How Many H1B Visa Holders Are in the USA?

The most recent official estimate from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services put the H-1B visa holder population in the United States at roughly 583,420 as of September 30, 2019.¹ That is the only formal population figure the agency has ever published. The true count today is almost certainly higher, likely somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000, but no federal agency maintains a live tally.

Why There Is No Current Official Number

The 85,000 annual cap on new H-1B visas gets most of the attention, but the cap is not a headcount. It only limits fresh entrants each year. The total number of people in H-1B status at any given moment is a moving target: new workers arrive, others leave, some transition to green cards, and some let their status lapse. USCIS captured a single snapshot of that population in a 2020 report and has not repeated the exercise since.¹

Several forces have almost certainly pushed the population above that 2019 baseline. H-1B status runs up to six years initially, with extensions available beyond that for workers whose green card applications are pending.² Those extensions keep tens of thousands of people on H-1B rolls long after they would otherwise have moved on. Annual approvals have also grown since 2019, feeding more workers into the pool each year than the older estimate reflects.

What Annual Approvals Show

The clearest ongoing signal comes from petition approval data. In fiscal year 2024, USCIS approved 399,395 H-1B petitions. Of those, 141,205 were for initial employment and 258,190 were for continuing employment, meaning extensions, transfers, or amendments for workers already in H-1B status.³ In fiscal year 2025, total approvals came to 328,185.⁴

Read those figures carefully. The 399,395 approvals in FY 2024 do not represent 400,000 new workers arriving in the country. Most were workers already on H-1B status getting extended or moving between employers. A single person can generate multiple approvals over the course of their time in the country. That is why approval counts cannot be added up year after year to produce a running total.

What the approval data does tell you is that hundreds of thousands of H-1B workers are actively renewing, transferring, or extending each year, which is only possible because they are already here. Denial rates stay low: in FY 2025, 2.8% of initial-employment petitions and 1.9% of continuing-employment petitions were denied.

Why the Population Keeps Growing

The single biggest reason the H-1B population has almost certainly grown well past the 2019 figure is the green card backlog. H-1B is a temporary visa, but for many holders it functions as a long-term status because the permanent residency line is so long.

Employment-based green cards are subject to per-country caps that limit any single country to roughly 7% of the annual total. That creates a severe bottleneck for the countries that send the most H-1B workers. Estimated waits for Indian-born workers in the EB-2 category, the most common path for H-1B holders with advanced degrees, run 15 to 18 years. EB-3 waits for the same group run 10 to 15 years. Chinese-born workers face shorter but still substantial delays. The State Department’s monthly visa bulletin shows priority dates for India lagging more than a decade behind the present.⁵

Workers caught in that backlog keep extending their H-1B status. USCIS permits one-year or three-year extensions past the normal six-year limit for workers with pending or approved green card petitions.² The result is a population that accumulates: people who a generation ago would have moved to green cards within a few years now stay on H-1B for a decade or longer.

Who the H-1B Population Is

The workforce is heavily concentrated by country of birth. In fiscal year 2024, workers born in India accounted for 71% of approved H-1B petitions, and workers born in China accounted for 11.7%.³ Together those two countries account for more than four in five approvals. No other country individually reaches 2%. The Philippines, Canada, and South Korea round out the top five at much smaller volumes.

That concentration is what makes the green card backlog so consequential. When 71% of new H-1B approvals go to workers from a country that can access only about 7% of employment-based green cards, the math forces most of those workers to stay in H-1B status year after year.

Occupationally, the program is dominated by computer-related work, which represented 64% of approved H-1B workers in FY 2024. The remainder spreads across architecture and engineering (10.2%), education (6.0%), administrative specialties (5.4%), medicine and health (4.2%), math and physical sciences (2.8%), and life sciences (1.9%). The largest single sector is professional, scientific, and technical services at 48% of approvals. Median compensation across all approved petitions was $120,000, with newly arriving workers earning a median of $97,000 and continuing workers a median of $132,000.

Where in the Country They Live

H-1B workers cluster tightly around a handful of metropolitan employment centers. California leads all states in approvals, followed by Texas, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia. The pattern follows the geography of the U.S. technology and consulting industries: the San Francisco Bay Area, greater Seattle, the New York and New Jersey corridor, and the Washington, D.C. suburbs. The largest H-1B employers each year include Amazon, Tata Consultancy Services, Google, and Microsoft, filing thousands of petitions apiece for both new hires and extensions.

Outside those hubs, H-1B workers are a small share of the professional workforce. That geographic imbalance is one reason public estimates of the program’s size vary so widely: in a few metros the presence is highly visible, and in most of the country it is not.

The Bottom Line on the Count

If you need a defensible number, 583,420 is the only one the federal government has ever officially published, and it is dated September 2019.¹ Given six additional years of approvals above the 85,000 cap, sustained extensions for backlogged workers, and low denial rates, the current population is widely estimated in the 600,000 to 800,000 range. A precise figure would require USCIS to publish a new snapshot, and so far it has not.

1
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. H-1B Authorized to Work Population Estimate
2
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. FAQs for Individuals in H-1B Nonimmigrant Status
3
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Report to Congress
4
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Fiscal Year 2025 H-1B Petitions
5
U.S. Department of State. The Visa Bulletin