USCIS announces FY2026 H-1B cap registration period

Global Immigration alert

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that the initial registration period for the fiscal year (FY) 2026 H-1B cap will run from March 7 to 24, 2025. During this period, prospective petitioners and representatives will be able to complete and submit registrations using the agency’s online H-1B registration system.

Background and analysis

On February 5, USCIS announced that it will open the H-1B cap registration period for FY2026 on Friday, March 7, 2025 at 12 p.m. EST, and will permit the submission of registrations through to 12 p.m. EST on Monday, March 24.

Prospective H-1B cap-subject petitioners must first submit the electronic registration and pay the required US$215 fee for each beneficiary using a myUSCIS online account during the registration period.

For H-1B petitioning employers who previously held an H-1B registrant account for FY2021 to FY2024 but did not use the account for FY2025, the existing account will be automatically converted into organization accounts upon their next login.

New petitioning employers must create an organization account before they can submit H-1B registrations, which they can do at any time through to the March 24 deadline. For FY2026, the H-1B registration fee has increased to US$215 per beneficiary, up from US$10 the prior year. The fee increase was announced in FY2025 as part of a broader USCIS initiative aimed at improving processing times and covering increasing administrative costs.

USCIS will continue to use a beneficiary-centric H-1B lottery selection process that was put in place in FY2025. Under the beneficiary-centric selection system, the random selection process is based on each unique beneficiary identified in the registration pool, as opposed to individual employer registrations.

Prospective petitioners or representatives will be able to draft, edit and sign cap registrations prior to final payment and submission. However, registrations cannot be submitted until March 7. All H-1B cap registrations for FY2026 must be submitted by March 24.

Additionally, USCIS has introduced several improvements to organizational and representative accounts to streamline the H-1B registration and filing process:

• Paralegals can now work with multiple legal representatives and prepare H-1B registrations and petitions within a single account.
• Legal representatives can easily add paralegals to their company clients.
• Certain fields in Form I-129 will prepopulate from selected H-1B registrations.
• There will be an option to prepare a spreadsheet of H1B beneficiary information and upload the data into the system to prepopulate H-1B registration fields.
• These enhancements will be live before the initial registration period begins on March 7.

What this means

If USCIS receives enough registrations by March 24, the agency will conduct a random lottery and send selection notifications via users’ myUSCIS online accounts. In the unlikely event that USCIS does not receive enough registrations to meet the congressionally mandated annual 85,000 cap, all registrations for unique beneficiaries that were properly submitted in the initial registration period will be selected.

USCIS intends to conduct the selection process and notify prospective petitioners and representatives by March 31. If selected, a petitioner is eligible to file an H-1B cap-subject petition during the associated filing period, which will be reflected on the selection notice from USCIS.

USCIS has not yet announced the petition filing period for the FY2026 H-1B cap. Based on prior years, it is expected that USCIS will start accepting H-1B cap petitions for selected beneficiaries on April 1, with a filing window of up to 90 days.