H-1B and visa sponsorship in 69,733 US job postings

The short answer

say the employer sponsors visas or H-1B (352 postings)

0.5%

say no sponsorship, or require citizenship or a clearance (6,182)

8.9%

say nothing about visas or relocation (60,911)

87.3%

If you need a visa, the useful reading is not "nobody sponsors". It is that the posting almost never tells you, so you cannot filter on it alone. About one posting in eleven closes the door in writing. Roughly one in two hundred opens it in writing. The rest is a question you answer another way: by looking at the employer, not the listing.

A silent posting is not a refusal. It means our scan found no sponsorship wording and no restriction wording. Many employers decide case by case and leave the posting generic. A further 3.3% mention relocation help without saying anything about visas, which we count separately because it often describes a move within the US.

What we counted

OfferMagnet reads job postings straight from the careers pages companies publish through three applicant tracking systems (ATS): Greenhouse, Workday and Ashby. For this study we kept postings located in the United States that our crawlers first saw between 19 September and 17 October 2026. That is a snapshot of postings that were open at some point in that window, not a count of hires or of visas granted.

Each posting gets one of four labels, checked in this order:

1. Restriction: the full text says it cannot or will not sponsor, requires work authorization without sponsorship, or requires US citizenship, US-person status or a security clearance.
2. Sponsors: the text states that the employer offers or supports visa sponsorship, for example "we sponsor visas" or "H-1B sponsorship is available for this role". Mentions inside a refusal ("we do not sponsor H-1B") do not count.
3. Relocation only: the text mentions relocation and nothing from the first two groups.
4. Silent: none of the above.

We left out the three employers with the most postings in the window. Together they are 12.0% of the 79,239 US postings on these systems, and they would otherwise pull every average toward themselves. The conclusions below hold with or without them.

By applicant tracking system

The system a company hires through says a lot about how its postings are written. Ashby, common among startups, has the most sponsorship and relocation language and almost no restrictions. Workday, common in large enterprises, has the most restrictions and next to no sponsorship statements.

What this means for your search: on Ashby a restriction is rare, so a posting that does not mention visas is more likely a generic one. On Workday, which hosts many large employers, restrictions turn up in about one posting in seven, so read the posting to the end.

By role family

We sorted titles into a few broad families with simple keyword rules. They are rough, which is why one bucket is simply "everything else", but the gaps are large enough to survive the roughness.

Explicit sponsorship wording stays under 1% in every family, so the real differences are on the restriction side. Software and other engineering closes the door most often (11.1%), partly because it includes defense and government contractors. Product and design is the least restrictive at 5.2%, and ML, AI and data science sits in the middle at 7.3% with the most relocation language (4.4%).

By state

Location is the messiest field in job data: many postings list several cities or just "Remote". For this table we kept only postings with a single location we could read as a state, which is 20,829 of the 69,733. Read it as a sketch, not a census. The full state-by-state breakdown is in H-1B jobs by state.

California is the only large state where explicit sponsorship wording reaches 1%, and New York has the lowest restriction rate of the big markets (4.0%). At the other end, half of Virginia's postings carry a restriction. That figure is driven by a few employers: two of them account for 81% of Virginia's restriction postings, which is what citizenship and clearance language looks like when a state hosts many government contractors.

The same caution applies to Illinois, Florida and North Carolina. A high restriction share there tells you which employers post a lot in that state, not that the state is closed to visa holders.

By company: the real unit of the search

Postings are a poor unit for this question, because one employer writes dozens of them from the same template. Counting employers instead gives a different picture.

• Of 1,403 employers, only 25 (1.8%) have a posting that states sponsorship, and 258 (18.4%) have at least one restriction.
• Among the 623 employers with 20 or more postings, 16 state sponsorship somewhere and 208 show a restriction somewhere.
• 4 of those 623 show both. The same company says yes in one posting and no in another, usually by role, team or location.
• 403 of the 623 show neither. Large employer, no written position at all.

That third bullet is the practical one. A restriction on one posting does not mean the employer refuses everywhere, and a sponsorship line on one posting does not mean every team will back it. Read the posting you are applying to, not the company's reputation. The employers that do say it plainly are listed in companies that sponsor H-1B.

Small posters are the most likely to state sponsorship (1.0%) and the least likely to restrict (5.9%), though with 1,730 postings across 645 employers that group is also the noisiest.

Remote roles are not more open

Of the 69,733 postings, 10,520 name remote in the location or title. Their split is 0.1% sponsorship and 8.8% restriction, almost identical to everything else. Remote does not change how employers write about visas, and many remote postings add that you must be located in, and authorized to work in, a specific country. The full picture is in remote jobs with visa sponsorship.

What to do with this

1. Treat a restriction as a hard stop for that posting only. It is written by someone who has thought about it. Move on, and check the same employer's other roles.
2. Treat a sponsorship line as a reason to apply early, not a guarantee. Ask in the first recruiter call, in plain words, which visa types the team has supported.
3. Treat silence as a question, not an answer. Look at the employer: do they hire internationally, have offices outside the US, appear in public sponsorship records?
4. Weight your time toward Ashby-hosted startups and AI labs, where the written signals lean most welcoming in this data.
5. Check the state before you read anything into a restriction rate. A few contractors can make a state look closed.