U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced this afternoon that the FY2014 H-1B Cap has been reached.

The filing window for the FY2014 H-1B Cap opened on Monday, April 1st. USCIS had predicted that the Cap would be reached within the first five days of the filing window. Many employers rushed to get their H-1B petitions in as close to April 1st as possible. Reports from FedEx and other services indicated that tens of thousands of packages were delivered to the Vermont and California Service Centers (the two locations that process H-1B cases) on April 1st alone.

USCIS will continue to accept packages until the close of business today, Friday April 5th. No additional petitions will be accepted after today. The law requires that in the event of the Cap being reached within the first five business days of the filing window, USCIS must include petitions filed on any of those five days in a "lottery." Even if the Cap had been met on Monday, USCIS would have continued to accept petitions until today.

Once all of the petitions are counted and checked for errors (missing signatures, dates, LCAs, fee checks, etc.), they will be placed in a computer-generated random selection process, or a "lottery."

The 20,000 visa numbers set aside for the US Master's cap exemption will be allocated first. The US Master's cap exemption is available to graduates of accredited US Master's programs. If you qualify for the US Master's cap exemption, but you are not allocated one of these 20,000 visas, you will also be included in the regular cap lottery. USCIS will then randomly assign the remaining 65,000 visa numbers. Any petitions that are not assigned a visa number will be returned to the petitioner or their attorney.

USCIS is presently unable to release the exact number of petitions that were received. They have also not designated a date on which the lottery will be conducted.

Watson Law Offices will keep affected clients apprised of the situation. We cannot confirm whether or not a case has been accepted for processing and assigned a cap number until we receive an official Receipt Notice from the government. Once the lottery has been completed, we will be able to address individual client's questions and concerns.

Check out the Watson Law Offices blog and Facebook for further updates in coming days.