H1B visa 2013 Predictions ? Lottery ? Data Analysis

Are you looking for H1B FY 2014 predictions ? 
Check out H1B Visa 2014 Lottery prediction- USCIS Data Analysis

As most of you know, in general, USCIS accepts H1B visa petitions for the next fiscal year beginning April 1st of previous year. Last year USICS did a press release on March 18th, 2011, indicating that it would accept H1B visas for Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 starting April 1st. As of today, we do not have any official press release from USCIS stating the date of accepting H1B visa petitions for fiscal year 2013. But, it is assumed, based on previous history, that USICS would accept H1B visa petitions starting on April 1st. So, we can assume that for H1B visa FY 2013, USCIS would start to accept H1B petitions from April 2nd, as April 1st is Sunday. Also, Some of you may have followed the H1B visa 2013 plann we suggested. As we had H1B lottery in some of the previous years, some of you might be curious to know the lottery situation of H1B visa filings for fiscal year 2013.  As I am not an oracle, I believe in past data for any predictions. Check out below graph.

H1B visa cap reach dates by year from FY 2004 to FY 2012. 

From the graph, it is very clear that US economy is recovering from recession as the H1B cap for FY 2012 reached in November 2011, whereas it was January 26 for FY 2011.  What can we expect for FY 2013 ?   Based on the above data analysis,we can definitely tell that H1B cap reach date for fiscal year 2013 would be earlier than November. What it would mean is that the number of petitions filed before that would be more…But, would that mean there will be a H1B lottery ? In my view, it is very unlikely to have H1B lottery for fiscal year 2013. I say that because of the below reasons :

• Rules for H1B petition filings have become stringent with additional requirements Neufeld H1B visa memo
• H1B visa filing fee has raised by $2000 during recession
• H1B visa rejection rates were  about 17% in 2011
• US unemployment rate is still at very high rate of 8.3 %
• Masters degree holders of STEM category are eligible for 17 month OPT extension

All the above reasons are not very encouraging for H1B sponsors. With all these complexities, employers are very cautious about selecting candidates for H1B employment and visa sponsorship. In fact, the rate of H1B filings by consulting companies have gone down drastically after the new guidelines for H1B visa filings in 2011.

If there is no lottery, the next question that comes to everyone’s mind is that how many petitions would be filed on first day ( April 2nd) of H1B filings ? Well, for H1B visa FY 2012, we had about 5,900 for regular cap and 4,500 for masters degree quota. Also, for H1B visa FY 2011, we had about    13,500 for regular quota and 5,600 for advanced degree quota. Honestly, we cannot predict the H1B cap count numbers as they are driven by various factors. But, just for the sake of prediction, we can take a wild guess based on the concept of averages, I would go with a range of 7,000  to 9,000 for regular quota and about 5,000 to 6,000 for masters degree quota.

Check out our H1B visa FY 2013 cap count Tracker

You can also check out our last year’s H1B visa FY 2012 lottery prediction.

What are your predictions ?