The H-1B by the Numbers: A FY2022 Snapshot, and What's Changed Since

Numbers like these are useful context, but they describe the program as it operated in fiscal year 2022, not as it operates in late 2026. Read the first half of this piece as background. Read the second half as the reason that background no longer tells the whole story.

How the H-1B Works, in One Minute

The H-1B was created by the Immigration Act of 1990 and is administered by USCIS. It lets a U.S. employer sponsor a foreign professional for a specialty occupation — one that requires specialized knowledge and, generally, at least a bachelor's degree. The worker's status is tied to that sponsoring employer.

New H-1B petitions are limited by an annual cap: 65,000 for regular applicants, plus a separate 20,000 for applicants with a master's degree or higher from a U.S. institution — 85,000 in total. Petitions for institutions of higher education, their affiliated nonprofits, and nonprofit or government research organizations are generally cap-exempt. Demand far exceeds the cap, so USCIS runs a lottery among registrations; petitions filed for selected registrations are processed, and everyone else waits for the next year. Approved status generally begins on October 1, the start of the fiscal year.

Who Gets Approved: The FY2022 Snapshot

Country of origin

Indian nationals received nearly 73% of approved petitions in FY2022, with China second at about 12.5%. The next eight countries combined accounted for only about 6%. The figures we're drawing on don't break out Bangladeshi workers separately, which is itself a reminder of how concentrated this program is in a small number of countries.

Age, gender, and occupation

Nearly two-thirds of initial-employment approvals went to workers aged 25 to 34, while extensions skewed older, with roughly 63% aged 30 to 39. Men received a large majority of approvals overall, though the split varies by country — among workers from the Philippines, for example, women received roughly 58.7% of approvals. By occupation, computer-related jobs dominated at 66% of approvals, and within that group, systems analysis and programming accounted for nearly 55%. Extensions outnumbered first-time petitions in every occupational category except education.

Approvals Are High, Denials Are Low — and They Swing With Policy

USCIS approved 442,043 H-1B petitions in FY2022, more than in each of the four prior years. The 2% denial rate for initial employment that year was a record low, down from 4% in FY2021. That figure is not a constant, though. The same dataset shows denial rates peaking at 24% in FY2018 and ranging between roughly 5% and 8% in earlier years — a reminder that approval odds depend heavily on adjudication posture and policy, not just on the strength of any individual petition.

Part of the reason denial rates tend to run low is cost and effort. The National Foundation for American Policy estimated that an employer could pay between $3,900 and $18,150 in government and attorney fees for an initial H-1B petition, and as much as $31,800 for an initial petition plus an extension. When filing is that expensive, employers are selective about what they file. Keep that number in mind — it matters in the comparison below.

The "Cheap Labor" Question

Critics of the program argue that employers use it to pay foreign workers less than they would have to pay U.S. workers in the same jobs, or to displace U.S. workers outright. The research cited in this dataset points the other way on wages: H-1B workers' salaries tend to sit in the top tier of U.S. wages, and several studies found that highly skilled foreign workers are not paid less than comparable U.S. counterparts. The median computer-related H-1B salary rose 26% between 2018 and 2022.

Employers are also legally required to pay at least the prevailing wage for the occupation and location, and they attest to that through a Labor Condition Application filed with the Department of Labor before the petition is submitted. The broader debate over the program's effect on the domestic workforce is ongoing, and a single year of data won't settle it — but wage levels are one of the places where the numbers are clearer than the rhetoric.

When a Job Ends: The 60-Day Grace Period

The same report highlights what happens when H-1B workers lose their jobs — a live issue after waves of technology-sector layoffs. Under current rules, a laid-off worker generally has 60 days to find a new sponsoring employer, change to another status, or leave the country. A presidential panel previously urged extending that window to 180 days, without result.

That window is now under threat in the opposite direction. DHS has proposed eliminating the 60-day grace period altogether for several employment-based categories, which we cover in detail in our piece on the proposal. It is not yet in effect.

What's Changed Since This Snapshot

The FY2022 picture is a program with modest government fees, a short safety net, and enormous demand. Here is how a few of those factors compare with where things stand as of October 2026.

We've covered each of these developments separately — the litigation over the $100,000 payment, the new $103,265 fee proposal, and the FY2027 cap announcement — so we won't repeat the details here. The point is simply that the cost, the odds, and the cushion all look different from the snapshot above.

What the Numbers Don't Tell You

A dataset of approved petitions only describes people who got through. It says nothing about the much larger group whose registrations weren't selected, whose employers decided the cost wasn't worth it, or whose status ended when a job did. Three structural features of the H-1B explain most of that:

• It depends on a lottery. A strong profile does not improve your odds of selection.
• It depends on one employer. The sponsorship, and the status that comes with it, rises and falls with that relationship.
• It depends on the employer's willingness to pay. As costs rise, the pool of employers willing to sponsor can narrow.

None of that makes the H-1B a bad path — for many people it remains the right one. But it's worth knowing that EB-2 NIW, EB-1A, and O-1 don't carry those same three dependencies, and that for qualified researchers, engineers, and physicians, they can run in parallel with whatever status you hold today.