The Diversity Visa Lottery Program, or DV Lottery, is an annual lottery that awards 50,000 immigrants every year with United States Green Card visas. Applications are available online through the State Departments dedicated website. No mail in applications is accepted any longer, all of them must be received through the online application system.

The DV Lottery program was established under various sections of the Immigration act of 1990. This states that the United States is able to provide visas to 50,000 immigrants each year from countries that have low rates of immigration to the United States.

To be eligible for the Diversity Lottery Program applicant need to meet two basic requirements. These are that the person must be a national of a qualifying country and they also must have obtained a high school diploma or equivalent 12 years of education. If they do not have the education requirement they could also be eligible if they have two years work experience in the past five years with a company that required two years training.

Eligible countries are listed for each year on the State Departments dedicated web site. For a country to qualify the number of immigrants received from the country in the past five years must be less than 50,000.

The winners of the DV lottery are randomly chosen through an electronic lottery system. The winners will be from six geographic regions with more visas going towards regions with lower immigration rates. But there will not be any country who receives more than seven percent of the available DV lottery visas in one year. No visas will be awarded to any country that has sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States within the last five years.

When you submit your DV lottery application you must include pictures of you, your spouse, and each unmarried child under the age of 21. This includes your natural children, step-children and legally adopted children, even if the child does not live with you or does not plan on moving with you. These need to be separate pictures as group pictures will not be accepted. You should check the qualifications of submitted pictures as there are strict guidelines.

The DV lottery application will include your name, date of birth, city of birth, country of birth, the country of eligibility, your photographs, mailing address, the country you live in today, your phone number and email address are optional. You must also include your marital status, your highest education level, number of children, spouse information and your children information.

There is no fee for filing a DV lottery application and there are no third parties involved in the program, so do not use any that claims to help you for a fee. If your application is selected in the DV lottery program you will be notified by mail. The applicants that are not selected will not receive any notification.