H-1B visas: Indian IT’s reliance on H-1B dropped 56% over past 8 years

India’s top seven IT services companies saw a 56% decline in their usage of the premier US work visa programme – H-1B – over the last eight years, data accessed by ET show.

The trend has reversed for American technology majors such as Amazon and Google. Experts said Indian IT companies’ reliance on H-1B visas has been declining over the years as they have been increasing local hiring in the US. Factors such as high denial rates during the Trump administration along with tightening of the immigration regime have also played a part, they added.

According to data from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), approved H-1B visa petitions for initial employment in the US from the seven companies fell from 15,166 in fiscal 2015 to 6,732 in 2023.

While the number for Tata Consultancy Services, which recorded the highest approvals in FY15, declined 75% in eight years, the count fell 21% for Infosys, 69% for Wipro and 46% for HCL America, the US unit of HCLTech. The remaining three — LTIMindtree, Tech Mahindra and Hexaware Technologies — too posted a fall in approvals, NFAP data showed.

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“The number of new H-1B petitions for Indian companies declined because the companies built up their domestic workforce in the United States and have relied less on visas. Also, Indian companies are following the industry trend of serving clients by using more digital services, such as cloud computing, bots and artificial intelligence, which require fewer workers,” NFAP executive director Stuart Anderson said.

The use of the H-1B programme by Indian companies is unlikely to increase significantly in the future because the companies will almost certainly expand local hiring in the US when possible and follow the trend of using more technology, Anderson said.

Extensive hiring in the US by Indian IT service providers such as Infosys, replicating their Indian talent model, has reduced the need for H-1B visa workers, according to Peter Bendor-Samuel, chief executive of research firm Everest Group.

“However, it has not eliminated the need and most Indian firms would like to increase the number of H-1B’s. It is the huge numbers applying for H-1B’s and the lottery to get them which is constraining the numbers,” Bendor-Samuel said.

The US government in recent months has taken measures to tighten the work visa regime.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) earlier this year increased the H-1B registration fee to $215 from $10 and the application fee to $780 from $460. It also added a $600 ‘asylum fee’ while filing H-1B and other petitions, making the process costlier.

The USCIS said in April that the number of eligible registrations had declined by nearly 40% from 758,994 for FY 2024 to 470,342 for FY 2025. It attributed the drop in numbers to its new ‘beneficiary-centric’ approach that it said was meant to reduce fraud. The total number of registrations also dropped from 780,884 for FY24 to 479,953 for FY25.

Phil Fersht, chief analyst at HFS Research, said there has already been such a sizable influx of Indians emigrating to the US with their companies that there is simply less need to sponsor visas to bring in more junior or mid-level Indian staff.

“It hurts the cost-effectiveness of the Indian services model to keep accelerating the immigration of more Indian tech workers,” he said, adding that it is now less appealing for Indian tech workers to move to the US as the cost of living is so much higher, and the opportunities within India to advance IT careers have never been more attractive than it is today.

Some American Big Tech companies, however, saw the reverse trend. For instance, Amazon, which was No.10 in terms of the number of approved H-1B visas for initial employment in FY 2015, was No.1 in FY 2023. It saw a 279% increase over this period from 1,070 approvals in 2015 to 4,052 in 2023. Google, which was not among the top 10 in 2015, ranked fourth in FY 2023.

The numbers highlight Indian companies’ localisation efforts over the last ten years, Shivendra Singh, vice president, global trade and development at IT industry body Nasscom said.

He added that the industry has invested $1.1 billion towards strengthening the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) pipeline in the US, is working with over 130 colleges and universities, and has upskilled 255,000 employees. The industry had created and supported over 600,000 jobs in the US, directly and indirectly, he said.

“Around 70% of the visas still go to Indian nationals, a large proportion being hired by American companies. This is testimony to their skill set, and critical role in making the US economy the No.1 economy in the world,” Singh said.