Lottery entries for the H-1B skilled-worker visa program fell by 85% to 100% this year among the companies most heavily affected by the White House proclamation that added a $100,000 fee to certain H-1B hires from outside the United States, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. The drop hit hardest at the IT staffing and technology firms that had for years been the program’s biggest users.
The scale of the pullback is defined by company-level cuts. IT services giant Infosys cut its lottery entries by more than 8,100 this spring, a 91% decline from the previous year. Tata Consultancy Services opted out of the program entirely this year after registering 3,752 the prior year. IBM reduced its entries by more than 2,700, wiping out almost its entire volume from the year before. Apple, which had one of the lower shares of H-1B hires from outside the U.S. among major sponsors, cut its H-1B lottery entries by 16% to 2,265. Infosys, Tata, Cognizant and Apple did not respond to requests for comment; IBM declined to comment.
The federal proclamation that produced the freeze was issued in September 2025 and imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B requests. It was later blocked by a court, but the market effect on the spring 2026 lottery was already visible. A follow-on proposal from the Trump administration would apply an even larger fee — $103,265 — to new petitions, including for recent U.S. college graduates and others who were exempt from the earlier charge. The revenue analysis behind the new proposal assumes employers will still meet the annual cap of 85,000 H-1B workers even at the higher price.
That assumption is disputed by economists and immigration policy analysts, who say the data from the first fee already signals a collapse in demand. Michael Clemens, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, said that under the new rule, unless American firms responded radically differently than they did to the first fee, the taproot for global talent fueling the U.S. innovation economy would be severed. A separate assessment released by the Institute for Progress projected the fee’s impact using five different methods, each of which concluded it would produce demand reductions of between 63% and 91%.
For more than a decade, employer interest in sponsoring H-1B workers has run far ahead of the 85,000-visa annual cap. Even after this year’s post-proclamation decline, registrations still exceeded the cap, meaning demand did not collapse to zero. But analysts say the additional fee would likely push future entries below the cap for the first time in years, undercutting the revenue Homeland Security expects to raise — Homeland Security identified $8.7 billion in costs for immigration work at various federal agencies as the basis for the fee.
The historical baseline is stark. Until the 2025 proclamation, administrative fees for an H-1B application totaled around $1,500. In the fiscal year before the fee took effect, H-1B applications had already fallen to about 359,000 — a four-year low — even before the $100,000 charge produced the more dramatic 2026 decline. India was the largest beneficiary of H-1B visas last year, accounting for 71% of approved applications, followed by China at 11.7%. Amazon led all employer beneficiaries the prior fiscal year, ahead of Tata, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google.
