On April 17, USCIS announced that it has completed the lottery for this year a week ago, on April 11th, for both the 20,000 allotted US Master’s H-1Bs and the general allotment of 65,000 H-1Bs. As of this writing, our office has yet to receive any indication of which cases may have been chosen such as hard-copy paper Receipt Notices or indications of cancelled government processing fee checks. Recall that H-1b Premium Processing has been suspended, so no Fiscal 2018 H-1B Cap cases could have been filing using Premium Processing and so receive the faster, e-mailed receipts common under this program.
USCIS also indicated that it received a total of 199,000 petitions this year – a decrease of over 30,000 from each of the last two years. However, this has been the fifth year in a row where the Cap limit was reached during the first five business days of April which USCIS holds open to accept these filings.