Indian IT firms are experiencing a significant decline in H-1B visa approvals, with a 70% drop since 2015, according to a new report by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). This decline highlights a shift in the landscape of high-skilled foreign employment in the United States.
The NFAP analysis of data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) revealed that the top seven Indian IT companies received only 4,573 H-1B petitions approved for initial employment in fiscal year 2025. This represents a 37% decrease compared to fiscal year 2024, in addition to the steep drop from 2015.
In contrast, U.S. technology giants like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are now dominating H-1B visa usage. For the first time, these four companies hold the top four spots for approvals of new H-1B petitions. Amazon alone secured 4,644 initial employment petitions approved in FY 2025.
Within the Indian IT sector, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the only company that ranks among the top five employers for securing approvals for new H-1B workers in the U.S. TCS also leads in continuing-employment approvals. However, TCS's rejection rate for extensions has increased from 4% last year to 7% this year. For initial employment, TCS received 846 approvals, down from 1,452 in 2024. Other Indian firms, LTIMindtree and HCL America, barely made it into the top 25 employers.
Several factors contribute to this shift. Experts suggest that increased hiring of U.S. workers by Indian-based companies, changes in technology, and the ability to perform work outside the United States have reduced the demand for new H-1B visa holders. Additionally, the rise of digital services like cloud computing and artificial intelligence may require fewer workers.
According to Newsweek, Stuart Anderson, the executive director of NFAP, said that Indian-based companies now deliver IT services to U.S. businesses using relatively few H-1B visas, while the largest U.S. technology companies are hiring many individuals, including recent foreign-born graduate students from U.S. universities, to help build AI in the United States after investing several hundred billion dollars to develop artificial intelligence.
The H-1B visa program remains critical for U.S. employers across all sectors. In FY 2025, 28,277 different employers in the United States were approved to hire at least one new H-1B visa holder. However, most employers hire only a few workers, with 61% receiving approval for a single petition and 95% for ten or fewer.
Denial rates for H-1B petitions remain low. The denial rate for initial employment increased to 2.8% in FY 2025 from 2.5% in FY 2024. The denial rate for continuing employment was 1.9% in FY 2025.
Mansi Singh, Partner at law firm BTG Advaya, stated that these trends indicate companies are focusing more on keeping their existing employees legally employed. Immigration platform Beyond Border has noted a decline in approvals for "software engineers" during the labor certification stage over the last four years, suggesting a reduction in both visa adjudication and underlying labor assessments.
