H-1B Visa by Country 2026 | India, China & Key Facts

India accounted for 70% of all H-1B visa approvals in fiscal year 2025, totaling 283,772 beneficiaries, while China ranked a distant second at 12% with 49,161 approvals. On September 18, 2026, President Trump extended the controversial $100,000 H-1B petition fee for another 12 months, a policy that disproportionately affects Indian applicants.

H-1B Visa by Country 2026 – Introduction

The H-1B visa by country breakdown for 2026 confirms a pattern that has held remarkably steady for years: India and China together account for the overwhelming majority of America’s specialty-occupation work visa program, while dozens of other countries split the remaining share in the low single digits. Indian nationals received 283,772 H-1B approvals in fiscal year 2025, representing 70% of the total, while Chinese nationals took a distant second place with 49,161 approvals, or 12%. This concentration took on fresh political significance just yesterday, when President Trump signed a proclamation extending the $100,000 H-1B petition fee for another full year, a policy that immigration attorneys and industry groups agree falls hardest on the Indian technology workforce that dominates the program.

This report breaks down H-1B visa by country statistics in 2026 across every dimension: the full country-by-country approval breakdown, the newly extended fee policy and its country-specific impact, the historical registration and selection rate trends that have reshaped the lottery system, approval and denial rates, the green card backlog that disproportionately burdens Indian and Chinese applicants, and the emerging reverse migration trend sending skilled workers back to their home countries. Understanding this country-level concentration matters for anyone tracking US technology labor markets, immigration policy, or the broader economic relationship between America and its two largest sources of skilled foreign talent.

Interesting Facts about H-1B Visas by Country in 2026

Data Source: US Citizenship and Immigration Services FY2025 Characteristics Report, White House Proclamation (September 2026)

The numbers above capture a program whose country-level concentration has barely shifted despite years of policy churn and political controversy. India and China together account for more than 80% of all H-1B beneficiaries, a dominance that reflects both countries’ massive STEM education pipelines and the structure of the technology industry’s global hiring practices, with no other single country exceeding 2% of total approvals. That said, the 406,348 total approvals recorded in fiscal year 2025 include a striking detail often missed in surface-level coverage: roughly 72% of these approvals represent extensions or renewals of existing H-1B status rather than brand-new hires, meaning the actual annual cap of 85,000 visas for new petitions represents just a fraction of the program’s total yearly footprint.

What makes 2026 a particularly consequential year for this country-level story is the collision between India’s overwhelming numerical dominance and the newly extended $100,000 petition fee, signed into law for another twelve months on September 18, 2026. Because Indian nationals represent such a large share of both new and renewing H-1B petitions, this single policy decision carries outsized weight for one country’s workforce more than any other, a dynamic further compounded by the fact that more than one million Indian nationals already sit in a multi-year queue awaiting employment-based green cards, a bottleneck this report examines in detail below.

H-1B Visa Approvals by Country 2026

H-1B Visa Approvals by Country, FY2025
India         |████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ 70%
China         |██████████ 12%
All Other     |███████████████ 18% (no single country exceeds 2%)

Data Source: US Citizenship and Immigration Services FY2025 Characteristics Report

The H-1B visa approvals by country for fiscal year 2025 show a distribution so lopsided that it bears repeating: India’s 70% share is nearly six times larger than China’s second-place 12%, and the gap only widens from there. No other individual country crosses the 2% threshold, with the Philippines, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, Pakistan, Brazil, and Nigeria rounding out the remainder of the list, each contributing a relatively small slice of the overall total. This pattern has held essentially constant since at least fiscal year 2023, when India accounted for over three-quarters of approvals, more than six times China’s 11.8% share that year.

This extreme concentration reflects structural realities in both countries’ education and technology sectors rather than any recent policy shift. India’s enormous pipeline of engineering and computer science graduates, combined with the country’s dominant IT outsourcing and consulting industry, has fed the H-1B program for decades, while China’s second-place position stems from its own substantial but comparatively smaller technology talent export, supplemented by graduate students transitioning from American universities into employment-based visas. The remaining roughly 18% of approvals spread across dozens of countries underscores just how narrowly concentrated America’s specialty-occupation visa program has become around these two source countries specifically.

The $100,000 H-1B Fee Extension 2026

$100,000 H-1B Fee Policy Timeline
Sept 2025     |████████████████████████████████████████ Fee first imposed
Court Action  |████████████████████████████████████ Initially challenged/blocked
Sept 18, 2026 |██████████████████████████████████████████████ Extended another 12 months, through Sept 2027

Data Source: White House Proclamation, September 18, 2026

The single biggest H-1B policy development heading into the rest of 2026 is President Trump’s decision to extend the $100,000 petition fee requirement for another full year, a proclamation he signed on September 18, 2026, keeping the restriction in place through September 21, 2027. First imposed in September 2025, this fee requirement has drawn sustained attention precisely because of the country-level concentration documented throughout this report: since Indian nationals represent 70% of all H-1B approvals, any policy affecting the program’s cost structure necessarily lands hardest on Indian workers and the American employers who sponsor them, even though the fee itself does not explicitly target any single nationality.

It’s important to understand what this extension does not do, since coverage of the policy has sometimes overstated its scope. The fee does not apply automatically to every existing H-1B visa holder; its application depends on the specific worker’s immigration circumstances, the type of petition being filed, and whether entry into the United States is required under the covered provisions. Indian technology companies and the largest US employers that rely heavily on H-1B talent have both indicated the extension adds a meaningful layer of cost and uncertainty to workforce planning, particularly for petitions requiring extension or amendment over the coming year.

H-1B Registration and Selection Rate History 2026

H-1B Cap Registrations and Selection Rate, FY2020-FY2026
FY2020  |█████████████████ 275,000 registrations, 45% selected
FY2023  |████████████████████████████████████████████████████ 781,000 registrations, 15% selected (peak gaming)
FY2024 |████████████████████████████████████ 479,953 registrations, 25% selected (reform)
FY2026 |█████████████████████ 339,000 registrations, 28% selected

Data Source: USCIS H-1B Registration and Selection Data, Fiscal Years 2020-2026

The H-1B registration system has undergone dramatic swings since electronic registration launched in fiscal year 2021, and understanding this history matters for grasping why country-level approval shares have remained stable even as the underlying selection mechanics changed substantially. Registration volume exploded from 275,000 in fiscal year 2020 to a peak of 781,000 in fiscal year 2023, a 184% increase driven almost entirely by employers submitting multiple registrations for the same beneficiary through different affiliated entities, a practice that crashed the selection rate to just 15% that year, meaning 85% of registrants received nothing despite legitimate employer sponsorship.

USCIS responded by implementing beneficiary-based selection starting in fiscal year 2024, which counts each individual person only once regardless of how many employers register them, immediately cutting registration volume nearly in half to 479,953 and improving the selection rate to 25%. The reforms continued into 2026 with the introduction of a wage-weighted lottery in February, replacing the purely random draw with a system that gives greater selection weight to higher-wage job offers, part of a broader effort to steer the program toward higher-skilled, higher-paying positions. Fiscal year 2026 registrations settled at 339,000 with a 28% selection rate, suggesting the combination of reforms has meaningfully curbed the gaming behavior that peaked in 2023, even as the underlying country-of-origin concentration among selected beneficiaries has remained essentially unchanged.

India’s Dominance in the H-1B Program 2026

India's H-1B Share Over Time
FY2023 |██████████████████████████████████████████████████ >75%
FY2024 |█████████████████████████████████████████████████ 71%
FY2025 |████████████████████████████████████████████████ 70%

Data Source: USCIS FY2025 Characteristics Report

India’s share of the H-1B program has drifted slightly downward over the past three fiscal years, from over 75% in FY2023 to 71% in FY2024 and 70% in FY2025, a modest but consistent decline that industry analysts attribute partly to tightened scrutiny of India-headquartered IT consulting firms rather than any broader shift away from Indian talent. The top seven India-headquartered IT services firms saw their combined new H-1B approvals fall to just 4,573 in fiscal year 2025, a 37% year-over-year decline, even as US technology companies themselves became the largest sponsors of new H-1B workers for the first time in the program’s history, according to analysis from the National Foundation for American Policy.

This H-1B concentration connects directly to the broader Indian American community’s economic and demographic profile, detailed extensively in the Indian Population in US report, which found that Indian Americans have achieved the highest median household income of any ethnic group in the country, at $151,200, a success story closely tied to the community’s outsized representation in H-1B-eligible technology and STEM occupations. That same report found temporary visa holders, primarily H-1B workers and their families, make up roughly 9% of the entire 5.4 million-strong Indian American population, illustrating how deeply this single visa category is woven into the broader story of Indian immigration to the United States.

China’s Position in the H-1B Program 2026

China's H-1B Share Over Time
FY2023 |███████████ 11.8%
FY2024 |███████████ 11.7-12%
FY2025 |████████████ 12%

Data Source: USCIS FY2025 Characteristics Report, VisaVerge Policy Analysis

China’s H-1B share has remained remarkably stable across the same three-year window where India’s share drifted downward, holding steady at roughly 11.7% to 12% from fiscal year 2023 through fiscal year 2025. Unlike India’s approval base, which skews heavily toward IT consulting and outsourcing firms alongside major tech employers, Chinese H-1B beneficiaries more often transition directly from American graduate programs into employment, a pathway that has proven somewhat more insulated from the IT consulting-specific scrutiny that has weighed on India’s numbers in recent years.

China’s steady share masks a notable behind-the-scenes shift, however. As US immigration uncertainty has grown and green card backlogs stretch on for years even for Chinese nationals, whose employment-based wait times, while shorter than India’s, still run considerably longer than most other countries, a growing number of Chinese STEM graduates are reportedly choosing to return home directly into China’s rapidly expanding artificial intelligence sector rather than pursuing the H-1B pathway at all, a trend that could gradually reshape China’s H-1B numbers in the years ahead even without any explicit US policy change targeting Chinese applicants specifically.

H-1B Approval Rates and Denial Trends 2026

H-1B Approval Rate by Petition Type and Era
Obama Era (Historical)           |██████████████████████████████████ >95%
First Trump Term (IT Consulting) |██████████████████████ ~85%
FY2025 Aggregate                 |█████████████████████████████ ~91%
FY2025 Change-of-Employer        |█████████████████████████ 87%

Data Source: USCIS FY2025 Approval Statistics, Historical Immigration Policy Analysis

H-1B approval rates have fluctuated meaningfully with each administration’s enforcement priorities, and the current environment sits in a middle position between historical extremes. Under the Obama administration, approval rates regularly exceeded 95%, while the first Trump administration saw a sharp increase in Requests for Evidence, particularly targeting IT consulting companies, that pushed approval rates for those firms down to roughly 85%. The most recent fiscal year 2025 data shows an aggregate approval rate of approximately 91%, with change-of-employer petitions, meaning workers seeking to transfer their H-1B status to a new sponsoring employer, approved at a slightly lower 87% rate, reflecting closer scrutiny of whether the new position genuinely qualifies as a specialty occupation.

This distinction between overall approval rates and change-of-employer rates carries real practical weight for H-1B workers navigating layoffs or career transitions, since a lower approval rate for employer transfers means workers have less certainty when trying to escape an unstable position or pursue a better opportunity. The overall denial rate has remained remarkably low in recent years, dropping to just 2% by fiscal year 2023, suggesting that while individual petitions may face more scrutiny and longer processing under current policy, outright denials remain relatively uncommon once a petition survives the initial registration lottery.

Green Card Backlog by Country 2026

Employment-Based Green Card Backlog by Country
India   |███████████████████████████████████████ 1,000,000+ waiting, 12+ year waits
China   |███████████████████████ Shorter but still multi-year waits

Data Source: Department of State Visa Bulletin, 8 USC 1152, USCIS Pending Case Data

The green card backlog facing H-1B workers from India and China represents the downstream consequence of the same country-level concentration documented throughout this report, colliding with a federal law that caps employment-based green cards for any single country at just 7% of the total issued each year. Because India generates 70% of H-1B approvals but can receive no more than 7% of employment-based green cards, the resulting mismatch has produced a backlog described as staggering even by immigration attorneys accustomed to lengthy waits: over one million Indian nationals are currently waiting in the EB-2 and EB-3 employment-based categories, with current processing dates reaching back to petitions filed in 2013, translating into wait times exceeding 12 years, with some projections running considerably longer.

The August 2026 Visa Bulletin underscored just how acute this backlog has become, listing India’s EB-2 advanced-degree category and EB-5 unreserved category as “Unavailable” for the remainder of fiscal year 2026, meaning no new green cards in those categories will be issued to Indian applicants until the next fiscal year begins. Chinese nationals face a similar though somewhat less severe problem, with an EB-1 cutoff date of July 1, 2023 and an EB-2 cutoff of September 1, 2021, both still representing multi-year delays. Against the backdrop of 1.8 million total pending employment-based green card cases nationwide, a bottleneck examined further in the USCIS Visa Appointment Statistics report, this per-country cap structure means an H-1B worker from India with identical qualifications, job title, and salary to a counterpart from almost any other country may wait decades longer for permanent residency.

Reverse Migration Trends 2026

Indian Professionals Returning Home
2024              |████████████████████████ 9,800
2025              |██████████████████████████████████████ 15,100
2026 (Mid-Year)   |████████████████████ 7,300+

Data Source: VisaVerge Policy Analysis, Indian Government Migration Data

A measurable reverse migration trend has emerged alongside the H-1B program’s tightening policy environment, with the number of Indian professionals returning home from the United States climbing from 9,800 in 2024 to 15,100 in 2025, and more than 7,300 additional returns already recorded by mid-2026. Analysts attribute this shift to the combination of immigration uncertainty, rising employer costs tied to policies like the $100,000 fee extension, and the multi-decade green card wait times documented earlier in this report, all of which have gradually weakened the relative appeal of remaining in the United States for some skilled Indian workers.

Many of these returning professionals are finding opportunities at Global Capability Centres, the increasingly sophisticated offshore innovation and technology hubs that multinational corporations have built directly in India rather than relying solely on H-1B-based US employment. A parallel pattern has emerged among Chinese returnees, many of whom are entering China’s own rapidly expanding artificial intelligence sector rather than remaining in the US technology pipeline. While these reverse migration numbers remain small relative to the hundreds of thousands of active H-1B holders from both countries, the consistent year-over-year growth suggests this trend bears watching as a potential long-term counterweight to the country-level concentration this report has documented throughout the H-1B program’s recent history.

H-1B Historical Context Behind Today’s Country Concentration

H-1B Total Approvals by Fiscal Year
FY2020 |████████████████████████████████████ 388,000
FY2022 |████████████████████████████████████████ 442,000
FY2023 |███████████████████████████████████ 386,000
FY2025 |█████████████████████████████████████████ 406,348

Data Source: US Immigration Statistics by Year, Fiscal Years 2020-2025

Placing 2026’s country-level H-1B data against the program’s broader multi-year trajectory, tracked comprehensively in the US Immigration Statistics by Year report, shows a program whose total approval volume has remained relatively stable, fluctuating in a fairly narrow band between roughly 386,000 and 442,000 approvals annually since fiscal year 2020, even as registration volumes, selection mechanics, and fee structures have all changed substantially underneath that stable surface. This stability in total volume, combined with the remarkably consistent India-China country concentration documented throughout this report, suggests the H-1B program’s fundamental shape has proven far more durable than the frequent headlines about policy changes might otherwise suggest.

That said, the specific mechanics governing who gets selected and what it costs employers to sponsor them have shifted dramatically, from the registration-gaming crisis that peaked in fiscal year 2023 through the beneficiary-based selection reform and wage-weighted lottery introduced since, and now into an environment defined by the extended $100,000 fee and a persistently growing green card backlog. Together, these historical trends and the newest policy developments documented throughout this report paint a picture of a program whose basic country-level shape has remained constant even as nearly everything else about how it operates has been rewritten in just the past few years.

H-1B Visa by Country 2026 – Frequently Asked Questions

Which country receives the most H-1B visas? India receives the most H-1B visas by a wide margin, accounting for 70% of all approvals in fiscal year 2025, totaling 283,772 beneficiaries.

Which country ranks second for H-1B visas? China ranks second with 12% of approvals, or 49,161 beneficiaries in fiscal year 2025, a distant but consistent second-place position.

What is the $100,000 H-1B fee and has it been extended? Yes. President Trump extended the $100,000 H-1B petition fee requirement for another 12 months on September 18, 2026, keeping it in effect through September 21, 2027.

Why does India dominate the H-1B program so heavily? India’s dominance reflects its massive engineering and computer science graduate pipeline combined with the structure of the global IT outsourcing and technology industry, which has relied on Indian talent for decades.

How long is the green card wait for Indian H-1B holders? Indian nationals in the EB-2 and EB-3 employment-based categories face wait times exceeding 12 years, with over 1 million Indian applicants currently in the queue.

Has India’s share of H-1B visas changed recently? Yes, modestly. India’s share fell from over 75% in fiscal year 2023 to 70% in fiscal year 2025, partly due to increased scrutiny of India-headquartered IT consulting firms.

Are Indian and Chinese professionals leaving the US? A growing number are. Indian professional returns to India rose from 9,800 in 2024 to 15,100 in 2025, with many taking jobs at Global Capability Centres, while Chinese returnees increasingly enter China’s AI sector.

How has the H-1B lottery system changed in 2026? A wage-weighted lottery replaced the purely random selection draw in February 2026, giving higher-wage job offers a greater chance of selection.

What percentage of H-1B approvals go to computer-related occupations? 62% of all H-1B approvals in fiscal year 2025 went to computer-related occupations.

What is the H-1B approval rate in 2026? The aggregate approval rate for fiscal year 2025 stood at approximately 91%, though change-of-employer petitions were approved at a slightly lower 87% rate.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available USCIS, White House, and immigration policy analysis sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information presented. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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