Finance & Banking H-1B: Wall Street's Foreign Talent

Software and IT dominate the H-1B conversation, but the country's biggest banks are quietly among the program's heaviest users. Wall Street runs on quantitative analysts, risk modelers, and platform engineers — and a large share of that talent files through the same Labor Condition Application (LCA) system that tech companies use. This article maps the finance H-1B sponsors that matter, explains what their numbers actually mean, and shows where the roles and wages sit.

You will learn which financial firms file the most, why their "certification rates" swing so widely, what role sits at the center of the cluster, and how to read the data without drawing the wrong conclusions.

Finance is a bigger slice than most people assume

In FY2026 filings to date, the Finance and Insurance sector accounts for about 9.0% of all H-1B LCA activity. That is a meaningful share for a single industry — and it understates the true footprint, because a lot of financial-sector technology work is filed under professional-services and information-sector employers rather than under the bank's own name.

The concentration also clusters geographically. The money-center banks pull talent toward New York, while card issuers, trading platforms, and back-office hubs spread filings into Texas, New Jersey, and beyond. If you are benchmarking a finance offer, the sector total is only the starting point — the individual sponsor tells you far more.

The finance sponsor leaderboard

Here are six of the most active financial sponsors, with their total LCA filings and their unconditional certification rate — the share of filings the Department of Labor certified outright.

JPMorgan's volume stands out — it files at a scale that rivals large technology employers, reflecting a sprawling in-house engineering and quantitative operation. But notice how differently the certification rates read across the group: Wells Fargo sits above 66%, while Capital One is near 21%. That gap does not mean one bank gets rejected three times as often as another. It reflects filing behavior, which the next section unpacks.

For the full, live ranking of the biggest sponsors across every industry, the chart below pulls the current numbers directly from the data.

Why low certification rates are not rejections

This is the single most misread number in the disclosure data. A low unconditional certification rate at a bank almost always reflects the certified-withdrawn pattern, not denials.

Here is the mechanism. Employers frequently file more LCAs than they ultimately use — to cover multiple candidates, work locations, or contingencies. When a position is filled, relocated, or dropped, the employer withdraws the surplus filings. Those filings were often certified first and then withdrawn, or withdrawn before a decision. In the aggregate rate, they drag the "unconditional certified" share down even though nothing was refused. We walk through this in detail in why certified-withdrawn filings are not denials.

So Capital One's 20.7% and Wells Fargo's 66.3% are better read as two different administrative styles, not two different success rates. A firm that files tightly against confirmed hires will show a high rate; a firm that files broadly and prunes later will show a low one. Neither pattern tells you a worker was turned away.

Keep three guardrails in mind whenever you read these tables:

• An LCA is not a visa. The LCA is a wage-and-conditions attestation filed with the Department of Labor. The actual H-1B petition goes to USCIS separately.
• Certification rate is not USCIS approval. DOL certifying an LCA says nothing about whether the visa petition was later approved.
• Withdrawn is not denied. A withdrawn filing is a filing the employer pulled — frequently a routine surplus, not a refusal.

The role at the center: financial analysts

The occupation that defines the finance cluster is Financial and Investment Analysts (SOC 13-2051). Across the dataset it carries 163,725 filings with a median offered wage of about $85,000. That is a large, mature category — the analysts, associates, and modelers who staff investment banking, asset management, and corporate finance desks.

Two things are worth stressing about that $85K median. First, it is the offered wage on the LCA, not take-home pay — finance compensation leans heavily on bonuses that never appear in these filings, so the cash-comp reality for many analysts is materially higher. Second, a single median hides a wide spread across seniority. The prevailing-wage ladder below shows how pay steps up from an entry-level (Level I) analyst to a senior (Level IV) one within this exact occupation.

Analysts are far from the only finance-heavy role. Banks file large numbers of software developers for their trading and platform teams, plus data scientists and risk-focused quantitative roles. The result is that a "finance" sponsor's filings often look, occupationally, a lot like a tech company's.

How to use this if you have a finance offer

Start with the sponsor, not the sector. Pull the employer's own page — for example JPMorgan Chase — and look at the specific occupation and location that match your offer. A firm-wide median blends everyone from a first-year analyst to a managing director's technical staff, so it is nearly useless for a single role.

Then compare the offered wage on comparable filings to your number, remembering that in finance the base wage is only part of the story. If your role is analyst-adjacent, the Financial and Investment Analysts occupation page and the wage-level ladder above give you a realistic band by seniority. If it is engineering or data, benchmark against the relevant tech occupation instead.

Finally, do not let a low certification rate scare you off a specific bank. As we covered, that figure is dominated by routine withdrawals, not refusals. The more useful signals are the wage level attached to your title, the work location, and how your offer compares to peers in the same SOC code.

The takeaway

Finance is one of the largest single-industry blocks in the H-1B data, led by a handful of banks — JPMorgan most of all — that file at tech-company scale. The wide gulf in their certification rates is a story about filing habits and the certified-withdrawn pattern, not about who gets approved. And the cluster's defining role, the financial and investment analyst, carries a large filing count and an ~$85K median offered wage that understates true finance compensation. Read the sponsor, the role, and the wage level together, and the finance H-1B picture becomes far clearer than any headline rate suggests.

h1b.report is an independent project and is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Labor or USCIS. Figures come from public LCA disclosure data; FY2026 is partial (roughly two quarters reported so far).