DV-Lottery

The official registration period for the US Diversity Visa (DV) Lottery occurs during a brief period each Fall (usually from early October to early November).

The registration period for DV-2026 started at 12:00 PM EDT on Wednesday, October 2, 2024, and ended at 12:00 PM EST on Thursday, November 7, 2024. Registration for the upcoming DV-2027 Green Card Lottery is anticipated to occur in October-November 2025 (the exact dates will be updated here once they become available).

Out of the millions of applicants who participate in the DV-Lottery, which is held in the first half of the following year, approximately 100,000 winners are randomly selected by computer, based upon the available Diversity Visas allocated for each of the following six geographic regions: (1) Africa; (2) Asia; (3) Europe; (4) North America; (5) Oceania; and (6) South America, Mexico, Central America, and The Caribbean. The reason that around 100,000 people are selected during the annual DV-Lottery is that thousands of “selectees” fail to pass the required Consular Interview stage for a variety of reasons and the goal of this US immigration program is to issue a Diversity Visa to 55,000 foreign nationals each year.

Participants of the DV-Lottery may check the status of their applications in May (or sometimes June-July if there was a delay in processing the results) on the US State Department’s Electronic Diversity Visa (E-DV) website after they enter their Confirmation Number, last/family name and their year of birth where indicated. They will also need to enter “capture” characters (numbers and/or letters of the English alphabet) exactly as they appear where indicated before pressing the “Submit” button to see their DV-Lottery results. The Diversity Visa Information Center (DV-Program.com) promptly notifies its clients when they are selected as “winners” of the DV-Lottery so they can begin the next step of the US immigration procedure as soon as possible.

Those who did not win the DV-Lottery will see a message stating that they were not selected for further processing. Winners (“selectees”) of the DV-Lottery will be redirected to a confirmation page where they will see the official notice from the US State Department containing a bar code, Case Number and notifying them that they have been selected for further processing. DV-Lottery winners should print out this winning notification, since they will need it later for the Consular Interview stage of the US immigration procedure.