A lottery that no longer treats every registration the same
For the first time since the H-1B program adopted electronic registration, USCIS did not run a random lottery this year. On March 31, 2026, the agency confirmed it had received enough registrations to reach the fiscal year 2027 cap of 65,000 standard slots plus 20,000 reserved for holders of US advanced degrees, and that selections were made under a new weighted process tied to wage level rather than a flat draw.
The rule behind that shift was finalized by the Department of Homeland Security, published in the Federal Register on December 29, 2025, and took effect February 27, 2026, just ahead of the March 4-19 registration window. Instead of one entry per registrant, DHS now assigns entries based on which of the Department of Labor's four prevailing wage levels a position falls into. A job offer at Level IV, the highest wage tier, gets four entries in the selection pool. A Level I offer gets one.
Petitioners who cleared the lottery were notified through their USCIS accounts starting April 1 and have a 90-day window to file completed petitions, which puts the filing deadline at the end of June. That means talent acquisition and immigration teams are working through this system in real time this quarter, not reading about it after the fact.
What the wage weighting actually did to the odds
An analysis of the FY2027 results by immigration law firm Manifest Law estimated selection odds by tier at roughly 15 percent for Level I registrations, 31 percent for Level II, 46 percent for Level III, and above 60 percent for Level IV. Under the old random lottery, every registration carried the same odds regardless of wage.
The practical effect is that employers who structure offers at the lower end of the prevailing wage scale, which is common for early-career hires and roles in lower-cost markets, are now competing with worse odds than employers offering senior-level compensation. That is a direct incentive shift: pay more to a smaller pool of candidates, or accept materially lower odds of winning a slot at all. Several immigration counsel firms tracking the cycle, including Ogletree Deakins and Fragomen, have flagged this as the most consequential structural change to the program in over a decade, more significant in its day-to-day effect on hiring than the headline-grabbing fee that accompanied it.
The fee that is still being litigated
That fee is the other half of the story. A September 19, 2025 presidential proclamation imposed a $100,000 supplemental payment on certain new H-1B petitions involving beneficiaries who are outside the United States and require consular processing. It applies on top of standard USCIS filing costs, which already run into the thousands of dollars per petition.
The fee has not gone unchallenged. On December 12, 2025, a coalition of 20 state attorneys general led by California and Massachusetts filed suit in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, arguing the proclamation functions as an unlawful tax that the executive branch has no authority to impose without Congress. As of early June, that case, State of California et al. v. Mullin, was still pending before the court, with the fee remaining in effect and collectible in the meantime. Employers filing petitions this month have had to plan and budget as though the fee will hold, because it currently does, while the legal question of whether it can survive stays open.
What this means for HR and talent teams right now
For companies with active H-1B pipelines, the practical takeaway is that two separate cost and risk variables just changed at once, and neither is settled. The wage-weighted lottery makes it structurally harder to sponsor at entry-level pay bands, which pushes toward either raising offer levels for sponsored roles or shifting early-career international hiring toward OPT and other non-cap-subject pathways. The $100,000 fee, still in litigation, adds a cost variable that HR and finance teams cannot simply write off as resolved.
Talent acquisition platforms and immigration case management tools built around the old flat lottery now need to model wage level against selection probability as a hiring input, not just a compliance afterthought. Compensation benchmarking, req approval workflows, and international mobility budgeting are all downstream of a rule that took effect four months ago and a fee whose legal status is still being argued in court. Employers relying on either staying static should expect neither.
Sources: USCIS: FY 2027 H-1B Initial Registration Selection Process Completed · Federal Register: Weighted Selection Process for H-1B Petitions · Greenberg Traurig: USCIS Finalizes Wage Weighted H-1B Cap Selection Rule · Ogletree Deakins: USCIS Completes FY2027 H-1B Lottery · Manifest Law: Is the New H-1B Lottery Better for Employers? · AILA: State of California v. Mullin case background