OPT, CPT & Day-1 CPT: Working in the USA on F-1 (2026)

Working in the USA on an F-1 visa runs through a set of stages that follow one another, and the choice you make early decides what is open to you later. The order is on-campus work, then CPT, then OPT, then the STEM OPT extension, then an H-1B if you win the lottery. The one decision that most often quietly ends an Indian student’s US career is leaning on full-time Day-1 CPT. One year of full-time CPT permanently removes your right to OPT at that degree level, and the Day-1 CPT you use now can be reopened and questioned on every future H-1B and green-card application.

This guide explains each stage in the order you will actually reach it, from your first campus job to the H-1B lottery, written for an Indian student on an F-1 visa. It covers what CPT and OPT are, how the 24-month STEM OPT extension works, the cap-gap that keeps you working while your H-1B is pending, and the honest odds of the new wage-weighted lottery. Every rule, fee and cap here changes often, sometimes overnight by court order or executive action, so treat the figures as accurate as of July 2026 and confirm each one at the linked government source before you act.

How can an Indian student on an F-1 visa work in the USA?

An F-1 student can work legally through five stages, and each one has its own authorisation and its own limits. You do not get to skip a stage, and using one badly can close the next. On-campus work and CPT happen while you study. OPT and STEM OPT happen after you finish. The H-1B is the long-term work visa most students are aiming for, and OPT is the window in which your employer files for it.

The F-1 visa itself only lets you enter and study. The right to work is layered on top of it through these stages, which is why keeping your F-1 student status clean matters so much for everything that follows.

What is on-campus work, and how many hours can you do?

On-campus work is the one type of F-1 employment that needs no application to USCIS and no separate authorisation letter, because it is built into your F-1 status. You can work up to 20 hours per week while classes are in session, and full-time during official breaks such as summer and winter, as long as you are enrolled and plan to continue, per USCIS guidance for students.

The 20-hour limit is the total across every campus job you hold, not per job. It is also self-policed, with no automatic counter, so if USCIS or ICE later reviews your record they look at your pay stubs and timesheets. Going over 20 hours even once is a status violation that can be held against your OPT and H-1B filings years later. The work must be at the university or a place tied to it educationally, such as the library, a research lab or a campus café. You apply for a Social Security Number only once your DSO, the Designated School Official who manages your record, approves the job.

What is CPT, and how is it authorised?

CPT, curricular practical training, is off-campus work that is a required or integrated part of your course, such as an internship or a co-op placement your program offers through an agreement with the employer. It is only lawful when three things are true, set out by DHS Study in the States. The training is an established part of your curriculum. Your DSO authorises it in SEVIS and issues a new I-20 naming the employer and the exact dates before you start. And you have already secured that specific training role.

USCIS is not involved in CPT at all. Your DSO authorises it, and starting work even one day before the new I-20 is issued counts as unauthorised employment. CPT is full-time when it is more than 20 hours a week and part-time when it is 20 hours or less, and there is no weekly cap the way on-campus work has one. The catch sits in what full-time CPT does to your OPT.

Here is the rule that surprises people. One year or more of full-time CPT permanently removes your eligibility for post-completion OPT at that degree level, in the exact words of the ICE SEVP Practical Training Overview and codified at 8 CFR 214.2(f)(10). There is no waiver and no appeal. The count is cumulative across your whole F-1 career at that level, even if you switch universities. Part-time CPT and full-time CPT under one year both leave your OPT untouched. This single fact is why the Day-1 CPT decision below carries more weight than students realise.

Is Day-1 CPT legal, and what is the real risk of Day-1 CPT universities?

Day-1 CPT is legal on its face but carries a real, lasting risk that most marketing around it hides. Standard CPT usually requires you to complete one academic year of study before you are eligible. “Day-1 CPT” describes universities that authorise CPT from the very first term, letting you work off-campus full-time from day one. The legal basis exists because some genuine graduate programs do require off-campus training from the start. Around 40,000 Indian students are enrolled in such programs, so the pattern is common, not fringe.

The danger is not the CPT itself. It is the scrutiny that follows on every later application. USCIS can send a request for evidence on your H-1B petition asking for transcripts and syllabi to prove your course genuinely required immediate off-campus work. It can deny a green-card adjustment years later for not maintaining valid F-1 status during the CPT period. In serious cases it can start removal proceedings. Because your entire study record is reopened at each future filing, a weak Day-1 CPT period compounds risk across your whole path to a green card.

Two real events show this is not hypothetical. In February 2025, Saint Peter’s University had its Day-1 CPT programs in business analytics and data science revoked, and enrolled students had to transfer their SEVIS records urgently or fall out of status, as reported by immigration press. Earlier, the University of Farmington was a fake university run by ICE, where more than 100 students, most of them Indian, were arrested even though they had technically enrolled. Officers now read questionable Day-1 CPT enrolments through that history.

If you are weighing a Day-1 CPT program, use the signals below. The more red rows your program matches, the harder it will be to defend later.

Whatever program you attend, keep every document from each CPT period, because a later officer can and does reopen this history. A 2017 case documented by NAFSA saw USCIS try to revoke an already-approved H-1B by reading the 12-month practical-training limit across CPT and OPT combined, against years of settled practice. Save your original I-20 endorsement, the offer letter, the job description showing it related to your major, and the syllabus showing the course required it. Students who cannot produce these are in a weak position on every filing that follows.

What is OPT, and when do you apply for it?

OPT, optional practical training, is up to 12 months of work directly related to your major, and every F-1 student gets one 12-month allowance per degree level. You file Form I-765 with USCIS and cannot start work until the physical Employment Authorization Document, the EAD card, arrives. Counting on a start date before the card is in your hand is a common and costly mistake.

Timing is the part students get wrong. You can file only inside a fixed window around your program end date, set by the USCIS OPT rules.

Earliest you can file = program end date minus 90 days
Latest you can file = program end date plus 60 days

So a student finishing on 15 May 2026 can file from 15 February 2026 and must file by 14 July 2026. File outside that window and USCIS rejects the application without a refund. Because processing runs two to five months, file at the 90-day mark rather than waiting. The I-765 fee is $520 on paper or $470 online, and premium processing, a 30-day decision, adds $1,780, per the USCIS fee schedule. If you use pre-completion OPT while still studying, every full-time month is subtracted from your 12-month post-completion allowance, so most students save the full 12 months for after graduation.

How does the 90-day OPT unemployment limit work?

On post-completion OPT you may not build up more than 90 days of unemployment in total across the 12 months, and going over it terminates your SEVIS record automatically. The clock starts on the OPT start date printed on your EAD, not from when you begin job hunting, under the USCIS Policy Manual. After OPT ends you have a 60-day grace period to stay in the USA, but you cannot work during it.

One rule inside this catches many students and even some DSOs give the wrong answer on it. Days you spend outside the USA during OPT still count as unemployment days. The rule sits in the Policy Manual chapter on absences, not in the OPT section, so it is easy to miss. If you fly home to India for three weeks during a gap between jobs, those 21 days come off your 90-day allowance. Plan any trip home around this.

SEVIS also counts any day without employer information on file as an unemployment day, so you must report a new job within 10 days through the SEVP Portal or your DSO. There is a quiet second reason to report on time. SEVIS stamps every update with a date, so a late entry stays visible as late even after your DSO corrects it, which can surface in a future H-1B or green-card review. If you are late, tell your DSO at once, have them enter the true start date, and keep your offer letter and pay stubs as proof you were actually working.

What is the STEM OPT extension, and does your degree qualify?

STEM OPT is a 24-month extension of your OPT, taking your total work time after graduation from 12 to 36 months, for students whose degree is on the government’s STEM list. It is the most valuable work authorisation an Indian student has, because those extra two years give you up to three shots at the H-1B lottery instead of one. It is confirmed at up to 24 months by the USCIS STEM OPT rules.

Whether you qualify comes down to a code, not the name of your degree. Your program has a CIP code, a Classification of Instructional Programs number assigned by the US Department of Education, and it must appear on the DHS STEM Designated Degree Program List. The list was last expanded in July 2023. Confirm your exact CIP code with your DSO before you assume you are eligible, because two similarly named degrees can differ.

STEM OPT adds two employer rules that ordinary OPT does not have. Your employer must be enrolled in E-Verify, the government system that checks work eligibility, with no exceptions. You and the employer must also complete Form I-983, a training plan describing your learning goals, supervision and pay, and you cannot be your own employer. You then have to keep reporting, validating your details with your DSO every six months, reporting any change within 10 days, and filing a self-evaluation at 12 and 24 months. Across the full 36 months you are allowed 150 days of unemployment in total, the original 90 plus 60 more during the extension. A STEM degree is also why students planning an MS in the USA so often choose STEM-designated programs.

What is the cap-gap, and how does it protect you?

The cap-gap keeps you legal and, in most cases, working during the months between when your OPT ends and when an approved H-1B begins on 1 October. Without it, a student whose OPT expired in, say, June would have to stop working and wait. When your employer files a timely H-1B that asks for a change of status, the cap-gap starts the moment USCIS receipts the petition, and your DSO issues a new I-20 showing the cap-gap dates as your proof of authorisation.

A 2024 rule strengthened this. The Modernizing H-1B final rule, effective January 2025, extended cap-gap work authorisation from the old 1 October cutoff to 1 April of the following year when the H-1B is still pending, which removes the gap that used to force students off payroll in autumn.

Three points decide whether the cap-gap actually protects you. Your OPT EAD must still be valid when the H-1B is filed for your work to continue; if you were already in the 60-day grace period, cap-gap keeps your status but not your right to work. The petition must ask for a change of status, not consular processing. And you should not leave the USA during the cap-gap, because in most cases you cannot re-enter in F-1 status and would have to wait abroad for an H-1B stamp.

How does OPT convert to an H-1B, and what are your real odds?

The H-1B is the main long-term work visa, and OPT exists partly to give your employer time to file for it. Congress caps new H-1Bs at 65,000 in the regular pool plus 20,000 reserved for holders of a US master’s or higher, so 85,000 a year, confirmed in the December 2025 selection rule. Demand runs far above that, so a lottery decides who gets to file. For the last few years the odds looked like this.

The big change for anyone registering now is that the random draw is gone. A final rule effective 27 February 2026 replaced it with a wage-weighted selection for the FY2027 season onward, giving higher-paid roles more entries in the draw. Each registration gets one to four entries based on the government wage level of the salary offered.

USCIS itself projected in the rule that a Level IV registration’s chance of selection rises to over 61 percent and a Level III to over 45 percent, against just under 30 percent under the old random draw. It did not publish a matching figure for Level I, but the effect is the opposite, and entry-level offers now sit at the bottom of the draw. This matters directly for new Indian graduates, who are usually hired at Level I or Level II, so your first-job salary now shapes your H-1B odds in a way it never did before.

The filing calendar repeats every year. Employers register candidates in March, USCIS runs the selection in late March, selected employers file the full petition from 1 April, and approved change-of-status H-1Bs start on 1 October. A STEM graduate on 36 months of OPT can be in the draw in three consecutive Marches, so up to three attempts, while a non-STEM graduate on 12 months usually gets one, sometimes two if the timing lines up. That gap of three tries versus one is the single strongest reason the STEM list decides so much. A US master’s helps again here, because you are entered in both the 65,000 pool and the 20,000 master’s pool in the same draw.

Freshness warning. A separate $100,000 H-1B fee introduced in a September 2025 order is being litigated and its scope keeps shifting. Whether it reaches an in-US change of status from OPT is contested, so confirm your own case with a licensed immigration attorney rather than any blog, including this one.

What happens if the H-1B lottery does not select you?

Not winning the lottery is common, and it is not the end of your options, though the honest picture is harder than it was. If you are a STEM graduate still on initial OPT, the first move is to file the STEM OPT extension straight away to keep working and buy two more lottery cycles. Beyond that, the routes below each suit a different profile.

One caution shapes the green-card routes. Indian applicants face a backlog of decades in the main employment green-card categories because of per-country limits, and you can see the live wait in the State Department Visa Bulletin. The EB-1A and EB-2 NIW categories move faster for strong candidates, which is why they are worth knowing about early rather than after a failed lottery. If you are choosing an MBA rather than a STEM master’s, weigh this whole picture against your one likely lottery attempt when you compare MBA options in the USA.

Sources

• USCIS, Students and Employment, uscis.gov
• DHS Study in the States, F-1 Curricular Practical Training, studyinthestates.dhs.gov
• ICE SEVP, Practical Training Overview, ice.gov
• USCIS, OPT for F-1 Students, uscis.gov
• USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 2 Part F Chapter 7 (absences and unemployment), uscis.gov
• USCIS, STEM OPT extension, uscis.gov
• ICE, DHS STEM Designated Degree Program List, ice.gov
• USCIS fee schedule (Form G-1055), uscis.gov
• Federal Register, Modernizing H-1B Requirements and F-1 flexibility final rule (cap-gap to April 1), federalregister.gov
• Federal Register, Weighted Selection Process for cap-subject H-1B petitions final rule, federalregister.gov
• USCIS, H-1B Electronic Registration Process (selection statistics), uscis.gov
• NAFSA, Impact of Full-time CPT on Eligibility for OPT, nafsa.org
• US Department of State, Visa Bulletin (green-card wait times), travel.state.gov

Related reading. When you pick a school, our list of top US universities for Indian students flags which programs are STEM-designated, which decides your H-1B attempts. For the full journey see the study in the USA guide for Indian students, and browse more on the Nbyula study abroad hub.