Is the H-1B Program Shrinking? What FY2026 Filings Really Show

The headline number looks dramatic: 210,387 H-1B filings so far in fiscal year 2026, against 596,552 for all of FY2025. Taken at face value, that reads like a program in sharp decline. It isn't — at least not on the strength of this data alone. FY2026 is a partial year: only about two quarters have been reported. Comparing a half-finished year to complete ones is the single most common way to misread this dataset.

This article walks through what the FY2026 figures actually support, what they don't, and why the more durable story may be about wages rather than volume. If you want the long historical arc instead, see our companion piece, H-1B in Charts: 15 Years of Filings and Wage Growth. This one is about the current-year question.

First, what these numbers are (and aren't)

Every figure here comes from Labor Condition Applications (LCAs) — the Department of Labor filings an employer must certify before petitioning for an H-1B worker. A few guardrails matter before you read a single trend:

• An LCA is not a visa. One certified LCA can cover multiple positions, and many never convert into an actual hire.
• Certification rate is not USCIS approval. DOL certifies the wage attestation; USCIS separately decides the petition. The two are different agencies making different decisions.
• Withdrawn is not denied. Employers pull filings for routine reasons — a role closes, a candidate declines, a duplicate gets cleaned up.
• Offered wage is not take-home pay. These are gross annual salaries as attested, before tax, benefits, or bonuses.
• FY2026 is partial — roughly two quarters reported at the time of writing.

Keep that last point in mind through everything below. It is the difference between an interesting observation and a false alarm.

The volume drop, in context

For most of the 2010s, LCA filings ran somewhere in the 560,000–660,000 per year range. FY2025 landed at 596,552, squarely inside that band. FY2026's 210,387 sits far below — but that is exactly what a half-reported year should look like.

The honest way to think about it: if roughly two of four quarters are in, then 210,387 is a run-rate, not a total. Doubling it lands you back near the historical norm, though even that is a crude extrapolation. Filing volume is not evenly spread across the year — the spring H-1B cap season and employer fiscal cycles create bulges and lulls — so a simple ×2 could overshoot or undershoot. The point isn't the exact multiplier. The point is that you cannot conclude a decline from a partial year, in either direction.

The trend line above stops at FY2025 on purpose: it shows complete years only, so the shape you see is real rather than an artifact of missing quarters. Notice how stable the band has been. Against that backdrop, a genuine structural decline would have to persist across several full years before it meant anything — and we don't have a full FY2026 yet to judge.

The wage story is the more interesting one

Volume gets the headlines, but the steadier signal in the FY2026 data is pay. The median offered wage rose to $130,000 in FY2026, up from $119,516 in FY2025. Wages climbing while reported volume falls is notable because it points away from the simplest "program is collapsing" reading.

Why might median wages keep rising even in a partial year? A few plausible mechanics, all consistent with the data:

• Composition. Early-year filings may skew toward higher-level, higher-paid roles, pulling the median up before the full mix arrives.
• Occupation shift. If the caseload tilts toward senior software, data, and management roles, the median follows.
• Wage-floor drift. DOL prevailing-wage levels ratchet upward over time, and offered wages have trended up across the dataset for years.

That last one is a long-running pattern, not a FY2026 novelty. The offered-wage line has been climbing for well over a decade, and the newest figure continues it rather than breaking from it.

If you're weighing a job offer against what sponsors actually file, this is the number to anchor on — with the caveat that a national median hides enormous variation by role and location. A software developer offer in the Bay Area and an analyst offer in the Midwest sit on very different parts of the curve.

Who is still filing — and for what

Even a partial year tells you who is active. The composition of top sponsors and top occupations has been remarkably persistent: large IT-services firms and a handful of big-tech employers dominate the counts, and computer-and-math occupations dominate the roles. The charts below draw on the live dataset, so they reflect the current standings rather than a frozen snapshot.

Software and data roles anchor the top of that list, which is why occupations like Software Developers and Data Scientists are the ones most job-seekers are actually comparing offers against. On the employer side, the split between outsourcing-heavy filers and product companies is stark:

The names at the top — firms like Infosys Limited and Tata Consultancy Services Limited alongside product companies like Microsoft Corporation — have held their relative positions across years. A partial FY2026 doesn't reshuffle that structure; it just captures less of it. So while we can't responsibly quote a FY2026 total for any one sponsor, the shape of who files and why is not in doubt.

What about next year?

Because partial-year data invites overreaction, it helps to look at a modeled full-year view instead. Our forecast projects 381,537 filings for FY2027, with a deliberately wide range of 167,562 to 595,512. That spread is the honest part: the uncertainty band is large precisely because filing volume is sensitive to policy changes, cap dynamics, and the business cycle. The full methodology and updated projections live on the H-1B forecast page.

Read that range correctly. The midpoint is below the 2010s norm, but the upper bound reaches right back into it. A single point estimate would imply false precision; the range says "we expect a full year, but we won't pretend to know exactly how full."

The bottom line

Is the H-1B program shrinking? The FY2026 data can't answer that yet. Here is what it can support:

1. Volume looks low because the year is half-reported — 210,387 filings covers roughly two quarters, not twelve. Do not compare it directly to FY2025's complete 596,552.
2. Median offered wages are still rising — $130,000 in FY2026 versus $119,516 in FY2025 — which is a poor fit for a "collapse" narrative.
3. The structure is stable — the same sponsor types and occupations dominate, as they have for years.
4. The forecast is a range, not a verdict — FY2027's projected 381,537 comes with a band from 167,562 to 595,512.

If you take one habit away from this, make it the partial-year reflex: whenever you see a current-year H-1B count that looks shockingly low, ask how many quarters are actually in it before you draw a line through the trend. For the full historical view that is built on complete years, read H-1B in Charts: 15 Years of Filings and Wage Growth, and see How Much Do H-1B Workers Really Earn for the wage picture broken down by location.