At 6:02 AM on a Tuesday in late February, Margaret Chen, a 28-year-old software engineer at a San Francisco startup, reaches for her phone before her alarm even goes off. Her finger hovers over the mail app. Three hundred and twelve miles away, in a high-rise office in midtown Manhattan, David Kim, an immigration attorney, is already at his desk, his third cup of coffee growing cold beside a spreadsheet of client wage levels. Both of them are waiting for the same thing: the new H-1B lottery results, governed by a system that did not exist a week earlier.
For more than a decade, the H-1B lottery was the great equalizer—a randomized draw where a Stanford PhD and a newly minted bachelor degree holder each had precisely one ticket in the raffle. The system was simple, even democratic in its randomness. But on February 27, 2026, that era ended. The Department of Homeland Security final rule, published in the Federal Register on December 29, 2025, replaced the pure lottery with something closer to a weighted raffle: applicants now receive multiple entries based on the wage level of their position, from one entry for entry-level jobs to four for the highest-paying roles.
The Death of Pure Randomness
The decision to move to a wage-weighted system was not made in a vacuum. DHS cited concerns that the previous lottery, despite its mathematical neutrality, favored employers who paid the least. By weighting selections toward higher-wage positions, the new system would incentivize employers to pay more and reduce the incentive for mass registrations.
The practical effect is this: if you are offered a position at Level 4 wages—the highest tier—your registration is entered into the lottery four times. Level 3 gets three entries. Level 2 gets two. And Level 1, the entry-level tier, gets just one.
The wage level is determined by the Department of Labor OEWS system. For any given occupation in any given metropolitan area, the DOL publishes four wage levels.
