"Which companies sponsor the most H-1Bs" is a reasonable first question and a bad last one. The employers at the top of the list are not necessarily the ones where you have the best chance, and the shape of the list explains why.
Here are the twelve largest sponsors by approved petitions in FY2023, from public federal filing records. Every bar links to that employer's record.
Five of the top twelve are IT services firms
Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCLTech and Capgemini together account for more approvals than Amazon, Google and Microsoft combined.
These are IT consulting and outsourcing companies. Their business model is placing engineers with client companies, which means the H-1B is central to how they operate, and they file at a volume product companies do not approach.
That is worth understanding rather than judging, because the two paths genuinely differ:
- Where you work. At a services firm you are typically placed at a client site, and the client can change. At a product company you work on that company's own product.
- What you work on. Services work follows client contracts — maintenance and migration as often as greenfield. That can mean broad exposure early, or narrow exposure, depending on the placement.
- How hiring works. Services firms recruit in volume with structured intake. Product companies run smaller, more selective processes.
Neither is the right answer for everyone. A services firm that files thousands of petitions a year is a genuine route into the US labour market, and plenty of careers start there. It is simply a different job from the one most people picture when they see a familiar name at the top of a sponsorship list.
What the numbers do not tell you
Volume is not odds. Amazon's 6,116 approvals are spread across tens of thousands of employees and every function in the company. Your chance of an offer depends on the team, the role and the year's headcount, none of which this number describes.
These counts are approvals, not new hires. An H-1B petition can be an extension or a transfer for someone the employer already has. A large number reflects the size of an existing visa-holding workforce as much as new hiring.
A big sponsor can still decline to sponsor your role. Sponsorship is decided per requisition. Plenty of postings at every company on this list are marked as not eligible.
The more useful question
Rather than "who sponsors the most", ask "who sponsors in my field, near where I want to live". A firm filing 40 petitions a year in civil engineering is a stronger lead for a structural engineer than Amazon's 6,116, because the 40 are for roles you can actually do.
That is what the field lists are for: civil engineering, VLSI and semiconductors, and healthcare. Each employer page also shows where that employer ranks inside its own industry, which is a far better gauge than its rank overall.
Method
Figures are approved H-1B petitions recorded in public federal filing data for FY2023, aggregated where a company files under several legal entity names. The full set covers 5,104 employers with at least one approval; the employer directory has all of them, filterable by state and volume.