The April Filing Starts in October

The cap for the first half of this fiscal year closed on September 4. Anything asking for a start date before April 1 is being rejected outright now. For a lot of employers that was the end of a season's planning, and the natural response is to set it down for a while and come back to it after the holidays.

We understand the instinct. We'd also ask you not to.

The second-half cap is 33,000 visas for start dates between April 1 and September 30, 2027. The filing window for those opens January 1. But the application you file on January 1 is the last step in a sequence that takes most of the fall to complete, and employers who wait until December to start it are already behind people who started in October.

The arithmetic nobody enjoys

The Department of Labor requires the H-2B application to be filed no more than 90 and no fewer than 75 calendar days before your date of need — that's 20 CFR 655.15(b), and "date of need" means the first day you actually need the workers, not the day you want paperwork moving.

If you miss the 90 day window, you miss your chance at submitting for the April 1st lottery. While the 90-75 day submission window is the technical rule, employers filing for an April 1st start date must submit January 1-3 to enter in for the April lottery. No exceptions. 

This all sounds manageable, until you look at what has to be finished before you can file.

What has to happen first

You need a prevailing wage determination before you can post the job order. The regulation is explicit: the employer must request and receive a PWD from the National Prevailing Wage Center before filing the job order with the State Workforce Agency, and that determination has to still be valid on the day the job order posts.

So the order of operations is fixed, and it runs backward from January:

1. Request the prevailing wage determination. This is the one with the least predictable turnaround, and it is the one that strands employers. It is also the step you can start today.
2. File the job order with the SWA, once the PWD is in hand and valid.
3. File the application with DOL, inside that January 1–3 window. 
4. File the I-129 with USCIS after certification.

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Every one of those depends on the one before it. There is no version of this where a late prevailing wage request gets made up later in the process.

Why October and not December

Two reasons.

The first is simply that the prevailing wage center is not faster in December. Everybody who put this off is in the same queue, at the same time, in the weeks when half the offices involved are short-staffed for the holidays. The employers who get clean determinations back with time to spare are the ones who asked in October.

The second is that January 1 is not a quiet morning. It is the single busiest filing date on the H-2B calendar, and applications arriving at the opening of the window are subject to DOL's randomization process — we've written about how that works elsewhere. You cannot control the draw. You can control whether you are in it, and being in it requires everything upstream to be finished and correct before the window opens.

A certified application that was rushed and comes back with problems is not the same thing as a certified application.

What to do this month

If you want workers on the ground April 1:

• Decide your date of need now, and be honest about it. It sets every deadline that follows, and moving it later to buy yourself time moves the whole chain.
• Get the prevailing wage request in. This is the single highest-value thing you can do in October.
• Pull your job description and your temporary need documentation and look at them with fresh eyes. If the season changed, if the headcount changed, if the duties changed, that has to be right before anything gets filed.
• Confirm who is handling the SWA job order and that they know the timing.
• Talk to us. If you are a current client, your account manager is already working your file. If you are not, this is the month where a conversation still changes the outcome.

The part worth sitting with

Most of the employers who miss an April start did not make a bad decision. They made a reasonable one in November — that there was still time — and the arithmetic disagreed with them in January.

The work that gets your crew here on April 1 is unglamorous, it happens in the middle of a quiet month, and it does not feel urgent while you are doing it. That is exactly what makes it easy to put off, and exactly why it decides the season.

If you want a set of eyes on your timeline before the window opens, reach out. October is a much better month for that conversation than January.

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