H-1B cap season - an HR planning calendar from candidate ID to October start

H-1B cap season is an HR project that runs on a fixed clock, and the teams that handle it well treat it as one. The H-1B is a nonimmigrant work visa for specialty occupation roles, meaning jobs that require at least a bachelor's degree in a related field. There are 65,000 regular cap visas per fiscal year, plus another 20,000 reserved for holders of a U.S. master's degree or higher. Those numbers don't move, so your job as People Ops isn't to predict the lottery. Your job is to have every eligible candidate ready, every cost approved, and every petition filed before its deadline.

This guide gives you a month-by-month operating rhythm: prep before March, registration logistics in the registration window, filing the petition after selection, and a real plan for candidates who aren't selected. If you want the mechanics of how selection actually works, point candidates to our breakdown of how the H-1B lottery works. This post stays on the operations side, where HR owns the process.

What should HR do before March?

The work that decides your cap season happens in the quiet months. By January or February you want a candidate list, a budget sign-off, and a USCIS online account that's ready to register.

Start with identification. Walk your current population of contractors, STEM OPT employees, and recent hires, and flag anyone whose long-term plan depends on an H-1B. For employees moving from student status, our guide to the OPT to H-1B transition is the right thing to share, and it gives your candidates a direct line to attorneys for their individual timing questions. Your role here is portfolio visibility: knowing who's in the pool, what their current work authorization is, and when each one expires.

Then confirm the role qualifies. A specialty occupation needs a clear connection between the degree field and the job duties. If a role is borderline, that's a conversation to have with counsel in January, not in March when the registration window is open.

Build the candidate list

A practical list captures, for each beneficiary, their current immigration status, degree level (the master's cap matters here), the position title, and the worksite. Master's cap eligibility affects selection odds, so flag who qualifies for the additional 20,000 allocation.

Lock the budget early

Cap season has costs at two stages: a per-registration fee when you enter each candidate, then the larger filing costs if a candidate is selected. Confirm the current per-registration fee against the latest USCIS announcement for the relevant fiscal year, because it has changed in recent years. For the full picture of what sponsorship runs an employer, see our breakdown of H-1B sponsorship costs. Getting finance to approve a not-to-exceed number in January means you register without waiting on an approval chain in March.

March: registration logistics

The electronic registration window typically opens in March, and you register each candidate through your employer USCIS online account. Confirm the exact open and close dates against the latest USCIS announcement for the relevant fiscal year, since they shift year to year. Don't treat "typically March" as a calendar entry you can act on without checking.

Selection uses a beneficiary-centric process, which means registrations are selected by unique beneficiary rather than by registration. One practical effect: entering the same person multiple times doesn't improve their odds. Confirm this rule is still in effect for your fiscal year, then register each eligible candidate once and move on.

Operationally, the registration window is short and the account work is fiddly, so the petitioner (your company) benefits from doing a dry run. Verify account access, confirm your authorized signatory, and have payment ready before the window opens. A candidate who gets identified on the last day usually still makes it in, but only if the account and budget are already set.

After selection: filing the petition by the deadline

Selected registrants receive a filing window, commonly 90 days, to file the full petition. This is where most of the real work lives, and it has a hard sequence.

First comes the Labor Condition Application (LCA), filed with the U.S. Department of Labor on Form ETA-9035E. The LCA can be filed up to six months before the start date and has to be certified before you file the petition, so start it early. Wage level affects the LCA, and our guide to H-1B prevailing wage levels covers how that's set.

Then comes the petition itself: Form I-129, Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker, filed with USCIS with the certified LCA attached. For a section-by-section walkthrough, see our Form I-129 guide, and for what the post-selection steps look like end to end, share our overview of the H-1B process after the lottery with your beneficiaries so they can raise individual questions with the attorneys directly.

Premium processing (Form I-907) is available and guarantees USCIS action within 15 business days. Confirm the current premium fee on the USCIS fee schedule rather than budgeting a fixed figure. Premium processing is worth flagging in your plan when a candidate has a hard start date or a work authorization gap to manage, and our explainer on USCIS premium processing lays out when it helps.

The cap-subject employment start date is October 1. Everything in the filing sequence works backward from that date.

See the full H-1B timelineMap your cap season from registration to the October 1 start.

View the timeline

A month-by-month H-1B cap season calendar

The table below turns the H-1B lottery timeline into an HR operating schedule. Dates that depend on the fiscal year are marked to confirm against USCIS, since the registration window and the cap deadline move each year.

Estimate your cap season costs

Planning for non-selection

A strong cap season plan assumes some candidates won't be selected, because most registrations aren't. Decide your fallback before results post so you're talking to people about options, not just delivering bad news.

Common backup options include trying again the next cap season, moving the role to a cap-exempt employer such as a university or affiliated nonprofit, or other visa categories. Our guide to H-1B cap-exempt employers covers the first of those. For candidates currently on STEM OPT, cap-gap relief can extend work authorization in defined situations, and for some profiles the O-1A is a fit. None of these is automatically the right or wrong call; the right move depends on the individual, which is why each non-selected candidate gets a direct line to attorneys.

For the candidate-facing version of this conversation, point people to our post on H-1B options if you aren't selected. HR keeps the portfolio view of who needs a backup and when their current status expires; the attorneys handle each person's individual path.

You can confirm cap season specifics directly on the USCIS site, and LCA details on the U.S. Department of Labor site.

How Tukki helps HR teams run cap season

Tukki is a U.S. immigration provider that helps skilled professionals and their employers with work visas and green cards, from H-1B and O-1A to EB-1A and EB-2 NIW. HR gets full portfolio visibility into every case across the company, with status and deadlines in one place, while each beneficiary gets dedicated attorney support for their individual timing and strategy. That split keeps cap season organized for the people running it and answerable for the people in it.

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