Today, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the initial registration period for the fiscal year (FY) 2026 H-1B cap will begin at noon Eastern on March 7, 2025, and run through noon Eastern on March 24, 2025. During this period, prospective petitioners and their representatives must utilize a USCIS online account to electronically register each beneficiary for the selection process and pay the required registration fee, $215.
Employers who have never used a USCIS online account for H-1B petitions must create an organizational account. Employers who had an H-1B registrant account for FY 2021 to FY 2024 but did not use it in FY 2025 will see their existing account automatically converted into an organizational account upon their next login. First-time registrants may create an account at any time.
USCIS will continue using the beneficiary-centric selection process introduced in FY 2025. Under this system, selections are made based on unique beneficiaries rather than individual registrations. USCIS plans to notify petitioners and representatives of selected registrations by March 31, 2025.
Only petitioners whose beneficiary registrations were selected during the registration process may file an H-1B cap-subject petition, including those petitioning for beneficiaries eligible for the advanced degree exemption. Because Congress set the annual regular cap for the H-1B category at 65,000 and the additional master cap with the advanced degree for the H-1B category at 20,000, this H-1B registration program selects a limited number of visas by random lottery from registered applicants.
For the FY 2026 H-1B filing season, USCIS has introduced several improvements to organizational and representative accounts, including:
- The ability for paralegals to collaborate with multiple legal representatives. Paralegals can now accept invitations from different legal representatives, allowing them to prepare H-1B registrations, Form I-129 H-1B petitions, and Form I-907 premium processing requests across multiple attorney accounts.
- A more streamlined process for legal representatives to add paralegals to company accounts.
- Automatic pre-population of certain fields in Form I-129 based on selected H-1B registrations.
- A new feature enabling bulk uploads of H-1B beneficiary data via spreadsheets to streamline the registration process.
Those who apply for an initial H-1B petition in this fiscal year 2026 can start working on October 1, 2025, the Federal Government’s fiscal year.
If you are interested in an H-1B visa, please contact us at mail@songlawfirm.com.
