Cities With the Most H-1B Sponsors: 55 US Metros Ranked by Employers and Petitions

The Bay Area leads, but Washington DC ranks fourth mostly because of one company's mailing address. Here is what the H-1B city data really shows.

If you are asking which cities have the most H-1B visa holders, the best measure available as of November 2026 is employer filings in the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub. By that measure the San Francisco Bay Area leads: 357 employers with 25 or more petitions and 96,313 petitions across FY2024 to part of FY2026. New York (310 employers, 43,144 petitions), Dallas (266 / 31,600), Washington DC (84 / 31,145) and Chicago (100 / 20,453) follow. One catch changes how you read every number below: USCIS records each petition under the employer's mailing address, not the city where the H-1B worker actually works.

Status line, as of 2026-11-01: the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub says it covers "fiscal year 2009 through fiscal year 2026 (quarter 4)" (checked 2026-11-01). This ranking uses the Hub extract behind our company pages, pulled on 2026-07-29 while FY2026 was still partial, so FY2026 counts are year-to-date, never a full year. Wage-weighted H-1B selection has been in effect since 2026-02-27. The FY2028 registration window is not announced.

Which US city has the most H-1B workers?

The San Francisco Bay Area has the most H-1B sponsorship activity of any US metro in USCIS Employer Data Hub records: 96,313 petitions from 357 employers with 25 or more petitions, FY2024 through part of FY2026. New York ranks second with 43,144 petitions from 310 employers, less than half the Bay Area's volume.

No federal source counts H-1B holders by the city they live in, and the Data Hub's location fields come from a mailing address. Its glossary page is blunt: "This is the State indicated in the mailing address of the employer and is not necessarily the beneficiary(ies) work location." City and ZIP work the same way, so read the ranking as where sponsors file from. By employer count alone, the top five are the Bay Area (357), New York (310), Dallas (266), Boston (133) and Houston (103).

How this ranking counts employers and petitions

• Petitions are the Hub's counts of workers on USCIS first decisions, approvals plus denials, across every filing type from New Employment to Amended, in FY2024, FY2025 and FY2026 to date, added together. Pending cases, appeals and revocations are left out.
• Employers are filing names with at least 25 petitions in that window. Smaller sponsors are not counted.
• Metro hubs group employers by mailing city. Suburbs are folded in for six metros only (Seattle, the Bay Area, Dallas, Washington DC with Arlington, McLean, Reston and Bethesda, Boston, and New York with Brooklyn, Jersey City and Newark). Every other city is its own hub, and a hub needs at least 15 counted employers.
• One company can be several "employers." Fidelity files under ten names in Boston and Amazon under seven in DC, so employer counts measure filing names, not companies.
• Totals are a floor. A filing name with fewer than 25 petitions in the window, including a small name variant of a large company, is left out entirely.

Cities with the most H-1B visa holders: all 55 metro hubs ranked

Source: USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub extract (pulled 2026-07-29), FY2024 through FY2026 year-to-date combined, employers with 25+ petitions; as of 2026-11. "Largest single filer" is the biggest filing name in the hub; its share is of the hub's petitions.

Together the top five hubs hold 54.8% of the petitions across all 55, and the top ten hold 70.5% (our arithmetic). The "largest single filer" column understates concentration where one company files under several names: Fidelity's ten names together file 27.5% of Boston's petitions, twice what its biggest name shows, and Amazon's seven names file 82.9% of DC's.

Is New York or the Bay Area bigger for H-1B?

The Bay Area is bigger by volume, with more than twice New York's petitions (96,313 versus 43,144). On employer count the gap is narrow (357 versus 310), and New York is the least concentrated of the ten largest hubs: its largest filer, Citibank, holds 6.4% of the hub's petitions, against Google's 9.0% in the Bay Area.

In the Bay Area, Google (8,674), Meta (7,136) and Apple (7,060) together file 23.7% of petitions. New York's volume is spread across banks, IT-services firms and media companies, led by Citibank, Mphasis, Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg. Our Bay Area H-1B sponsorship guide covers that market employer by employer.

Sponsor history is not the same as openings now. Indeed's October 2026 labor market snapshot puts local job postings indexes in "Seattle (67), San Francisco (72), and Santa Rosa (73) all among the lowest in the nation," while the national index "hit 103.8 on October 16" (February 1, 2020 = 100). Two of the deepest sponsor markets have postings roughly 30% below their early-2020 level, while postings nationally are slightly above it.

Why does the Washington DC area rank so high for H-1B?

Because of Amazon's mailing address. Seven Amazon filing names list Arlington, Virginia, and together they account for 25,821 of the DC hub's 31,145 petitions, about 83% (our arithmetic from the extract). Take them out and the hub has 77 employers and 5,324 petitions, which would rank 15th, just behind Edison, New Jersey. The largest non-Amazon filer is the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda (491).

Common misconception: "DC ranks fourth because of federal agencies and contractors." Correction: the hub's volume is mostly one company's address, visible on Amazon.com Services' filing record, and it says nothing about where those employees work.

Seattle is the mirror image: no Amazon filing name appears in its hub, yet Seattle ranks seventh with 15,486, and Microsoft files 58.3% of them. Northern Virginia's IT-services suburbs also stay outside the DC hub; Ashburn, Herndon, Sterling and Chantilly add 100 employers and 5,743 petitions.

Which smaller cities have many H-1B sponsors?

Suburban IT-services clusters. Alpharetta, Georgia has 64 counted employers, more than Atlanta itself (62). Piscataway, New Jersey (45), Troy, Michigan (42), McKinney, Texas (39) and Frisco, Texas (38) come close to Seattle's 49. Their sponsors are small: Alpharetta averages about 62 petitions per employer, the Bay Area about 270. Many are consulting and staffing firms that place workers at client sites, so the mailing city often is not where you would work.

New Jersey is the extreme case. Eight central and northern New Jersey hubs (Princeton, Edison, Plainsboro, Iselin, Piscataway, Somerset, South Plainfield and Parsippany) hold 256 employers and 24,164 petitions; merged, they would rank fifth by petitions and fourth by employers. Our New Jersey H-1B jobs guide separates the pharma and finance sponsors from the staffing firms.

Why College Station, Texas tops some lists but not this one

A Stacker analysis, syndicated by local news sites and built on older data, reportedly ranks College Station first on a per-capita basis. We could not confirm its method, so treat it as a pointer, not a source. In our extract, two Cognizant filing names there total 11,969 petitions, more than the whole Austin hub, but too few other sponsors file from College Station to form a hub. Tata Consultancy Services looks similar in Rockville, Maryland (11,968 across two names). Treat both as one-employer towns, and do not read past volume as current demand: the Congressional Research Service (Insight IN12747, 2026-10-14) reported that Cognizant, Infosys and Tata submitted 100%, 91% and 95% fewer FY2027 registrations. Infosys is Dallas's largest filer.

University towns are a different market

Where the largest filer is a university or academic medical center, as in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Miami, Columbus and Houston, that filer is typically cap-exempt and hires outside the lottery; our list of cap-exempt H-1B employers explains who qualifies. Two state actions are in effect and postdate much of this data. Texas froze new H-1B petitions at state agencies and public universities from 2026-01-27 until the end of the Legislature's session on 2027-05-31, unless the Texas Workforce Commission gives written permission (Governor Abbott's letter); K-12 and private employers are not covered (Texas Tribune). By our reading that reaches hub filers such as UT Austin, UT Southwestern, MD Anderson, the University of Houston and UT Health San Antonio, not private Rice or Baylor College of Medicine. Florida's Board of Governors paused new H-1B hires at its 12 public universities from 2026-03-02 until at least 2027-01-05; current employees and renewals are not affected (Central Florida Public Media). In these hubs that means USF, FIU and the University of North Florida, not the private University of Miami. Cap-exempt petitions also get no cap-gap extension (8 CFR 214.2(f)(5)(vii)), so timing matters when your OPT is ending.

What the ranking looks like if you merge the suburbs

Only six metros fold their suburbs in, so some regions look smaller than they are. Here are neighbouring hubs added up (our arithmetic; each employer sits in one hub, so nothing is double counted).

Merged regions, same Data Hub extract, FY2024-FY2026 YTD; as of 2026-11.

Merged, the Dallas region counts 358 sponsors, one more than the core Bay Area hub (the merged Bay region has 391). Greater Atlanta passes Austin, and metro Detroit, led by the Troy and Farmington Hills IT-services cluster, passes Durham.

Do more H-1B sponsors in a city mean better odds for me?

Not in the lottery. Cap selection is national, and since 2026-02-27 it has been weighted by wage level, not by city or sponsor count. Per the USCIS H-1B electronic registration page, selection is "based generally on the highest OEWS wage level that the beneficiary's proffered wage will equal or exceed," for the occupation's SOC code "in the area(s) of intended employment." Level IV is entered four times and Level I once, under the weighted selection final rule. Because the thresholds are set by area, the same salary can reach a higher level in one metro than in a pricier one; see which metros push your H-1B to a higher wage level.

What a dense sponsor city does give you is more employers to approach and more options if a job ends. The flip side is concentration: in Durham, IBM files 78.5% of petitions; in Plainsboro, Compunnel 74.0%; in San Diego, Qualcomm 62.2%; in Seattle, Microsoft 58.3%. If that one employer slows hiring, the city's sponsor market slows with it. Houston is the opposite, with 103 employers and a largest filer at 5.1%. Our comparison of emerging tech hubs and established hubs works through that trade-off.

Microsoft, Infosys and Capgemini, the largest filers in Seattle, Dallas and Chicago, are among the eight employers DOL announced on 2026-10-08 it was suspending from PERM, as are Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services. That action is in effect as announced, with no written notice or end date, and it concerns green-card labor certification; per Mayer Brown's analysis, it "does not suspend any employer from the H-1B program."

How to turn this ranking into a city shortlist

1. Open the metro hub page for each city you are weighing (for example Dallas) and list the employers that hire for your occupation.
2. Look up each employer in the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub and compare its New Employment and Change of Employer columns (people it brought on) with Continuation and Amended (people already there). A filer that is mostly continuations is keeping existing H-1B workers, not adding new ones.
3. Search the LCA disclosure files on DOL's OFLC performance data page for that employer's worksite cities and job titles, which show where the work is rather than where the mail goes. Our guide to building a sponsor target list from LCA and Data Hub data covers the mechanics.
4. Check the OEWS wage level your expected salary would reach in that worksite area on DOL's FLAG Wage Search, since it sets how many lottery entries a cap-subject registration gets.
5. Weigh the largest-filer share: a city where one employer files most petitions is a one-employer bet.
6. Ask your DSO what you must report, and by when, before you move for an OPT or STEM OPT job. Days without employer information count toward the 90-day limit on post-completion OPT (150 days in aggregate with STEM OPT, under 8 CFR 214.2(f)(10)(ii)(E)), per the SEVIS Help Hub.

Common mistakes

• Reading the ranking as where H-1B workers live. It follows mailing addresses, as Amazon's Arlington and Cognizant's College Station filings show.
• Counting filing names as companies. Fidelity's ten names in Boston and Deloitte's six in Philadelphia (which together file 70.7% of that hub's petitions) inflate employer counts and hide concentration.
• Treating the totals as annual figures. They add three fiscal years, the last one partial. Pull a single year from the Hub if you need one.
• Assuming sponsor history means openings now. The Bay Area and Seattle are deep sponsor markets, yet Indeed rates San Francisco (72) and Seattle (67) among the weakest local posting indexes.
• Leaving out the suburbs. Alpharetta, the New Jersey corridor and the Dallas suburbs change the picture once merged.
• Assuming a Texas or Florida public university can file a new H-1B today. Check the state freezes first.
• Reading the PERM suspension as an H-1B ban. It is not one.
• Relying on old rankings. Many results for this question still cite a 2018 Pew Research Center analysis or older, from before the employers and lottery rules changed.

Frequently asked questions

Which US city has the most H-1B workers?

No federal agency counts H-1B holders by the city they live in. By employer petitions in the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, the San Francisco Bay Area leads with 96,313 petitions from 357 employers across FY2024 to part of FY2026, followed by New York with 43,144. Those counts follow each employer's mailing address, not the worker's job site.

Is New York or the Bay Area bigger for H-1B?

The Bay Area, by volume: 96,313 petitions to New York's 43,144, although the employer counts are close (357 versus 310). New York is the more spread-out market, with its largest filer, Citibank, at 6.4% of the hub's petitions.

Which smaller cities have many H-1B sponsors?

Suburban IT-services clusters lead. Alpharetta, Georgia has 64 employers with 25 or more petitions, more than Atlanta's 62, and Piscataway, Troy, McKinney and Frisco each have 38 to 45. Most of these sponsors are small consulting and staffing firms, so check where they place workers before you apply.

Why does the Washington DC area rank so high for H-1B?

Amazon's filing entities use Arlington, Virginia as their address. Seven Amazon filing names account for 25,821 of the hub's 31,145 petitions, about 83% by our arithmetic. Without them the hub would have 77 employers and 5,324 petitions and would rank 15th.

Do more H-1B sponsors in a city mean better odds for me?

Not in the lottery. Since 2026-02-27 USCIS weights cap selection by the OEWS wage level your offered salary reaches for your occupation in the area of intended employment, not by city or sponsor count. Location matters only through that wage level, which is set by area. A dense sponsor city gives you more employers to approach, but check its concentration and whether its sponsors file new-employment petitions.

Sources

• USCIS, H-1B Employer Data Hub and Understanding Our H-1B Employer Data Hub
• USCIS, H-1B Electronic Registration Process
• Federal Register, Weighted Selection Process final rule (2025-12-29)
• DOL Office of Foreign Labor Certification, Performance Data
• DHS SEVIS Help Hub, Unemployment Counter
• Congressional Research Service, Insight IN12747 (2026-10-14)
• Indeed Hiring Lab, US Labor Market Snapshot, October 2026
• Office of the Texas Governor, letter to state agency heads on H-1B petitions (2026-01-27), and Texas Tribune (2026-08-18)
• Central Florida Public Media, Board of Governors H-1B hiring freeze (2026-03-02)
• Mayer Brown, DOL enforcement actions in the H-1B and PERM fraud probe (2026-10)

How we checked this: rankings, shares and merged totals are our arithmetic on the USCIS Employer Data Hub extract behind our company pages (pulled 2026-07-29); the USCIS, DOL, DHS, CRS, Indeed, Texas and Florida pages cited above were read on 2026-11-01 and 2026-11-02. This is general information, not legal or tax advice: your own notices, I-20 and I-94 govern, and your DSO (for OPT and SEVIS) or a licensed immigration attorney (for petitions and status strategy) should answer questions about your case.

If you are deciding where to focus an OPT or STEM OPT search, F1Jobs helps international candidates target employers with a real sponsorship record in the cities that fit them.