United States Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) announced yesterday that it received a record 233,000 petitions for the 65,000 regular and 20,000 “Master’s cap” annual H-1B quota for Fiscal Year 2016. USCIS also confirmed that it had conducted a computer-generated lottery to determine which H-1B petitions would be selected for review. The review of the cases will begin no later than May 11, 2015.

Based on past experience, we expect to begin receiving receipts for selected H-1B petitions within the next couple of weeks.

If you have filed a petition through our office, Pryor Cashman will be in touch with you on any case-specific developments and to consider next steps for those cases that were not selected.