Visa sponsors in California

USCIS publishes H-1B petitions approved and refused per employer for a single fiscal year. It is a record of decisions already made, not a list of jobs open now, and it covers the H-1B route only.

An employer that files from more than one state appears under each of them, so state figures do not add up to the national total. Every number on this page is read straight from USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, and none of it is an estimate.

USCIS decided 38,495 H-1B petitions for employers filing from California in fiscal year 2023, and approved 97.6% of them. The rate across the whole register is 97.1%, so employers here clear the bar more often than the national picture. A refusal is a decision on a filing an employer already committed to, so a high rate says little about your own odds of being hired.

These are the employers with the most H-1B approvals recorded against a California address, named exactly as the register spells them. Between them they account for 31.9% of everything the register attributes to California, which is how concentrated sponsorship here really is.

Employers report their industry to USCIS, so the register shows which parts of the California economy actually file petitions rather than which ones are hiring loudest.

48 states and territories clear the 25-employer floor we report on individually, and sponsorship is nowhere near evenly spread between them. California carries 196.9 times as many sponsoring employers as Montana, so where you look changes the odds before your CV does.

A place on the register means an employer has sponsored before, which is the single hardest thing to verify from a job advert. It does not mean they are hiring today, so treat the list as a shortlist to research rather than a set of open roles.

Our job board for the United States only carries listings from employers on this register. The full United States breakdown ranks every region, and our analysis of all three registers sets out how the UK, US and Canadian sources differ and why their numbers should never be added together.