IANAL, but I'm going to be frank. The H1B situation is a giant shitshow right now and for the foreseeable future, so don't hold your breath on this one. It has

IANAL, but I'm going to be frank. The H1B situation is a giant shitshow right now and for the foreseeable future, so don't hold your breath on this one. It has been since 2012 in case you haven't been paying attention since before this year. To answer your question, the cap is expected to be reached in the very first week of the season because of the lottery, which will begin April 1. In the expected <60% (because you have an MS, otherwise <45%) chance that your application is actually even processed through the lottery, you can only join your employer in October of that year. So essentially you want to get your offer by March 10th at the latest, so have your interviews with them sometime by January. The important thing is you need to find a company with a position that is ok to be left unfilled by a perm till next October. For most small-to-medium sized companies, this is a long and risky commitment without even getting the benefit of your service. It costs more than hiring a local in terms of USCIS and IRS fees as well as for the HR work. So most companies, unless pressed hard or you have such a compelling case, will shy from extending you an offer even if you are an excellent candidate for the job. This was not the case till 2012, when it was just a matter of doing a small bit of paperwork pretty much anytime starting from April all the way till around November, and get the H1B ready by October. Until that date, the candidate could be brought on deferred payment with a B1 or other visa and get settled in before October too, and then transitioned when the H1B visa was ready. Now none of these things are available anymore due to much more stringent H1B rules, and essentially it's a logistics nightmare for a US company to hire a non-trade-partner-national. In the meantime, I'm not sure if you've done it already, but you should have the OPT option available to you if you graduated from a US institute, which will give you a year + 18 months since you're in the STEM service. This is low overhead for any potential employer, and you can ask them to resolve an H1B or other visa while on your OPT. Source: wrestling with USCIS for my visa for the last 3 years