Workers’ H-1B Lottery Wins Boosted Under New Trump Framework

After years of worsening odds in the annual H-1B visa lottery, US businesses this year saw selection rates jump to unseen levels for high-skilled foreign workers, according to initial results shared with Bloomberg Law by immigration firms.

The boost to lottery winnings signals that Trump administration employment-based immigration policies are upending the tech-heavy visa program not just by favoring the highest paid workers, but by sharply reducing the pool of prospective H-1B workers too.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services hasn’t yet released official data on this year’s annual selection process for the specialty occupation visa program, the first under a Trump administration framework designed to steer visas to the most skilled and highly compensated workers.

Several top immigration firms and legal services providers cited selection rates of well over 50% across the board in many cases, compared to one in three selection chances in previous years. At business immigration law firm BAL, selection rates exceeded 60% from some clients, said partner Kelli Duehning.

“The $100,000 fee was really, it felt like, the big delta,” she said.

Other law firms like Ogletree Deakins and Erickson Immigration Group, and service provider Boundless Immigration, shared lottery results that were well above numbers for past years. That’s the result of a much smaller pool of registrations driven primarily, attorneys say, by the $100,000 charge imposed by the White House last year on H-1B workers hired from outside the US.

That six-figure fee had already blocked almost all international recruiting through the program by universities and hospitals. It’s led tech firms and other companies subject to an annual visa cap to also opt out of hiring from abroad, which accounted for four in 10 new H-1B employees in recent years. But it was a boon to workers already in the US whose companies opted to enter them in the annual visa lottery.

More Predictable Strategies

Lottery entries for 85,000 visas available under an annual H-1B cap had already plummeted after Biden-era reforms—after surpassing 750,000 just three years ago. Lawfully projects there were between 195,000 and 235,000 total registrations this spring—a decline of up to 43% from the previous year that would be the lowest number since the online lottery system was set up in 2020.

While the $100,000 fee proclamation likely had the biggest impact on the lottery, shifting labor markets and rapidly changing policies governing the program were also factors in shaping the pool of lottery entries, observers said.

As the tech sector pushes major investments in artificial intelligence, firms are making fewer hires that prioritize more senior roles than in the past, said Xiao Wang, CEO at Boundless Immigration, which helps individuals and businesses navigate the legal immigration system. Many companies also adopted a “wait and see” approach to sponsoring foreign workers after recent policy changes, sitting out this year’s lottery, he added.

For Boundless customers who did enter workers, that translated to the highest selection rates in a decade, especially in the highest wage levels. That offers a more clear strategy to winning the H-1B lottery and keeping valuable foreign workers at companies, Wang said.

“The mentality goes from maybe they’ll get selected, to expecting they’ll get selected,” he said.

Lottery Overhaul

The Trump administration in December finalized an overhaul of the H-1B lottery, replacing a randomized selection process with one that prioritized higher paid, more senior workers in a given field and market. Rather than getting equal chances of selection, workers would be entered in the lottery up to four times based on which of four wage levels their position is slotted in.

That weighted selection framework itself didn’t affect whether many companies sponsored workers, but how, said Alejandra Zapatero, a partner at Erickson Immigration Group.

The firm’s largest clients saw selection rates anywhere from 44% to 71%. The selection rate was more than three out of four for individuals with a master’s degrees in the highest wage level, she said.

“All that’s to say the weighted selection rule achieved its aim,” Zapatero said.

But selection rates were higher than government projections for all wage levels because the $100,000 fee was such a large deterrent to sponsoring workers who would have been entered in years past, she said, making the higher selection rates a “net neutral” for many employers.

Looming Uncertainty

Whether lottery entries bounce back next year could be dictated by court decisions as well as changing market conditions. Multiple lawsuits have challenged the $100,000 fee on H-1B workers. Decisions on whether to block or strike down the charge are pending at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the Northern District of California, and the District of Massachusetts.

Even if the fee is eliminated, proposed Labor Department regulations promise to add tens of thousands to required wages for H-1B workers, further pushing many employers to consider alternatives to the visa program.

Businesses with successful lottery entries are also navigating new questions as they move forward with sponsoring H-1B workers. USCIS this year issued an updated form to petition for those workers, adding new detailed job requirements including special skills needed for a position and other information to determine the appropriate wage level.

That could mean an uptick in requests for evidence to support petitions from the agency, said Jihan Merlin, head of immigration strategy at Alma.

“Every step in the process is much more complex,” she said. “The stakes are high and we don’t know exactly how they’ll treat these cases.”