H-1B cap season is here. On April 2, USCIS began accepting petitions for the H-1B visa lottery. Open for the first five business days in April, it only took until April 6 before USCIS reached the 65,000 H-1B visa cap for fiscal year 2019. While waiting to have an H-1B visa petition accepted, you may be wondering what to expect. When can your employee enter the U.S. if they’re not already here? When can they begin working?
Here’s what you can look forward to as you get started:
H-1B petition accepted? Here are your next steps
First, watch for RFEs
Though there may be delays in acceptance of H-1B cap petitions (such as requests for evidence (RFEs), which increased by 45 percent between 2016 and 2017), 85,000 H-1B visas will be awarded.
You should know by June or July whether your employee has been accepted, and in the coming months, USCIS will be issuing RFEs, to which you have an allotted time frame to respond with supporting documentation. Though RFEs do not always indicate an impending denial, lately RFEs have been correlated with higher denial rates.
If you are successful with an H-1B petition being accepted, you can expect a few different notifications from USCIS, which may be mailed directly from the agency. Or, if you work with an immigration provider like Envoy, they will be sent to you.
Approval notices
If you are an Envoy customer, we will email you to alert you that your petition has been accepted and your filing fee check deposited with USCIS. Some H-1B petitions will be receipted in June, and formal approval notices will likely arrive after August 1.
If you are not an Envoy customer, you can expect to see an approval alert and notification of your check deposit with USCIS after the beginning of June. You will be sent a formal approval notice by USCIS in early fall 2018.
Starting work on H-1B
Generally, H-1B petition holders can begin work no earlier than October 1, 2018. Some petitions arriving from overseas may be permitted to enter the country 10 days ahead of time to settle in before starting work on October 1. (Here’s a helpful list of important dates for the H-1B visa cap.)
Envoy is pleased to provide you this information, which was prepared in collaboration with Sara Herbek, who is the Managing Partner at Global Immigration Associates, P.C. (www.giafirm.com), Envoy's affiliated law firm.
