U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that the initial registration period for the fiscal year 2026 H-1B cap will begin at noon Eastern on March 7, 2025, and will run through noon Eastern on March 24, 2025.
During this period, prospective petitioners and their representatives must register each beneficiary electronically using a USCIS online account and pay the required $215 registration fee per beneficiary.
For the second consecutive year, USCIS will use the beneficiary-centric selection process introduced in FY 2025. Rather than selecting registrations based on the number of submissions per employer, the system will randomly select unique beneficiaries from the pool of properly submitted registrations. If USCIS receives enough unique registrations by March 24, it will conduct a random selection and notify account holders by March 31. If the cap is not reached, all properly submitted registrations will be selected.
Employers who do not yet have a USCIS online account will need to create an organizational account. Those who had an H-1B registrant account for FY 2021–FY 2024 but did not use it in FY 2025 will have their accounts converted to organizational accounts upon their next login. First-time registrants can create accounts at any time, and updated guidance will be available before the registration period opens.
To accommodate higher transaction volumes, the U.S. Department of Treasury has approved a temporary increase in the daily credit card transaction limit from $24,999.99 to $99,999.99. Payments exceeding this amount must be processed via Automated Clearing House (ACH), which may require employers to notify their banks in advance.
Enhancements to H-1B filing process
For FY 2026, USCIS has introduced several enhancements to streamline the filing process, including:
- Allowing paralegals to work with multiple legal representatives, enabling them to prepare registrations and petitions for different attorneys within one account.
- Simplifying how legal representatives add paralegals to company clients.
- Pre-populating certain fields on Form I-129 based on selected H-1B registrations.
- Enabling bulk spreadsheet uploads of beneficiary data to pre-populate registration fields.
These enhancements will go live before the registration period begins, making the process more efficient for employers, attorneys, and beneficiaries.
For further details and updates, visit the H-1B Electronic Registration Process page on the USCIS website.
