H-1B demand against the 85,000 cap: 567,907 certified applications in one year
- Employers received certification on 567,907 H-1B applications in fiscal 2025, 6.7 times the 85,000 new visas the law allows each year. The gap is structural: applications are filed before the lottery, cover extensions and transfers as well as new hires, and include cap-exempt employers.
- Demand has never returned to its 2019 peak of 624,690, but it has recovered most of the pandemic dip: 503,248 in fiscal 2021, 567,907 in 2025.
- The cap itself has not moved since fiscal 2006, when Congress set 65,000 visas plus 20,000 for US advanced-degree holders. Certified demand has roughly doubled from its 2010 trough over the same period.
What's happening
The chart runs certified H-1B applications against the one number most people know about the program: the 85,000-visa annual cap, drawn as the dashed rule near the bottom. The line has never been within sight of it. The lowest year in the series, 290,493 applications in recession-year 2010, was still 3.4 times the cap.
From that trough the program climbed through the decade, with a single dip in 2017, to its peak of 624,690 in fiscal 2019. It gave back a fifth of that through the pandemic and has ground back to 567,907 in fiscal 2025, up 33,870 on the year.
The peak years are the striking part. Fiscal 2017 through 2019, the period of the sharpest petition scrutiny in the program's history, were also three of its four highest-volume years: 582,501, then 611,155, then 624,690 certified applications. Enforcement changed who filed, shifting volume away from the outsourcing firms, more than it changed how much was filed.
Why demand can run seven times the quota
The two numbers count different things, which is exactly why the pair is worth charting. A Labor Condition Application is the wage-and-worksite filing an employer certifies with the Department of Labor before petitioning for a worker, and one application can cover several positions. Extensions, transfers, and amended petitions for workers already in the country each require a fresh one. Universities, nonprofit research institutes, and government research organizations are exempt from the cap entirely. And cap-subject filings are made in hope: certification comes before the lottery, so most of these applications never become a new visa.
Read that way, the line is the cleanest public measure of total employer demand for H-1B labor at offered wages, and the flat dashed rule is the fixed pipe it all drains through. Who files the demand has changed more than how much: the turnover at the top is charted in the top-25 employer race.
What to watch
Fiscal 2026 is the first full year filed under the $100,000 petition fee announced in September 2025, the sharpest price change in the program's history. The years to compare against are 2009 and 2010, when demand fell 28 percent in two years and took until 2013 to recover; whether a fee does what a recession did is the open question the next data release starts to answer. The cap line, meanwhile, only moves if Congress moves it: no adjustment has passed since the fiscal 2006 settings took effect.
Common questions
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