On Wednesday, November 23, 2011, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) indicated that as of November 22, 2011, it received "a sufficient number of petitions to reach the statutory cap for FY 2012." Cap-subject petitions filed after November 22, 2011 will be rejected. Employers may file H-1B petitions for the next fiscal year, which begins on October 1, 2012, no sooner than April 1, 2012.
The statutory cap allows for 65,000 new H-1B petitions to be approved each year. An additional 20,000 H-1B numbers are allocated for persons graduating from U.S. universities with advanced degrees. Of the 65,000 "regular" H-1Bs available each year, 6,800 are reserved for nationals of Singapore and Chile pursuant to free trade agreements with those two countries. Any unused H-1B1s for Chileans and Singaporeans in a given year are added to the H-1B pool for the next fiscal year.
According to the USCIS' published information, it appears that the rate of cap-subject H-1B filings more than doubled over the last week that H-1Bs were available. A day before the announcement that the cap had been reached was made, on November 22nd, the USCIS announced that 61,800 H-1Bs had been received as of November 18th. This was an increase of over 5,000 from the previous cap count only 4 days earlier. It is unclear, however, how many H-1B petitions were actually received by the USCIS in its final count, as this information was not provided in the USCIS' most recent announcement. The USCIS has also not announced how many unused H-1B1s for Singaporean and Chilean nationals from FY2011 were added to the available number of H-1Bs for this fiscal year. We will provide this information as soon as it is made available.
Please note that H-1B petitions are not subject to the cap where one of the following applies:
- The individual has been granted H-1B status within the last six years;
- The petitioning employer is a nonprofit research organization or a governmental research organization; or
- The petitioning employer is an institute of higher education.
Please contact our office if you have further questions about the cap, or would like to discuss alternatives to H-1B classification.
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