Indian IT Firms See Significant Decline in FY26 H-1B Work Visa Approvals

Indian IT Giants See Sharpest Single-Year Decline in H-1B Visa Approvals

India's six largest IT services companies, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Tech Mahindra and Cognizant, collectively held just 11,041 H-1B visa approvals as of March 31, 2026, down sharply from 18,469 a year earlier, a decline of nearly 40%, according to a Mint analysis of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data.

The numbers mark the steepest single-year fall in recent memory for Indian IT's US visa footprint, and suggest that the industry's long-running dependence on the H-1B route to staff American client sites has entered structural retreat. TCS, India's largest IT exporter, bore the sharpest decline, with H-1B approvals falling to 2,885 in FY26 from 6,136 a year earlier, a drop of 53%, according to USCIS data.

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Wipro saw its approvals fall by 62% year-on-year, while Tech Mahindra recorded a 59% decline, per Mint's analysis of USCIS data. HCL Technologies also reported a year-on-year decline, though specific FY26 figures were not separately disclosed. The one outlier is Infosys, which was the only Indian IT major to see its H-1B approvals rise in FY26, ending the year with 3,195 approvals, the highest among the six companies and an improvement over FY25.

The collapse in approvals does not have a single cause. Three significant policy actions compounded each other inside a span of twelve months. In September 2025, US President Donald Trump signed a proclamation imposing a $100,000 annual fee on new H-1B petitions, a measure that would, for a mid-sized IT firm deploying 500 visa workers, translate to a $50 million annual cost line. The fee was framed as targeting 'systemic abuse' of the programme, though it applied broadly to all employers.

In February 2026, the Department of Homeland Security shifted H-1B selection from a random lottery to a wage-weighted system for the FY2027 cap season, giving the strongest preference to Level IV wage beneficiaries. Indian IT outsourcing firms, which have historically sponsored workers at Level I and II wage classifications for client-site staffing roles, are structurally disadvantaged under this framework.

The US Department of Labor's own data, meanwhile, shows H-1B labour condition applications fell 23.1% in FY2026's first quarter (October–December 2025) compared to the same period a year earlier, confirming the broad contraction is not limited to Indian IT alone.

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The collapse is concentrated in new hiring, not existing deployments. Extension approval rates for TCS, Infosys and Wipro remained above 93%, meaning the existing H-1B workforce in the US faces limited immediate disruption. However, TCS's extension rejection rate did rise from 4% to 7% in FY2025, compared to a US-wide average of 1.9%, a signal worth monitoring.

The FY26 data sits within a longer arc of decline. The top seven Indian IT companies together received just 4,573 new H-1B approvals for initial employment in US fiscal year 2025, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, a 70% drop from 2015 levels, and 37% lower than FY2024, per NFAP's analysis of USCIS records.

Indian IT firms have been accelerating nearshore delivery, building out capacity in Canada, Mexico and Eastern Europe, to reduce their structural dependence on US visa pipelines. The FY26 numbers are likely to accelerate that shift further, particularly as the wage-weighted lottery makes entry-level outsourcing staffing through H-1B increasingly uncompetitive against American university graduates being hired directly by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google, all of whom now rank above Indian IT firms in new H-1B employer tables.