On April 30, 2024, the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it has received a sufficient number of petitions needed to reach the congressionally mandated 65,000 H-1B regular cap and the 20,000 H-1B U.S. advanced degree exemption, known as the master’s cap, for fiscal year (FY) 2024. 

USCIS selected 114,017 beneficiaries in the initial selection for the FY 2025 H-1B cap.  USCIS always makes more than 85,000 selections to account for petitions that are denied or not filed.

During the registration period for the FY 2025 H-1B cap, USCIS saw a significant decrease in the total number of registrations submitted compared to FY 2024, including a decrease in the number of registrations submitted on behalf of beneficiaries with multiple registrations.

The decrease in number of registrations is due to the change implemented by USCIS this year to make H-1B lottery selections by individual, rather than based on the total number of registrations submitted, many of which were duplicates that permitted individuals to "game" the system and increase their chances of selection. Last year there were 312,994 duplicate registrations submitted by multiple companies of behalf of the same individuals. This resulted in some individuals being selected multiple times while others were not selected at all.

USCIS has released the following statistics regarding the FY2025 H-1B lottery:

• The number of unique beneficiaries registered for FY 2025 (approx. 442,000) was comparable to the number registered last year for FY 2024 (approx. 446,000).
• The number of unique employers submitting registrations for FY 2025 (approx. 52,700) was also comparable to the number submitted last year for FY 2024 (approx. 52,000).
• The number of eligible registrations, however, was down dramatically for FY 2025 (470,342) compared with FY 2024 (758,994) — a 38.6% reduction.
• Overall, USCIS reported an average of 1.06 registrations per beneficiary in FY 2025 compared to 1.70 for FY 2024.  Consequently, the new selection process was successful in discouraging duplicate registrations.