More Than 6 in 10 H-1B Recipients Work in Tech Jobs

Just as the dust is starting to settle on the flurry of new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, a new proclamation from President Donald Trump has sent shockwaves through corporate America. On Friday, the president signed a proclamation taking aim at the H-1B visa program for high-skilled foreign workers, imposing a $100,000 fee on any new H-1B visa petition submitted from September onwards to curb what the White House describes as “systemic abuse of the program,” which has allegedly been “deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”

The new regulation, which is essentially a tariff on specialized foreign talent, will have a significant effect on the tech sector in particular, which relies heavily on the H-1B program to bring in IT talent, most often from India and China. According to the latest data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the vast majority of H-1B recipients in fiscal year 2024 worked in computer-related occupations. With 255,000 approved applications, tech workers accounted for almost 65 percent of all beneficiaries of the program last year, with jobs in architecture, engineering and surveying a distant second with 40,000 successful applications. Interestingly, 70 percent of the approved applications for computer-related workers were petitions for continuing employment – the highest share among all occupational groups.

According to the latest Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers report, the median annual compensation for successful H-1B applicants was $120,000 for all occupations last year and $125,000 for computer-related occupations. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median pay for computer and mathematical occupations across the economy was $105,000 in 2024, illustrating that H-1B workers don’t exactly qualify as cheap foreign labor, even though it’s hard to make position-based comparisons.