On April 5th, 2019, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it received a sufficient number of petitions needed to reach the 65,000 H-1B visa regular cap for fiscal year (FY) 2020. USCIS stated that it will next determine whether it received a sufficient number of petitions to meet the 20,000 H-1B visa U.S. advanced degree exemption, also known as the master’s cap.

The agency will reject and return filing fees for all unselected cap-subject petitions that are not prohibited multiple filings (please see my previous post: New Policy Memo Warns Against Multiple H-1B Cap Filings for the Same Beneficiary)

I will provide further updates here regarding the master’s cap, when available.

Quick Reminders: 

• Starting this year, USCIS will reverse the order of the H-1B lottery for the regular and master’s cap. The lottery will first be run for all H-1B cap-subject petitions filed, including those eligible for the master’s cap. USCIS will then run the lottery for the master’s cap by selecting a sufficient number of remaining eligible H-1B petitions needed to reach the master’s cap.
• USCIS will offer premium processing in a two-phased process during the FY 2020 cap season in order to better manage requests without completely suspending the process as the agency did last year. The first phase will include FY 2020 cap-subject H-1B petitions requesting a change of status and the second phase will include all other FY 2020 cap-subject petitions. For specific details, please see my previous post: USCIS Announces a Two-Phased Approach for Premium Processing of FY 2020 H-1B Cap-Subject Petitions.