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Where H-1B Jobs Actually Are (It's Not Just California)
July 28, 2026
H-1B filings cluster in a handful of states, but raw volume hides where the program is most concentrated per resident. Two maps, two very different rankings.
If you follow H-1B coverage, you already know the punchline: California dominates. What's less obvious is how much the program clusters in a few places, why raw filing counts can mislead you, and what the map looks like once you adjust for population. This piece walks through both views — the volume leaderboard everyone cites, and a per-capita reframe that changes which states look like real H-1B hubs.
A quick note on what we're counting. The figures below come from Labor Condition Application (LCA) disclosure data — the wage-and-location filings an employer must submit before petitioning for an H-1B worker. One filing is not one worker, and an approved LCA is not an approved visa. But because every filing names a worksite, LCAs are the best public map we have of where sponsored jobs are proposed to sit.
The volume leaderboard
Cumulatively, the top of the table is stark. California leads with roughly 1.68 million filings, followed by Texas at about 994,000, New York at 779,000, New Jersey at 534,000, Illinois at 428,000, and Washington at 407,000. California alone accounts for 20.4% of FY2026 filings — one in five, from a single state.
Stack the leaders together and the concentration is even clearer: the top five states make up about 50.5% of all filings. Half of the entire program's paperwork lands in five places on the map. The other 45 states plus territories split the remaining half.
That concentration isn't random. It tracks the geography of the industries that use the visa most heavily — software, IT services, finance, and engineering — which in turn cluster around a short list of metros. California's lead reflects the Bay Area and the Los Angeles–San Diego corridor; Washington reflects the Seattle software economy; New York and New Jersey reflect finance and the consulting/IT-services firms headquartered or heavily staffed there. You can see the same story from the employer side on our top H-1B sponsors and H-1B by industry pages.
California isn't just leading — it's pulling away
The share numbers are a snapshot, but the direction matters too. Between FY2025 and FY2026, the biggest mover in share of national filings was California, up 1.8 percentage points. In a program where the top five states already hold half the volume, the single largest state gaining ground means concentration is tightening, not loosening.
| Period | Value |
|---|---|
| 2015 | 115,758 |
| 2016 | 119,754 |
| 2017 | 119,409 |
| 2018 | 128,477 |
| 2019 | 16,784 |
| 2020 | 116,018 |
| 2021 | 177,848 |
| 2022 | 123,097 |
| 2023 | 123,478 |
| 2024 | 102,108 |
| 2025 | 110,926 |
| 2026 | 86,080 |
A 1.8-point shift sounds small until you remember the base. When one state already files a fifth of everything, adding nearly two points of national share in a single year is a meaningful pull toward the coasts — driven largely by the same big technology employers expanding their sponsored headcount. For context on that employer mix, our breakdown of outsourcing giants vs. big tech explains why different sponsors concentrate in different places.
The per-100k reframe: raw counts hide the real hubs
Here's where the standard leaderboard gets misleading. Ranking states by raw filings mostly ranks them by size. California, Texas, and New York top almost any list of anything measured in absolute numbers, because they have the most people, the most companies, and the most jobs of every kind. That tells you where the country is big — not where H-1B is dense.
The more revealing question is: relative to its workforce, how H-1B-heavy is a given state? Divide filings by population (a per-100,000-residents view) and the map reshuffles. Large but economically diverse states like Texas and Florida — where sponsored tech and finance roles are a smaller slice of a huge, varied labor market — slide down. Meanwhile smaller states with a concentrated professional-services or tech presence punch far above their raw rank.
Two states illustrate the effect especially well:
- New Jersey. It's fifth-ish by raw volume, but it's a comparatively small state by population. On a per-resident basis its H-1B intensity is extraordinary — the product of its dense corridor of finance and IT-services employers just outside New York City.
- Washington. Its 407,000 filings look modest next to California's 1.68 million. But Washington's population is a fraction of California's, so per resident it ranks among the most H-1B-concentrated states in the country, thanks to a software sector that leans hard on sponsorship.
The general rule: big states dominate the count; specialized states dominate the rate. If you're a worker weighing an offer, the per-capita view tells you something the raw ranking doesn't — how normal (or unusual) sponsored employment is in the local labor market you'd be joining. A dense H-1B state often means deeper networks of employers who already know the process, more portability if a job doesn't work out, and a larger pool of comparable filed wages to benchmark against.
Why the geography matters if you're the one moving
The concentration has practical consequences beyond trivia.
Wage benchmarking is local. Prevailing wages are set by the metro area, not the nation. A filed salary that looks strong in one region can be merely average in a high-cost hub. If you're comparing an offer, look at the wage for your specific occupation and location — start from our occupation directory or a state page and compare the filed figures, not a national headline number.
Portability is uneven. In a dense H-1B state, if your sponsoring job falls through, there are simply more employers nearby who file regularly and can pick up a transfer. In a state with a thin H-1B footprint, your options narrow fast — the program's geography quietly shapes how much leverage a worker has.
Employer mix varies by place. The states aren't just different in volume; they're different in who files. Finance-heavy New York and New Jersey draw a different sponsor roster than software-heavy Washington or the consulting-and-IT-services firms spread across Texas and Illinois. Two states with similar counts can offer very different day-to-day realities.
The takeaway
Two maps tell two true stories. The volume map — California at 20.4% of FY2026, the top five states at 50.5% of all filings, and California still gaining nearly two points of share year over year — shows a program that is heavily, and increasingly, concentrated in a handful of large states. The per-capita map reshuffles that ranking and reveals the real intensity hubs, where states like New Jersey and Washington outrank their raw-count position because sponsored jobs make up a bigger share of a smaller labor market.
"It's not just California" cuts both ways. California genuinely leads and is pulling away — but the states that are most defined by H-1B employment aren't always the ones at the top of the volume chart. If you're evaluating where to work, or just trying to understand where this program actually lives, both views are worth keeping side by side.
h1b.report normalizes public Department of Labor LCA disclosure data. It is independent and not affiliated with the DOL or USCIS. See our methodology for how filings are counted and de-duplicated.
- H-1B
- geography
- states
- labor data
- visa sponsors