Where you are willing to live narrows a job search more than almost anything else, and for an international graduate it narrows it in a way that is easy to get wrong. The states with the most people are not the states with the most sponsors, and a few places punch far above their size.
Here is where the 5,104 employers with an H-1B filing record actually are. Each label opens that state's list.
What stands out
New Jersey is third, ahead of New York, Illinois and Massachusetts. It is the eleventh most populous state. The reason is concentration: New Jersey is a hub for IT consulting and pharmaceutical employers, both of which sponsor heavily, and it sits inside the New York metro job market without New York's costs.
Michigan is close behind Massachusetts, which surprises people who assume sponsorship follows tech hubs. Automotive engineering and the University of Michigan's medical system are both substantial sponsors, and neither shows up in the usual advice.
Texas is much closer to California than most people expect — 822 employers against 889. Dallas, Austin and Houston between them cover tech, engineering consulting, energy and healthcare.
Conversely, several states people assume are strong are not: sponsorship follows industry concentration, not population and not cost of living.
Why this list is not the same as "where the jobs are"
Two cautions before you plan a move around it.
A filing address is not a work location. Employers file from the office that holds the paperwork, which for a national company is often a single headquarters. A consulting firm with a New Jersey address may place people anywhere in the country. So this map is better read as "where sponsoring employers are based" than "where the work is".
Employer count is not job count. A state with 260 sponsoring employers may have fewer openings than a state with 180, depending on the size of those employers and what they are hiring for this year.
How to actually use it
- Use it to widen, not narrow. If you have been searching only California and New York, this list says Texas, New Jersey and Michigan deserve a look.
- Cross it with your field. A state's total is irrelevant if none of it is your discipline. The civil engineering, VLSI and healthcare lists filter by state.
- Check cap-exempt options in university towns. Ann Arbor, Baltimore, Rochester and similar cities host non-profit hospitals and universities that can file without waiting for the lottery.
- Remember STEM OPT requires an E-Verify employer. That is a separate filter from sponsorship history and worth confirming early.
Method
Counts are employers with at least one approved H-1B petition in public federal filing records for FY2023, attributed to each state they filed from; an employer filing from several states appears in each. The full set is in the employer directory, filterable by state and volume.