New numbers are out on H-1B usage and the past week showed last week's substantial pickup was just noise. Only 800 visas were claimed against the 65,000 cap, half of last week's total and somewhat less than the typical weekly usage we've seen over the summer. 37,400 H-1Bs have been counted now. I'm moving my exhaustion projection date back a week. My target is based on a rolling four week usage average so variations from week to week are discounted. Usage over the last month has been about 1075 H-1Bs per week.
On the masters cap of 20,000, the pace remains steady with 300 petitions counted in the last week and total usage of 13,700. At that pace, we will likely run out sometime around mid-January.
