2026 H-1B Top 100 Employers for New Hires (FY2026 Q1 to Q3): Amazon Has More Than Twice the #2

By Coach Chiao (George), author of Data-Driven Job Search · 閱讀中文版 →

If you want to work in the US, one of the first questions is usually: which companies actually sponsor H-1Bs for new hires?

The USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub now covers the first three quarters of fiscal year 2026 (Oct 1, 2025 to Jun 30, 2026). I ranked employers by new-hire approvals into a Top 100, merging the different legal entities of the same company.

This article counts new employment only, meaning people getting an H-1B for the first time. I’ll cover people who already hold an H-1B (extensions and changing employers), and the combined total of new plus existing, in separate articles.

The highlights:

Amazon dominates: 4802 approvals, more than twice the #2, Infosys
Indian IT services firms are still the bulk: Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL, LTIMindtree, Wipro and Tech Mahindra, 7 firms in the Top 30
Finance made the top 20: Goldman Sachs #9, JPMorgan #15, Capital One #18
Consulting is still there: Deloitte, EY, McKinsey, BCG, PwC
Semiconductors: only NVIDIA (#16) and Qualcomm (#27) are in the Top 30. TSMC is #63, Intel #77

Three quarters in, already close to last year’s full total

85724 new-hire approvals in the first three quarters, already 76% of last year’s full-year 113458. At the same point last year, it was only 68%
If Q4 is even three quarters the size of last year’s Q4, this year’s total will pass last year’s
Amazon: 4802 in three quarters, already more than its entire previous year (4637)
Infosys: 2095 in three quarters, 8 times its entire previous year (263)
On the other side, Meta: 219 in three quarters, under 15% of its full previous year (1554). Intel: 74, only about a tenth of its full previous year

Year over year (FY2025 Q1 to Q3 vs FY2026 Q1 to Q3)

New-hire approvals went up, not down: from 76812 to 85724, a 12% increase
Big tech split in two: Amazon +78%, Apple +77%, Google +45%; Microsoft -54%, Meta -84%, Intel -85%
Indian IT services doubled: the 7 firms combined went from 2779 to 5633, with Infosys going from 242 to 2095
Universities and hospitals dropped: education -37%, healthcare -39%
Reviews got stricter: the denial rate for new hires rose from 3.0% to 3.4%; approvals for extensions fell 18%, and for changing employers 9%

Trump’s H-1B policy changes over the past year

Status as of late October 2026. Several of these are still in court or not final, so check the official sources below for updates.

From Sep 21, 2025, new H-1B petitions for people applying from outside the US carry an extra US$100000 fee. People already in the US changing status (for example from F-1 to H-1B) don’t pay it
The March 2026 lottery became weighted by wage level: the highest wage level gets 4 entries, the lowest gets 1. Registrations fell from 344000 to about 212000
June 2026: a federal court vacated the US$100000 fee. USCIS stopped collecting it at the end of July; the government is appealing
August 2026: the Department of Homeland Security proposed a new fee of US$103265 on every H-1B petition that goes through the lottery, including change of status inside the US. It is not final

My take

More new-hire approvals doesn’t mean the policies had no effect. The official data only records the approval date, and many of the cases approved in these three quarters were filed in spring 2025, before the US$100000 fee. The first full batch under the new rules won’t show up until the Q4 data.

The first employers affected may be universities and hospitals. They don’t go through the lottery, but they often hire directly from abroad, and their new hires dropped the most. However, the data can’t show whether the applicant was in the US at the time, so all we can say is that the timing matches. It doesn’t prove cause and effect.

Layoffs don’t mean a company stops hiring foreign new hires. Meta, Intel and Microsoft all had big layoffs this year, and their new H-1Bs shrank with them. But Amazon had layoffs too, and its new hires grew 78%.

If you’re studying in the US: switching from F-1 to H-1B doesn’t carry the US$100000 fee right now, but the August proposal would still affect you if it’s finalized. The weighted lottery also lowers the odds for anyone whose starting salary falls in the lowest wage level. When you negotiate an offer, the wage level now directly affects your chance of being selected.

2026 H-1B new-hire Top 100 (#1 to #50)

Rank	Employer	New-hire approvals
1	Amazon	4802
2	Infosys	2095
3	TCS	1524
4	Apple	1065
5	Google	905
6	Cognizant	847
7	IBM	656
8	Tesla	644
9	Goldman Sachs	605
10	Deloitte	559
11	Microsoft	503
12	HCL	451
13	Capgemini	426
14	Walmart	378
15	JPMorgan	373
16	NVIDIA	353
17	Oracle	330
18	Capital One	308
19	Accenture	286
20	EY	275
21	LTIMindtree	266
22	McKinsey	244
23	BCG	240
24	Wipro	230
25	Tech Mahindra	220
26	Meta	219
27	Qualcomm	219
28	ByteDance	211
29	PwC	207
30	Cisco	205
31	TikTok	204
32	Morgan Stanley	195
33	TT Commerce	184
34	UST Global	176
35	Salesforce	167
36	Micron	158
37	Bloomberg	153
38	Mphasis	146
39	EXL Service	142
40	KPMG	141
41	PayPal	135
42	Cummins	130
43	University of Michigan	129
44	Barclays	128
45	Intuit	128
46	LinkedIn	125
47	Virtusa	125
48	Stanford University	121
49	BofA Securities	104
50	CGI	101

#51 to #100

Rank	Employer	New-hire approvals
51	Rivian	101
52	Adobe	100
53	CVS	100
54	University of Pennsylvania	100
55	Applied Materials	98
56	Compunnel	97
57	Eli Lilly	97
58	Washington University in St. Louis	95
59	Texas Instruments	94
60	Bain	92
61	DoorDash	92
62	Lucid	90
63	TSMC	90
64	OpenAI	89
65	Palo Alto Networks	86
66	Databricks	83
67	Mayo Clinic	83
68	SAP	83
69	Cadence	82
70	Snowflake	80
71	University of Florida	80
72	Massachusetts General Hospital	79
73	Johns Hopkins University	78
74	Randstad Digital	76
75	Citibank	75
76	University of Chicago	75
77	Intel	74
78	Nokia	74
79	University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	74
80	L&T Technology Services	73
81	University of Wisconsin-Madison	73
82	University of Maryland	73
83	CitiusTech	72
84	AMD	71
85	Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai	71
86	ServiceNow	71
87	UT Southwestern Medical Center	71
88	Yale University	71
89	Harvard University	70
90	ADP	69
91	Grant Thornton	69
92	Indiana University Indianapolis	69
93	UC San Francisco	68
94	Expedia	67
95	Mankind America	67
96	University of Pittsburgh	66
97	Beaconfire Staffing	65
98	General Motors	65
99	Uber	65
100	Fidelity	64

The Top 30 together account for only 23% of all new-hire approvals. The other three quarters or so are spread across tens of thousands of companies. Companies outside this list sponsor H-1Bs too: this list shows who sponsors the most, not the only ones who sponsor.

How the numbers were calculated

Source: USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, fiscal year 2026. The official page says “through fiscal year 2026 (quarter 3)”
Metric: New Employment Approval, the number of approved new-hire petitions for people getting an H-1B for the first time. These are petitions, not people
Different legal entities of the same company are merged. For example, Amazon combines 7 entities, including Amazon.com Services, Amazon Web Services and Amazon Development Center
Same period last year: the official snapshot for FY2025 Q1 to Q3 (Oct 1, 2024 to Jun 30, 2025)
Limits: the data assigns each case to a fiscal year by approval date. It doesn’t show the filing date, or whether the applicant was in the US at the time

Six months ago I shared a ranking based on Q1 data only, and TCS was #1 then. With Q2 and Q3 added, Amazon is back on top. When the Q4 data is published, I’ll put together a full-year comparison.

Sources

USCIS: H-1B Employer Data Hub
Federal Register: Weighted selection final rule (2025-12-29)
USCIS: H-1B electronic registration numbers
Fragomen: FY2027 H-1B cap reached
AILA: California v. Mullin (First Circuit, 2026-07-24)
Federal Register: Proposed fee for certain H-1B petitions (2026-08-25)