Industry comparison

Educational Services vs Professional, Scientific & Technical Services

NAICS-sector comparison built from the H1B Report corpus. Filing volume, distinct sponsor count, sponsor concentration and dominant occupations.

Summary

Educational Services (NAICS 61) and Professional, Scientific & Technical Services (NAICS 54) represent two distinct H-1B sponsorship landscapes. Professional Services overwhelmingly leads in H-1B activity, with 5.36 million filings across 57,468 employers, compared to Educational Services' 613,346 filings from 6,945 employers.

Professional Services—encompassing IT consulting, engineering, and R&D—drives the majority of H-1B demand, sponsoring roughly 8.7 times more workers than Educational Services over the all-time record. Educational Services relies on H-1B visas at a smaller scale, primarily for specialized academic and research roles. The employer base in Professional Services is also significantly larger, with more than 8 times the number of sponsors filing petitions.

Both sectors use H-1B sponsorship to fill skill gaps, but Professional Services remains the dominant force in the overall H-1B labor market by volume, employer participation, and scope.

Educational Services vs Professional Services H-1B
H-1B filings by sector comparison
NAICS 61 vs NAICS 54 H-1B
Professional Services H-1B sponsorship
Educational Services H-1B employers

Sector A

Educational Services

NAICS 61Rank #4

Sector B

Professional, Scientific & Technical Services

NAICS 54Rank #1

Key metrics

Filings / employer is a concentration hint — higher means a few sponsors do most of the filing.

Metric	Educational Services	Professional, Scientific & Technical Services
Total filings	626,270	5,462,333▲
National share %	6.55%	57.14%▲
Distinct sponsors	7,516	63,101▲
Filings / employer	83	87
Rank	#4	#1▲
Top sponsor	University of Michigan	INFOSYS LIMITED
Top occupation	Biological Science Teachers, Postsecondary	Software Developers

Filings by fiscal year

Year-over-year H-1B demand within each sector.

Educational Services

Time series
Period	Value
FY2010	39,175
FY2011	34,146
FY2012	35,379
FY2013	34,165
FY2014	33,842
FY2015	34,126
FY2016	34,254
FY2017	32,741
FY2018	34,175
FY2019	34,638
FY2020	29,870
FY2021	48,175
FY2022	36,695
FY2023	46,343
FY2024	41,453
FY2025	45,692
FY2026	31,401

Professional, Scientific & Technical Services

Time series
Period	Value
FY2010	162,393
FY2011	184,930
FY2012	237,548
FY2013	270,996
FY2014	334,578
FY2015	420,866
FY2016	442,248
FY2017	408,878
FY2018	415,563
FY2019	418,841
FY2020	341,992
FY2021	433,810
FY2022	318,868
FY2023	324,927
FY2024	279,362
FY2025	273,304
FY2026	193,229