Who actually sponsors H-1B workers in 2026, and what they offer to pay

Every H-1B petition starts with a Labor Condition Application (LCA) filed with the US Department of Labor. On it, the employer gives the job title, the worksite and the wage it will pay. The Labor Department publishes these forms every quarter. We combined all of them from 1 October 2023 to 30 June 2026 (fiscal year 2024 to the third quarter of FY2026), along with the PERM green-card filings for the same period. That comes to 1.57 million LCA cases and 374,000 PERM cases from 153,000 employers.

Five findings stand out:

• The largest filers are cutting back, and most of the cut comes from outsourcing firms. Comparing like with like (October to June of each year), certified LCAs fell 8.1% in FY2026. Twenty large IT-services firms filed 31.9% fewer and account for a third of the drop, though they filed only 8.7% of FY2025's applications.
• Most sponsors file one application a year. Of the 63,545 employers with a certified LCA in FY2025, 51.6% had exactly one.
• Who you work for affects the wage more than the visa does. The median offered wage for software-engineer titles was $203,350 at Meta and $112,986 at Tata Consultancy Services.
• Green-card sponsorship varies widely. Intel had 32 PERM certifications for every 100 LCAs. Infosys had fewer than one.
• Denials are rare: 0.68%. That figure says very little, and the reason is explained below.

Who files the most

In FY2025, the last complete year, the Labor Department certified 541,597 LCAs, 8.2% more than the 500,329 in FY2024. Of these, 529,432 were for H-1B. The rest were for the country-specific versions: 8,858 E-3 (Australia), 1,940 H-1B1 (Chile) and 1,367 H-1B1 (Singapore).

The table ranks employers as they appear on the forms. These are legal entities, not corporate groups, so Amazon's four main filing entities are counted separately. Combined, the four filed 22,914 in FY2025.

Certified LCAs by decision date. "Oct–Jun" compares the same nine months of each fiscal year, because the FY2026 data ends on 30 June 2026.

Like-for-like, total certified LCAs fell from 436,875 to 401,397. Most of the drop came early in the year. Compared with a year before, the October–December 2025 quarter was down 22.2%, January–March was down 7.7% and April–June was down 2.3%. A presidential proclamation of 19 September 2025 added a $100,000 payment to certain new H-1B petitions just before that first quarter. (A federal court vacated the guidance implementing that payment on 8 June 2026, and the litigation is ongoing.) The data shows when filings fell but not why, and an LCA is filed before the petition, so these figures can't separate the petitions the payment applied to from those it didn't.

Change wasn't spread evenly. Of the 68 employers with at least 500 certified LCAs in October–June FY2025, 44 filed fewer in the same months of FY2026. The largest falls were IBM (−63.8%), Tata Consultancy Services (−55.6%), Qualcomm (−51.8%), LTIMindtree (−47.6%) and HCL America (−44.0%). Infosys went the other way, up 17.9%. The largest rise was at Nvidia, up 71.2% to 2,390, making it the 15th-largest filer so far this year. Grandison Management rose 37.4%. More than half of its FY2025 filings (54.2%) were for physical therapists, with a median offered wage of $77,480. The big filers aren't all in tech.

Most sponsors are small

The ten largest filers accounted for 15.7% of certified LCAs in FY2025. The top 100 accounted for 34.0%, and the top 1,000 for 55.5%. At the other end, 32,765 employers filed exactly one certified LCA. Including those that filed two, that's 43,454 employers, or 68.4% of all sponsors, together accounting for 10.0% of filings. The median sponsor filed one.

For job seekers, this means a company's absence from the top-100 lists doesn't show it won't sponsor. Most sponsors have never been on those lists.

Volume and pay by type of employer

To compare kinds of employer, we sorted them into groups. Four groups are lists of named employers we chose by hand. The other two are matched by name: any employer with "university" or "college" in its name, and any with "hospital", "medical center", "health system", "clinic" or "children's". Both methods are crude, and the full lists are in the analysis script.

PERM per 100 LCAs uses FY2024 + FY2025 for both counts.

Two groups account for most of this year's fall. The 20 IT-services firms filed 11,776 fewer certified LCAs in October–June than a year earlier, 33.2% of the total decline. The Big Four and two strategy firms filed 4,356 fewer, 12.3% of the decline. Both shares are far larger than the groups' share of filings. The 61,006 employers in "everyone else" fell by 4.7%.

Universities filed 18.7% more LCAs in FY2025 than in FY2024. Their median offered wage, $81,100, is the lowest of any group, because their most common titles are assistant professor and postdoctoral researcher. Most universities, and the non-profit research bodies linked to them, are exempt from the annual H-1B cap.

What the wages say

These are offered wages: the lower end of the range written on the form, converted to a yearly figure. The job title "Software Engineer" alone had 28,123 certified LCAs from 4,588 employers in FY2025, with a median of $139,000. Across all software-engineer and software-developer titles, there were 105,098 filings with a median of $137,500. The median at each large filer varies far more than that single figure suggests:

FY2025 certified LCAs whose title contains "software engineer", "software developer", "software development engineer", "software engineering" or "SDE". Employers with at least 300 such filings with a wage; the full list of 38 is in the script output.

Titles are less useful than they look at the largest outsourcing firms. At Cognizant, 35.2% of FY2025 filings carry one internal job code, "Manager JC50 - Computer Systems Engineers/Architects". At TCS, 40.9% are simply "Architect", with a median of $84,115. Comparing roles across those firms is close to impossible.

To find the best-paid jobs that many employers sponsor, we kept only titles with at least 500 FY2025 filings from at least 25 different employers. The top title wasn't in tech:

The lowest-paid common titles were teacher ($53,600), market research analyst ($62,900), medical technologist ($63,149) and the various postdoctoral titles ($65,000–$69,926).

Who also sponsors green cards

An LCA supports a temporary visa. PERM labor certification is usually the first step toward an employer-sponsored green card. Dividing PERM certifications by LCAs gives a rough measure of how often an employer takes that second step. Across all employers in FY2024–FY2025, the figure was 23 per 100. For the biggest filers (at least 3,000 certified LCAs), it ranged from 32 down to almost none:

The yearly column shows something the ratio hides. Monthly certifications stopped at several large filers. Google's last month with 50 or more was February 2024, and it has had three in the 28 months since. Amazon.com Services fell below five a month from May 2024 to February 2026 and has risen slowly since (56 in October–June). Cognizant has had none since July 2024 and Infosys none since January 2024. Because PERM cases take more than a year to decide, a decision gap from 2024 points to a pause in filings around 2023, which matches what Google and Amazon were widely reported to have done that year. The data shows only the gap, not its cause.

One warning about this measure: a company may file its LCAs under one legal entity and its PERM cases under another. Fidelity Technology Group has 3,847 LCAs and no PERM cases, while FMR LLC, another Fidelity entity, has 778 PERM certifications in FY2024–FY2025. Check every entity a company uses before concluding that it doesn't sponsor green cards.

Where the jobs are

California accounted for 18.7% of FY2025 certified LCAs by worksite, followed by Texas (15.3%), New York (8.3%), Washington (6.3%) and New Jersey (5.0%). Together those five states had 53.6% of filings.

Why denials tell you nothing

In FY2025, 3,918 LCAs were denied, against 541,597 certified and 31,083 certified then withdrawn. That's a denial rate of 0.68%, and it has been under 1% in each year of the data. An LCA is a statement by the employer: that it will pay at least the required wage, and that hiring the worker won't harm the working conditions of other employees at the site. The Labor Department mostly checks that the form is complete and free of obvious errors. It doesn't decide whether the worker qualifies or whether the job is real. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) decides that later, when it reviews the petition. PERM is checked more closely, and its denial rate was 1.78% in FY2025. Neither rate tells you about visa approvals.

Methodology and caveats

• Source. US Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC), LCA and PERM disclosure files for FY2024 to FY2026 Q3 (1 October 2023 to 30 June 2026). The data is public domain. We are not affiliated with the Labor Department.
• Counting. Every file was loaded and de-duplicated by case number, keeping the latest decision. Cases are counted in the fiscal year of the decision date. "Certified" excludes certified-then-withdrawn cases. FY2026 covers only nine months, so it is compared only with the same nine months of earlier years.
• A certified LCA is not a visa. One worker can have several LCAs (for example, for a new worksite or an extension), and many LCAs never lead to a petition. LCA counts measure employer filing activity, not people hired or visas approved.
• Offered wage is not pay. We use the lower end of any wage range on the form, converted to a yearly figure (2,080 hours a year for hourly wages), and drop values below $10,000 or above $2 million. Bonuses and equity aren't included.
• Employers are legal entities. Names are normalised, so "Google LLC" and "GOOGLE LLC" count as one employer. Separate entities of the same company are not merged, apart from the Amazon total we give above. Groups are our own choices, and the lists are in the script.
• Privacy. Only business fields are read: status, dates, visa class, employer, job title, wage, worksite state and number of positions. No information about workers, employer contacts, attorneys or form preparers is read or published, and employers that file under a person's own name are excluded.
• Reproducible. Two Node.js scripts produce every figure here: one re-reads the DOL files and the other computes the results (results.json). Their case counts match our published employer index exactly (1,570,055 LCA and 373,878 PERM cases).

Nothing here is legal or immigration advice. For your own case, talk to a qualified immigration attorney.

Source: US Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor Certification, LCA and PERM disclosure data (public domain).

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Each of the 2,000 largest sponsors has a free page at locaihost.org/visa-sponsors/employers/ showing its filings by year, the titles it sponsors and the wages it filed. For example, see Cognizant or Google. To look up many companies at once, or to check live job listings for sponsorship evidence, the same data is available through an Apify Actor at $5 per 1,000 results.