DV Lottery 2028 From Pakistan: Why the US Green Card Lottery Excludes Pakistani Natives, the USD 1 Fee and the Scam Industry to Avoid

By the Kimi Travels Team | Updated October 2026

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Every autumn, the same wave of forwarded messages sweeps Pakistani WhatsApp groups: green card lottery open, apply now, agent guarantee, hurry. And every year the message skips the single most important sentence in the entire program. Pakistan is on the United States Diversity Visa program's ineligible-country list — excluded from DV-2025 and again from DV-2026 under the rule that bars natives of countries that sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States over the preceding five years. The DV-2026 instructions name nineteen excluded countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, the Philippines and Vietnam.

No agent in Islamabad, Dubai or New York can enter a Pakistani-born applicant into a lottery whose instructions exclude Pakistani natives, and paying anyone to try is a donation to their business, not an application. This year the story has a second layer: the program itself spent 2025 and 2026 in turmoil — a first-ever USD 1 registration fee and a government pause that has left DV-2027 registration unopened as of this writing.

This guide from Kimi Travels gives Pakistani readers the verified picture — what the law says, the two narrow legal workarounds that exist, the scam patterns to refuse, and the US visa routes that genuinely remain open. For the routes Pakistanis actually use, start with our USA B1/B2 visa complete guide for Pakistanis.

The Rule That Excludes Pakistan — and Since When

The Diversity Visa program was created by the Immigration Act of 1990 to issue up to 55,000 immigrant visas a year to natives of countries with historically low US immigration, and its exclusion rule is arithmetic, not politics: countries whose natives sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the previous five years are barred from the next lottery, and Pakistan crossed that threshold into the exclusion list with the DV-2025 cycle. The instructions published for the October-to-November 2023 registration window listed Pakistan among the ineligible countries, and the DV-2026 instructions published a year later kept Pakistan on the list alongside Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, South Korea, Venezuela and Vietnam.

The law keys eligibility to your country of birth, not your citizenship or your address — a Pakistani passport holder born in Karachi is a native of Pakistan for DV purposes no matter where they live today.

The scale of the lottery explains both the obsession and the exclusion: the DV-2026 drawing selected from more than 20.8 million qualified entries received in a 37-day window, with no single country permitted more than seven percent of the visas in a year. When a country's migration numbers fall back under the threshold in some future cycle, it can return to the eligible list — the list changes — but as of the most recent published instructions, Pakistan's natives remain outside the tent. That is the sentence the WhatsApp messages never include, and it is the first thing Kimi Travels tells any client who asks about the green card lottery.

The 2025-2026 Turmoil: the USD 1 Fee and the Paused Program

Even a fully eligible applicant would face an unusual moment right now, because the program's own machinery has been in flux. The Department of State introduced a USD 1 electronic registration fee — the first charge in the program's history, non-refundable and payable when the entry is submitted — and in December 2025 the Department of Homeland Security paused the Diversity Visa program for a vetting review, with the result that DV-2027 registration, which would ordinarily have run through the autumn of 2026, has not opened as of this writing and its window continues to shrink.

The pause was ordered after a fatal shooting at an American university by a man who had obtained permanent residency through the lottery years earlier, and officials have not committed to a restart date or ruled out permanent changes to the program. For Pakistani readers the practical reading is twofold. First, any website or agent claiming the lottery is open right now for Pakistanis — for any fee, under any urgency — is false on both counts: the program is paused and Pakistan's natives are excluded. Second, when a future cycle does open, the entry will be filed at the official dvprogram.state.gov portal and cost one dollar, which means the historic scam pitch of pay-us-to-register now has a built-in punchline: an agent charging fifty dollars to submit your one-dollar entry to a lottery you cannot enter. One distinction worth locking in, because the two pauses are constantly confused: the 75-country immigrant visa suspension that froze family and employment green-card processing from 21 January 2026 — Pakistan included — was a separate policy, struck down by a federal court in August 2026 and formally lifted by early September 2026; what that reopening means for family files is covered in our US immigrant visa restart guide. Neither the ruling nor the restart changes the diversity program's own status.

Verification beats urgency every time — the habits that protect a family from lottery scams are the same ones that protect it in every visa corridor, a discipline we apply to every file at Kimi Travels.

The Two Legal Workarounds — Narrow but Real

The instructions contain two pathways by which a person born in an excluded country can still qualify, and both matter to Pakistani families with mixed birthplaces. First, the spouse rule: an entrant whose husband or wife was born in an eligible country may claim the spouse's country of chargeability, provided both spouses are named on the selected entry, are both found eligible and issued visas, and enter the United States together — a Pakistani-born applicant married to a born citizen of an eligible country enters through the marriage, not the passport.

Second, the parent rule: an applicant born in an excluded country may claim the country of birth of a parent, if neither parent was born in or legally resident in the applicant's country of birth at the time of the applicant's birth — the provision aimed at children born abroad to transient parents, such as a child born in Pakistan to parents who were neither Pakistani-born nor Pakistani residents at the time.

Both pathways are interpreted strictly, and both still require meeting the education threshold: a high-school education or its equivalent, or two years of work experience within the past five years in an occupation that itself requires at least two years of training — assessed against the US Department of Labor's occupational database. The final mechanical rule is unforgiving: one entry per person per year, and multiple entries disqualify every one of them. A husband and wife who each qualify may each file one entry, and a selecting spouse carries the other and the children under twenty-one as derivatives.

For the small share of Pakistani families where a workaround genuinely applies, the entry still costs a dollar and still goes only through the official portal — Kimi Travels points those families to the official instructions and declines, always, to charge for what costs nothing.

The Scam Industry: Four Patterns to Refuse

The DV scam economy runs on the gap between what the program is and what desperate applicants believe it might be. The official facts are simple: the only entry point is the dvprogram.state.gov website during a published registration window, the historic cost of entry was nothing and the current cost is one dollar, the selection is a randomised computer drawing that no consultant, agent, priest or insider can influence, and the State Department's own instructions warn against visa consultants who complete entries on applicants' behalf and then hold the confirmation number hostage. From those facts, the four patterns to refuse write themselves:

• The guaranteed-selection agent: no one can guarantee a random drawing, and every such promise is fraud by definition
• The registration-fee factory: a slick website charging forty or eighty dollars to "file your DV entry" is submitting a one-dollar form you could submit yourself — if you were eligible, which for Pakistani natives you are not
• The confirmation-number ransom: an agent files the entry, keeps the confirmation page, and later demands more money to release the number without which the entrant can never check their status — the exact scheme the State Department describes
• The never-opened lottery: in the current climate, any message claiming the lottery is open right now is false on its face

The deeper protection is a rule of thumb that serves every visa application a Pakistani family will ever file: no honest service charges for access to a government form, and no honest service promises an outcome inside a lottery. The same discipline governs our practice at Kimi Travels — we charge for assembling files, never for promises.

The US Routes That Remain Open — and What an Agency Can Actually Do

Losing the lottery changes nothing about the doors that were already open, and some of them are sturdier than the lottery ever was. The B1/B2 visitor visa remains the workhorse route for Pakistanis — tourism, family visits, business trips — assessed on the applicant's ties, finances and honesty rather than on luck. A strong B1/B2 file also multiplies across other borders, because a valid US visa unlocks visa-free or simplified entry to a string of countries from Mexico and Turkey to Georgia and the Philippines.

Student and exchange routes serve the academically serious; employment-based routes exist but belong to US employers and immigration attorneys, not travel agencies; and family-based petitions run through US citizen and permanent resident relatives.

What a travel agency can honestly do in this landscape is the unglamorous, decisive work: build the B1/B2 file that survives the interview, prepare applicants for the questions that actually decide consular decisions — the preparation is mapped in our US visa interview preparation guide for Pakistanis — and show families how one well-earned US visa then travels across half the planet's borders, as catalogued in our countries Pakistanis can visit with a valid US visa guide. And when a first application meets refusal — as even strong files sometimes do — the recovery matters more than the setback, a path mapped in our visa refusal help guide from Pakistan. Kimi Travels does this work every week for Pakistani families at home and abroad — the honest routes, filed properly, with the lottery myths left where they belong.

Want the honest picture on US visa routes for your family — B1/B2 preparation, interview coaching and the multiplier travel a US visa unlocks? Kimi Travels is a Sialkot-based travel agency building US visitor visa files and full travel plans for Pakistani clients at home and abroad. Plan My US Visa Route Honestly

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Pakistanis enter the DV lottery for 2028?
Pakistani natives are excluded: Pakistan has been on the ineligible-country list since DV-2025 and remained on it in the DV-2026 instructions, the most recent published. Unless you qualify through the spouse or parent chargeability pathways, there is no lawful DV entry for a Pakistan-born applicant — and no agent can change that.

Is the DV lottery open right now?
No. After a USD 1 electronic registration fee was introduced and the Department of Homeland Security paused the program in December 2025 for a vetting review, the DV-2027 registration window — which would normally have run in autumn 2026 — has not opened. Any website or agent claiming the lottery is currently open is lying twice over.

What are the two legal workarounds for excluded countries?
You may claim your spouse's country of birth if the spouse was born in an eligible country, both of you are on the entry, and you enter the US together; or you may claim a parent's country of birth if neither parent was born in or legally resident in your birth country at the time you were born. Both are interpreted strictly by the State Department.

Can an agent increase my chances of winning?
No. Selection is a randomised computer drawing — no service, fee or connection can influence it. The only official entry point is dvprogram.state.gov during a published window, entry has always been free historically and now costs one dollar, and more than one entry per person disqualifies all entries.

What US visa routes remain open to Pakistanis?
The B1/B2 visitor visa for tourism, family and business travel — built on ties, finances and honest interview answers; student routes for genuine study; employment routes sponsored by US employers; and family-based petitions through qualifying relatives. A well-earned US visitor visa also unlocks simplified entry to many other countries.