FY2027's Level I Wipeout: 60% of OPT Engineers Are on a 12-Month Clock
The first wage-weighted H-1B lottery rejected 60% of Level I petitions. Here is how to source the stranded OPT engineers before their clocks expire.
On May 12, 2026, Boundless Immigration published the first hard numbers from the wage-weighted FY2027 H-1B lottery. The Level I selection rate came in at 40%. The Level II rate came in at 36%. That means 60% of the entry-level petitions filed by US employers on behalf of engineers already on their payroll lost. Those engineers, most of them on F-1 OPT, now have a dated clock running. If you are hiring junior to mid engineers in the next twelve months, this is the cleanest sourcing pool of 2026, and it does not show up in any layoff tracker.
What actually happened on March 31
The H-1B wage weighted lottery 2026 cycle is the first run of the rule DHS finalized in late December 2025. Level IV petitions get four entries in the lottery. Level III gets three. Level II gets two. Level I gets one. USCIS hit the FY2027 cap on March 31, 2026 and announced cap-reach the same day. Filing opened April 1 and closed June 30, so by mid-summer every rejected worker knows their petition is dead for this cycle.
Boundless's client data, reported in GeekWire on May 12, broke out cleanly by tier:
- Level I: 40% selected
- Level II: 36% selected
- Level III: 68% selected
- Level IV: 64% selected
Compare that to the unweighted random lottery this rule replaced. Fragomen's published baselines: 24.8% selected for FY 2024, 28.9% for FY 2025, 35.35% for FY 2026. In other words, Level III and IV petitioners just got the best odds in five years. Level I and II got worse odds than the random lottery ever produced.
Who actually loses a Level I petition
Level I is the entry rung of the prevailing wage system. In King County, the Level I prevailing wage for a software engineer is $117,000. Level IV in the same area is $212,000. A first-year engineer at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, or Apple in Seattle does not get classified as Level IV. They get classified as Level I or II. So when Boundless says 60% of Level I petitioners lost, the practical translation is: the majority of first-year H-1B sponsorships at Big Tech in Seattle failed this cycle.
Almost all of those workers are already employed in the United States, on F-1 OPT, drawing a US salary, paying US taxes, and showing up to standup every morning. They are not "international hires." They are domestic engineers with a visa problem.
The 12-month clock, and the 36-month clock
Post-completion OPT runs 12 months with a 90-day unemployment cap. STEM OPT extension adds 24 months, with another 60 days of allowable unemployment, for a maximum of 150 days across the full three-year window. Exceed 150 days unemployed and DHS can terminate the SEVIS record automatically. F-1 status and work authorization end. The worker leaves the country.
The clocks split the cohort in two:
- Non-STEM Level I losers have roughly 12 months plus a 60-day grace period from the date their current OPT was issued. Most have already burned six to ten months of that by the time they got the rejection. Their hiring window is short, measured in weeks.
- STEM Level I losers at an E-Verify enrolled employer can ride the 24-month STEM extension. That gives them up to 36 total months and two more lottery cycles. But a current employer that just lost the lottery is statistically the worst sponsor to bet on a third try. Many of these engineers will be quietly let go before FY2028 filing season opens.
Layoff trackers miss this cohort entirely. They were not laid off. Their visa was.