If a us employer will apply for my H1B visa on this month of July, when can i probably get a visa?

Question

Is it possible for me to get a visa before October of this year if my sponsor will apply for my H1B visa this month of July 2008?

Answer 1

Friend,

- It is not clear that your employer has filed you H1B petition or not.

- If he has filed your H1B visa petition [I-129] in first week of April 2008 and IF YOU ARE LUCKY ENOUGH TO GET SELECTED IN THE LOTTERY, yes you can try to get the visa before Oct-2008.

- If your employer has not filed your H1B petition, you they need to apply on April 2009.

All the best

Answer 2

Unless you are exempt from the H-1B cap (ie. you work for a noncharitable organization or something like that), your company will not be able to file an H-1B for you until at least April 2009. The cap for this year is already gone. There is no guarantee that you will get one next year either, since it is a 30% chance random lottery.

Answer 3

Since 2001, the "open" date for making an application for an H1B was officially April 1 of that calendar year. Typically, the selection lottery has received enough petitions that further applications are turned down by no later than April 2.

If an application is submitted AND makes the lottery selection AND is approved, the document is issued with either an October start date (for the same calendar year as the April application), or a January start date (for the year following the April application), depending on how the application itself was worded.

If the application has not yet been made, it isn't worth the money to apply now. Anything submitted after the lottery closure back in April (or anything that wasn't selected in the lottery, even though it was submitted within the time frame) is so much garbage and a waste of your (and your prospective employer's) time and money. The next possible date for application submission is April 01, 2009. Visas approved from that submission will be available in either October 2009 or January 2010.

As an example - my employer applied for my visa status on April 1 in 2004, 2005, 2006, and March 30 2007 (since April 1 was a Sunday). It took until 2007 to be selected in the lottery; I then received H1B status effective October 2007.

It's been pretty typical that the number of applications accepted in the two-day window at the beginning of the period exceeds the number of visas available by at least a factor of 4-to-1.