This article was prepared with the assistance of ABIL, the Alliance of Business Immigration Lawyers, of which Loan Huynh is an active member.
On December 23, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a final rule implementing a weighted selection process that generally favors the allocation of H-1B visas to those who are, in the administration’s view, “higher-skilled and higher-paid.” The rule governs the process by which U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) selects H-1B registrations for unique beneficiaries for filing of H-1B cap-subject petitions (or H-1B petitions for any year in which the registration requirement is suspended). DHS received 17,000 comments and made no changes from the proposed rule. Court challenges are expected to follow.
Under the new process, instead of a random lottery, registrations for unique beneficiaries or petitions will be assigned to the relevant Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics wage level and entered into the selection pool as follows: (1) Registrations for unique beneficiaries or petitions assigned wage level IV will be entered into the selection pool four times; (2) Those assigned wage level III will be entered into the selection pool three times; (3) Those assigned wage level II will be entered into the selection pool two times; and (4) Those assigned wage level I will be entered into the selection pool one time. Each unique beneficiary will only be counted once toward the numerical allocation projections regardless of how many registrations were submitted for that beneficiary or how many times the beneficiary is entered in the selection pool, DHS said. The new final rule is expected to make it significantly less likely that companies will hire international students when they graduate from U.S. universities.
The final rule, to be published on December 29, 2025, is effective February 27, 2026, and will be in place for the Fiscal Year 2027 H-1B cap registration season.
