The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that fiscal year (FY) 2021 H-1B cap-subject petitions may now be filed with USCIS if based on a valid selected registration.
USCIS states that nearly 275,000 unique registrations were submitted during the initial registration period, which is a 37% increase from last fiscal year’s total of 201,011. Approximately 46% (126,500) of all unique registrations were for prospective beneficiaries with U.S. advanced degrees, and the remaining 54% (148,500) were regular cap registrants. Additionally, more than 40,000 registration accounts were created, and a majority of submitted registrations were for potential beneficiaries from India (67.7%) and China (13.2%). Therefore the percentage of likelihood a beneficiary was selected was roughly 16% for the advanced cap and 25% for the regular cap.
If selected, an H-1B cap-subject petition must be properly filed within the period indicated on the relevant registration selection notice. The period for filing the H-1B cap-subject petition will be at least 90 days.
Due to the COVID-19 (coronavirus), many businesses in the U.S. are closing their doors. Therefore, it is unclear whether all of the attorneys and companies with selected registrations will ultimately submit full applications in the 90 day period. If selected registrations do not subsequently have a full petition filed with USCIS within the 90 day period, that could free up extra slots for registrations that were not selected the first time around. USCIS has previously said that if not enough petitions are filed, they would pick more unselected petitions to meet the cap numbers. At this time, all registrations that were not selected remain identified as “Submitted” in the myuscis website.