Registration for DV-2025 (US Green Card Lottery) Now Open

Registration for the DV-2025 Diversity Visa, popularly known as the green card lottery, is now open. Registration for the program opened on Wednesday, October 4, 2023 at 12pm EDT and runs until Tuesday, November 7, 2023 at 12pm EST.

The Diversity Visa program runs each year and makes available on a lottery basis up to 55,000 green cards available to nationalities of various countries across the world that have low immigration rates to the United States. The DV program is run by the US State Department and was established by the Immigration Act of 1990 with the goal of diversifying the immigrant population in the US.

To  participate in the program, applicants must be natives of countries that have had less than 50,000 of its citizens migrate to the US in the previous five years. For DV-2025, native of the following countries are ineligible to participate in the program because more than 50,000 of their natives migrated to the US in the previous five years: Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, The People’s Republic of China (including mainland and Hong Kong born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Republic of Korea (South Korea), Venezuela, and Vietnam. Natives of Macau SAR and Taiwan are eligible.

The entrant must also have either at least a high school education or two years work experience in an occupation that requires at least two years of training or experience to perform.
Registration for entry into the lottery is done exclusively online by submitting Form DS-5501 on the DV program website and is free of charge.

Applicants who submit an entry will receive a confirmation number in their email. Only one entry per individual is permitted. Those who submit multiple entries will be disqualified.

The State Department reminds entrants that registration for the lottery is completely free of charge. The Department does not charge any fee, and the State Department warns that any website, individual or company claiming the Department charges a fee is trying to defraud entrants.

The State Department also encourages participants to submit their entries as early as possible, as the system may get overwhelmed near the end of the registration period as participants normally rush in to complete their entries to beat the deadline.

Applications are only accepted at this DV program website: https://dvprogram.state.gov.

Applicants will need to submit the following information: Name, gender, birth date, city of birth, country of eligibility for the DV program, mailing address, country of residence, phone number (optional), email address, current marital status, education level, and number of children. Entrants will also be required to provide a recent passport-sized photograph.

Upon a successful entry, participants will be sent an email containing a confirmation number. They will need to use this confirmation number to check if they won when the results become available online on the https://dvprogram.state.gov website - on or around the first week of May, 2025.

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