Industry comparison

Finance & Insurance vs Retail Trade (general)

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

Summary

Finance & Insurance and Retail Trade represent distinct approaches to H-1B sponsorship in the U.S. labor market.

Finance & Insurance dominates by filing volume, with 588,317 total H-1B filings across 9,250 employers. This sector's scale reflects heavy reliance on specialized roles in banking, insurance, investment management, and related fields. Retail Trade (general) follows with 250,553 filings from 2,757 employers—a smaller footprint that aligns with the sector's labor-intensive, domestic-focused operations and fewer positions requiring foreign specialty workers.

The employer count gap is equally striking: Finance & Insurance sponsors nearly 3.4× as many employers as Retail Trade, suggesting deeper H-1B adoption across financial institutions, insurers, and related firms. Both sectors show sustained sponsorship activity, but Finance & Insurance's scale, wage profile, and occupational diversity place it among the top H-1B sectors nationally.

Finance vs Retail H-1B
H-1B filings by sector
Finance and Insurance sponsorship
Retail Trade H-1B comparison
sector H-1B data

Sector A

Finance & Insurance

NAICS 52Rank #5

Sector B

Retail Trade (general)

NAICS 45Rank #7

Key metrics

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

Metric	Finance & Insurance	Retail Trade (general)
Total filings	608,260▲	262,640
National share %	6.36%▲	2.75%
Distinct sponsors	10,091▲	3,220
Filings / employer	60	82
Rank	#5▲	#7
Top sponsor	GOLDMAN SACHS & CO. LLC	AMAZON.COM SERVICES LLC (VA)
Top occupation	Software Developers	Software Developers

Filings by fiscal year

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

Finance & Insurance

Time series
Period	Value
FY2010	18,669
FY2011	18,090
FY2012	18,557
FY2013	19,216
FY2014	22,794
FY2015	27,044
FY2016	28,760
FY2017	32,036
FY2018	38,729
FY2019	39,814
FY2020	39,659
FY2021	69,522
FY2022	51,485
FY2023	51,662
FY2024	42,693
FY2025	50,637
FY2026	38,893

Retail Trade (general)

Time series
Period	Value
FY2010	3,089
FY2011	3,674
FY2012	4,146
FY2013	4,743
FY2014	6,059
FY2015	7,463
FY2016	8,728
FY2017	11,457
FY2018	13,585
FY2019	17,470
FY2020	22,645
FY2021	33,213
FY2022	27,820
FY2023	27,462
FY2024	24,688
FY2025	26,082
FY2026	20,316