H1B Pre-Registration- Right around the corner!!!
By
Dev B. Viswanath, Esq.
With the year 2022 under way, Employers are all gearing up and organizing candidates for H1b filings for Fiscal Year 2023, which will begin October 1st 2022. The filings for H1Bs will start around April of 2022 and the lottery system will be based on cases selected through Pre-registration, similar to last year, which will start as of March 1st, which is almost 2 weeks earlier than previous years and ends almost 10 days earlier than previously. From noon Eastern Time on March 1st through noon Eastern Time on March 18, all pre-registration should be done and in.
Typically, this is how it works:
- First round pre-registration candidates are randomly selected from all the Quotas. Those who are picked will have 90 days to file their H1B – earliest date they can start to file would be April 1st 2022.
- Anyone who is not selected but still eligible, will be kept as “submitted” until a short bit after 90 days. Those who are not eligible will be rejected and removed from the FY 2023 H1B lottery.
- Within and up to that 90 day period, some H1B petitions will be filed and denied, and some will be filed and withdrawn, and still some will just never be filed within the 90 days. So, all the leftover visas that were not positively used will be utilized for 2nd round picks.
- Typically, 2nd round picks will happen around the 2nd or 3rd week of July, after USCIS has had a chance to tally all the visas left and available. And then a random selection will occur again.
- After all the visas available are used to pick random folks for round 2, those people will have 90 days to file and everyone else will remain as “submitted”.
- Sometime around November round 3 will begin after the 90 days for round two and also to account for any additional denials starting from Round 1. There may or may not be many visas left at that point but still gives an opportunity to use up every possible visa number available.
- The H1B lottery is a per year system and the visa numbers not used in a given fiscal year will go to waste. That is why this relatively new pre-registration system is so valuable and helpful. It allows the maximum number
Prospective petitioners with selected registrations will be eligible to file a FY 2023 cap-subject petition only for the alien named in the registration and within the filing period indicated on the eligibility notice. It is extremely important that all accounts are created properly otherwise registration can get easily messed up and missed.
For those employers who have counsel/attorneys, there will be account process for the attorney and then any account process for the employer and they are interconnected so that preregistration can take place. AND absolutely no one should have duplicate filings for the same employee and same employer for the same job. If that occurs the entire preregistration for that beneficiary will be cancelled as moot.
For successful applicants, the system will send a confirmation saying that the preregistration is complete. Then it will be a wait game to find out if the applicant is picked. For any employers or potential H1B applicants, if you need information or advice, please contact an experienced immigration attorney.