H-1B Beyond Tech: Healthcare, Finance & Education Sponsors

The H-1B program has a reputation problem: most people picture it as a pipeline for software engineers at a handful of Silicon Valley firms. The Labor Department's disclosure data tells a more complicated story. Yes, technology dominates — but hospitals, investment banks, universities, engineering firms and pharmaceutical labs all file Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) in large numbers, and some of the best-paid H-1B roles have nothing to do with writing code.

This article walks through what the sector mix actually looks like, which non-tech industries file the most, and why the highest wages on record belong to physicians rather than programmers. Along the way we'll flag the common ways this data gets misread.

First, a quick definition

The figures here come from LCAs — the wage-and-worksite filings an employer must certify with the Department of Labor before it can petition for an H-1B worker. A certified LCA is a precondition for a petition, not a visa. So a few guardrails before we start:

• An LCA is not a visa. Certification means the paperwork cleared DOL, not that USCIS approved anyone.
• Certification rate is not approval rate. They are different agencies and different decisions.
• Withdrawn is not denied. Employers routinely withdraw duplicate or abandoned filings.
• The "wage" is the offered wage, not take-home pay after taxes and benefits.
• FY2026 is partial — roughly two quarters reported so far — so treat its shares as a snapshot, not a full year.

With that out of the way, let's look at who's actually filing.

The sector mix busts the "it's all tech" myth

Group every FY2026 filing by the employer's industry and one category leads by a wide margin — but it isn't "tech" in the way people assume.

Professional, Scientific & Technical Services accounts for 44.2% of FY2026 filings. That bucket is broad: it includes the big IT-consulting and outsourcing firms, but also management consultancies, engineering-services companies, accounting practices and research labs. After that the field spreads out across the economy:

• Manufacturing — 9.9%
• Information — 9.7%
• Finance & Insurance — 9.0%
• Educational Services — 8.8%
• Health Care & Social Assistance — 4.8%

Add those non-tech-core sectors together and you're looking at a large share of the program running through banks, factories, campuses and clinics. "Information" — the sector that actually houses software publishers, data processing and telecoms — is under 10% on its own. The idea that H-1B is a monolithic tech story doesn't survive contact with the sector table.

Over the long run, the pattern holds

The single partial year could be a fluke, so it's worth checking the full history. Summed across all reported years, the volume ordering looks familiar:

Professional services dwarfs everything, which reflects how much of the IT-staffing and consulting industry is classified there. But the next tier is genuinely diverse. Educational Services has filed more than 600,000 LCAs over the years — think universities hiring postdocs, research faculty and postsecondary teachers. Finance & Insurance is close behind, and Health Care & Social Assistance has cleared well over a third of a million. None of these are rounding errors.

The plot twist: non-tech pays best at the top

Here's the part that surprises people who assume tech owns the high end. Rank occupations by median offered wage and the leaderboard is topped by medicine, not software.

Psychiatrists sit at a $210,000 median offered wage — comfortably above the top software roles. Other physician specialties cluster near the top as well. That makes sense once you remember how prevailing wages work: they're benchmarked to the occupation's real labor market, and physicians command high salaries everywhere, H-1B or not. A Physicians, All Other filing carries a very different price tag than an entry-level analyst role.

The takeaway isn't that tech pays badly — it plainly doesn't — but that the ceiling on H-1B wages is set by non-tech professions. Healthcare, in particular, is small by volume yet enormous by wage.

Who these non-tech sponsors are

The employer list outside pure tech is a who's-who of the broader economy. In finance, names like JPMorgan Chase appear as direct sponsors. In professional services, the accounting and consulting giants — Ernst & Young and Deloitte Consulting among them — file heavily, much of it for management-analyst and financial roles rather than developers.

You can see the occupational fingerprint of these industries in the data. Management Analysts, Financial and Investment Analysts, Accountants and Auditors and Mechanical Engineers all show up as substantial H-1B occupations — the connective tissue of banks, consultancies and factories, not the marquee tech titles.

Universities are their own category. Because they're generally exempt from the annual H-1B cap, colleges and academic medical centers file steadily for research and teaching roles that never enter the lottery. That's a structural reason the education sector's presence is larger and more durable than its "tech" reputation would suggest.

How to read this without getting fooled

A few analytical cautions specific to the sector view:

• Industry classification is imperfect. An employer is coded to one NAICS sector, so a tech vendor embedded inside a bank may land in Finance, or vice versa. Big buckets like "Professional Services" absorb a lot of IT-consulting work that people mentally file under "tech."
• Volume and wage are different questions. Healthcare is tiny by filing count but leads on pay. Don't conflate "who files the most" with "who pays the most."
• Shares shift within a year. Because FY2026 is only partially reported, its percentages can move as more filings land. The multi-year totals are the steadier guide.

The bottom line

The H-1B data does not describe a tech monopoly. Technology and IT services are the largest slice, but a meaningful share of every year's filings flows through manufacturers, banks, insurers, universities and hospitals — and the very top of the wage table belongs to physicians, not engineers. If you're a worker weighing an offer, a researcher mapping the program, or a journalist tracking sponsors, the useful move is to look past the tech headline and read the sector and occupation breakdowns directly.

Want to explore further? Browse the full industry breakdown, the highest-paying H-1B jobs, or start from a specific occupation or sector page.