H-1B Lottery Season Begins March 2023

January 19, 2023

Each year at this time, SKO works with our clients to prepare H-1B work visa registrations for noncitizen employees they wish to sponsor in the upcoming H-1B Cap Lottery in March, a lottery for the limited number of H-1B visas made available each year. This opportunity only comes once a year and is a great way for employers to support their noncitizen employees. If your company is interested in sponsoring noncitizen employees in professional positions (particularly recent college graduates) for these work visas, click below to find out more about the process.

What is H-1B STATUS?

H-1B is a widely used professional work visa available to noncitizens for employment in the U.S. H-1B requires employer sponsorship. The employment must be in a specialty occupation that requires a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education to enter the field in the U.S. Examples of fields for which H-1B is appropriate include computer science, engineering, chemistry, quantitative data analysis and certain financial fields.

What is THE H-1B CAP?

Each year there is a limit of 65,000 H-1B’s for bachelor’s degree cases with an additional 20,000 for persons with U.S. master’s degrees or higher. Since more individuals seek H-1B’s than there are numbers available, H-1B’s are allocated through a lottery system. Registration for the lottery will open in March 2023.

Some types of employment are exempt from the lottery system, including jobs at institutions of higher learning, research organizations, and some physicians.

WHO SHOULD APPLY?

If you wish to employ or continue to employ a noncitizen for a professional position and they have never been in H-1B status before, we recommend contacting SKO as soon as possible so we can review their case for potential H-1B status.

We strongly recommend considering foreign nationals who are currently employed on F-1 OPT or STEM OPT (work status obtained following graduation from an institution of higher learning), as they have a limited number of chances to be selected in the lottery.

WHAT IS THE PROCESS?

Start by contacting SKO!