About 4 in 10 open US jobs in JobShifu's crawl are at an employer with an H-1B approval on record, but much of that share is retail and pharmacy chains with a handful of approvals. At employers with 100 or more initial approvals it is 1 in 10, and one in five past sponsors with a crawled board had nothing open. Measured on 4 October 2026.
Search for "H-1B sponsors" and every result is a republished USCIS table. Those tables are public record and useful, and they share one blind spot: an approval filed in 2022 says nothing about whether that employer has a job open this week. Sponsor lists answer "who sponsored". Job boards answer "who is hiring". This post joins the two.
It is published by JobShifu, which crawls employer career boards directly, and the method is at the bottom. On 4 October 2026 the crawl held 942,964 open postings located in the US, across 10,605 employer boards. Those were matched by employer name to the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub records for fiscal years 2021 to 2023 [2], which yielded 3,281 sponsoring employers in the crawl. The newest USCIS ranking, fiscal year 2026 to 30 June [1], is used further down to check which of today's biggest sponsors the crawl can see.
This is the second edition of the post. The first, measured on 8 August 2026, counted open postings in every country, against a smaller crawl and an earlier run of the employer matcher, so its figures are not comparable with these. Read the two as separate measurements, not as a trend.
How much of the US market is at a past sponsor depends on what you count as a sponsor
| Employer's FY2021 to 2023 initial approvals | Open US postings | Share of all open US postings |
|---|---|---|
| 1 or more | 375,497 | 39.8% |
| 10 or more | 212,808 | 22.6% |
| 100 or more | 92,449 | 9.8% |
| 1,000 or more | 19,465 | 2.1% |
Open US postings on 4 October 2026 at employers matched to a USCIS record, by the employer's initial approvals (new-employment petitions approved) in fiscal years 2021 to 2023 combined.
"At least one approval" is the definition most sponsor lists use, and it is generous. CVS Health has 28,397 open US postings in the crawl and 308 initial approvals in three years; Lowe's has 21,951 and 43; Starbucks has 20,541 and 24. A handful of approvals at a chain with tens of thousands of store roles is a real record, and it says very little about the store roles. Raise the bar to 100 approvals and the share falls from about 40% to about 10%. Even then CVS Health alone holds 31% of the postings that clear it.
The 58,164 postings at sponsors that first appeared in the previous seven days are 38.6% of everything new in the US that week, so the pool refreshes at about the same rate as the market around it.
Many past sponsors have nothing open right now
A sponsor only counts as hiring if the crawl can see its board. Of the 3,281 sponsoring employers matched, 2,178 had a board crawled in the seven days before measurement. Among those, the median sponsor had 11 open US postings, and 439, about 20%, had none. A republished USCIS table will happily send you to an employer in that 20%. The record is true; the advice it implies is out of date.
The heavier sponsors are a different population. Of the 79 employers with 100 or more initial approvals and a crawled board, the median had 311 open US postings, and only 8 had none.
Who sponsors most is not who is hiring most
USCIS's newest ranking covers fiscal year 2026 to 30 June 2026 [1]. Put its top employers that the crawl covers next to what is open on their boards, and the two orders come apart.
Amazon leads both sides, with 12,994 approvals across its four filing entities in the USCIS top 100 and 9,376 open US postings. After that the order breaks. Google is fourth on the chart by approvals, at 3,180, and had 464 open US postings. Walmart is eighth, at 1,669, and had 5,962, more than any employer on the chart except Amazon. JPMorgan Chase had more than twice as many open US postings as approvals. Oracle is the one where the two columns nearly agree: 1,716 approvals and 1,712 openings.
Large employers' counts are floors. The crawl keeps a rolling window per board, so an employer that posts thousands of roles shows the ones it has posted recently.
The biggest sponsors this year are mostly outside the crawl
The USCIS FY2026 top 25 names 23 distinct employers (Amazon appears three times). The crawl covers 13 of them. The other 10 run career sites it does not reach: Tata Consultancy Services (4,450 FY2026 approvals), Infosys (4,113), Cognizant (3,510), Tesla (1,574), HCL America (1,516), Deloitte (1,298), LTIMindtree (1,289), IBM (1,230), Wipro (1,175) and Capgemini (1,074). Together they hold 21,229 of the top 25's 59,050 approvals, about 36%. Nine of the ten are IT services or consulting firms; Tesla is the exception.
Google was in that list in August and is not now: its own careers site is crawled, with 464 open US postings on measurement day.
These employers are left out rather than shown with a zero, because a zero would measure the crawl, not their hiring. The same holds lower down: of the 117 employers with 100 or more FY2021 to 2023 initial approvals, 38 have no crawled board, mostly IT services firms and universities. If your target list is weighted toward either, check those employers' own sites directly.
Postings that mention sponsorship mostly refuse it
The sponsor record is about the employer. The posting is about the role, and most postings that raise the question say no. On JobShifu's visa sponsorship research page, postings that say they will not sponsor outnumber those that say they will by 35.9 to 1 (edition of 4 October 2026, open postings in every country) [3]. An earlier edition of that page read 7.3 to 1. The jump was a rebuild of the classifier that reads these statements, not a change in the market, and the page records it as a series break. A second rebuild on 30 September came after that day's edition was measured at 45.9 to 1, so 35.9 is not comparable with 45.9 either.
Measured on 4 October with the rebuilt classifier, the split by employer record looks like this, for open US postings whose description had been read:
| Employer's FY2021 to 2023 initial approvals | Postings read | Say they will not sponsor | Say they will sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|
| None on record | 566,203 | 8.0% | 0.11% |
| 1 to 99 | 282,989 | 9.3% | 0.25% |
| 100 or more | 92,421 | 6.7% | 0.27% |
At employers with 100 or more approvals, a posting is a little less likely to refuse and more than twice as likely to offer as one at an employer with no record. Refusals still outnumber offers about 24 to 1 there. Silence is the norm everywhere: most postings say neither, and silence is not a yes. A sponsor's record gets you to the right employer; the posting and the recruiter answer for the role.
Where the sponsor openings are
At employers with 100 or more initial approvals, 14.4% of categorized open US postings are software engineering roles, against 6.4% across all open US postings. Finance and accounting is 7.6% against 4.4%, and data and analytics 3.4% against 1.9%.
Medical and clinical roles are 26.3% of those postings against 11.2% overall. That is mostly CVS Health and hospital systems such as Cleveland Clinic, and it is the clearest case of the threshold doing work: at the looser bar of one approval, retail (16.1% against 12.8%) and food and hospitality (8.3% against 6.0%) over-index instead, because the large chains clear it. At 100 approvals, food and hospitality falls to 0.5%.
Where to start if you need visa sponsorship
- Check the live board, not the league table. A 2022 approval is a track record, not an opening. About one in five sponsors with a crawled board had no US role open on measurement day.
- Set your own bar for "sponsor". One approval in three years and a thousand are different signals. The dataset lists approvals and open US postings for every employer with 100 or more.
- Read the posting's sponsorship line. Even at heavy sponsors, postings that address sponsorship refuse it about 24 times for every offer. Postings that say nothing are not offers.
- Go direct for the IT services firms. Ten of USCIS's FY2026 top 23 employers, mostly IT services and consulting, run boards this crawl does not reach.
JobShifu ships this join as a filter: visa sponsorship marks openings at employers with a USCIS approval record, next to how fresh the posting is. The same mechanism as this post, running on every crawl.
Common questions
How do I find companies that sponsor H-1B visas?
The public record is the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, which lists approvals by employer and fiscal year; its newest data runs to 30 June 2026. It answers who has sponsored, not who is hiring. Joining it to a crawl of employer career sites turns a track record into roles open this week. On 4 October 2026, 39.8% of open US postings in JobShifu's crawl were at an employer with at least one initial approval in fiscal years 2021 to 2023, and 9.8% at one with 100 or more.
Does a company that sponsored an H-1B before still sponsor now?
A past approval is a track record, not an opening. Of the 2,178 past sponsors whose boards JobShifu crawled in the week to 4 October 2026, the median had 11 open US postings and 439, about 20%, had none. Among employers with 100 or more initial approvals the picture is better: the median had 311 open US postings and 8 of 79 had none.
Which jobs are most likely to offer visa sponsorship?
At employers with 100 or more initial approvals, software engineering is 14.4% of categorized open US postings against 6.4% across all of them, and finance and data roles over-index too. Medical and clinical roles are 26.3% of those postings, mostly at CVS Health and hospital systems. Whether a specific role sponsors is stated, if at all, in the posting.
Does a sponsoring employer mean any of its jobs come with sponsorship?
No. At employers with 100 or more approvals, 6.7% of open US postings say they will not sponsor and 0.27% say they will, about 24 refusals for every offer, measured on 4 October 2026. The rest say nothing. The record gets you to the right employer; the posting and the recruiter answer for the role.
Method
The same five steps work for any country that publishes a list of sponsors; the UK edition runs them on the Home Office register.
- Sponsor list. USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub bulk files for fiscal years 2021, 2022 and 2023 [2], loaded on 7 July 2026: 125,411 employer and year rows, aggregated per employer. Approvals are USCIS's first decisions [4]. The hub's per-year bulk files stop at FY2023; newer years are published only through the interactive hub, so the FY2026 ranking to 30 June 2026 [1] (its "Total Approvals" figure for the top 100 employers, accessed 4 October 2026) is used for the ranking and coverage check, not for the posting join. The FY2023 file carries far fewer initial approvals (38,315) than FY2021 or FY2022 (about 140,000 each) and is used as published.
- Postings. Open postings located in the US on employer career boards JobShifu crawls, on 4 October 2026: 942,964 postings from 10,605 employer boards, excluding sources and employers on JobShifu's block list.
- Matching. Employer names normalized (case, punctuation, legal suffixes) and matched in three tiers: exact, a curated alias list for brands filing under other legal names (Amazon's filing entities; CVS Health as CVS Pharmacy, Caremark and Aetna), and a looser normalized key. Exact and alias matches alone give 33.3% of open US postings at an employer with one or more approvals and 9.1% with 100 or more, against 39.8% and 9.8% with all three tiers. A random sample of 30 key-tier matches was read by hand: 27 were clearly the same employer and 3 were uncertain, all generic names. A sponsor is one USCIS employer identity; several company records matched to it count once.
- Coverage. A sponsor counts as covered when an enabled board for it was crawled in the seven days before measurement. Uncovered sponsors are excluded from "has nothing open", because their zero is a gap in the crawl. Name matching also misses some sponsors: Citigroup's board (1,408 open US postings) is not matched to Citi's USCIS record, which understates the sponsor share slightly.
- Thresholds and statements. Sponsors are counted at one or more initial approvals; employers matched with continuing approvals only (40,776 open US postings) are not counted. Sponsorship statements come from JobShifu's classifier over the posting description, rebuilt on 30 September 2026; postings that say both or neither count in neither column. Categories come from JobShifu's job-category tagger; 23.3% of open US postings are not yet tagged and are left out of the category figures.
- Limits. Large employers' counts are floors, because the crawl keeps a rolling window per board. An employer's approvals are company-level aggregates over three fiscal years, not a statement about any role. Corpus history begins in late June 2026, so the post makes no trend claims.
- Dataset. Published under CC BY 4.0 as h1b-sponsors-hiring-2026-10-04.json: the threshold table, coverage counts, sponsorship statement shares, category shares, the FY2026 top 25 with coverage, and approvals and open US postings for every employer with 100 or more initial approvals. Cite as: JobShifu, H-1B sponsors with live US job postings, October 2026, with a link to this post. Aggregates only; no posting text is republished.
Sources
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, H-1B Employer Data Hub, fiscal year 2026 data as of June 30, 2026; accessed October 4, 2026.
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, H-1B Employer Data Hub Files, fiscal years 2021 to 2023; loaded July 7, 2026, consulted October 4, 2026.
- JobShifu Research, How many job postings say they will sponsor a visa?, edition of October 4, 2026.
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Understanding Our H-1B Employer Data Hub; consulted October 4, 2026.