification of non-selection to employers’ online MyUSCIS accounts. The status for registrations submitted for FY 2023 will now show as “Not Selected.”

This means there will not be a second or third round of the lottery this year, unlike the past two years.

The reason for this is that USCIS has been tweaking its calculation for how many registrations to select in each round to end up with 85,000 new H-1B visas.

Last year, USCIS received 308,613 H-1B registrations and initially selected 87,500 registrations projected as needed to reach the FY 2022 numerical allocations, followed by a second selection in July of an additional 27,717 registrations and then a third selection in November 2021 of an additional 16,753 registrations. This resulted in a total of 131,970 selected registrations for FY 2022.

To compare, for FY 2023, USCIS received 483,927 H-1B registrations and initially selected 127,600 registrations projected as needed to reach the FY 2023 numerical allocation.

For Weaver Schlenger clients, we understand that not being selected can be distressing and will send out notifications to all impacted individuals in the coming days.