This is the fifth straight year that the H-1B cap has been reached within the first few days of filing in April. The first day to file H-1B petitions for this fiscal year was April 3rd, 2017 and on April 7th, USCIS announced that it had received more than enough H-1B petitions for the 2018 fiscal year. The USCIS will conduct a lottery to decide which applications will get one of the 65,000 H-1B general visa numbers, and the 20,000 H-1B visa numbers for beneficiaries with US masters degrees.