US CIS announced on April 7th that they had received enough petitions to reach the congressionally mandated H-1B cap for Fiscal Year 2017 (FY2017 starts on October 1, 2016). US CIS will use its computer-generated "lottery" to randomly select petitions to meet the 20,000 advanced degree exemption and 65,000 in the general category.

The advance degree exemption will be completed first with the remaining unselected advance degree petitions becoming part of the random selection under the 65,000 general cap.

Due to the volume of cases received, US CIS will complete the initial intake of cases received during the filing period that ended on April 7th and then complete the random selection process. At present, no date has been set for the start of the random selection process.

For the US CIS announcement, please click here.