On Friday, February 5, 2021, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the online registration period for H-1B quota selection for Fiscal Year 2022 will begin on March 9 at 12:00 pm (noon) eastern standard time and run through 12:00 pm (noon) eastern standard time on March 25. The FY2022 H-1B quota is for H-1B registrations and petitions filed to USCIS in the spring of 2021, with a start date of October 1, 2021 or later.

As we updated in our alert last week, the USCIS wage-weighted quota selection rule has been delayed until the end of this year. This regulation would have given preference to those H-1B registrations where the employer would pay the highest wages as determined by the Department of Labor’s four-tiered wage system. Therefore, the registration system for this year is expected to be similar to last year’s H-1B registration. Registrations will be submitted electronically and will require a non-refundable $10 registration fee. Assuming that USCIS receives more registrations than the allotted number of 85,000 available H-1B petitions, USCIS will conduct a computer-generated lottery among all registrations. USCIS has confirmed that notifications of selected registrations will be available by March 31. Employers with selected cases will then be eligible to file an H-1B petition within a designated 90-day period following registration selection. As mentioned above, approved H-1B petitions will be effective on October 1, 2021 or later — the start of the government’s 2022 fiscal year.

For more details regarding the USCIS lottery selection and notification process, please see our March 2020 alert.