The H-1B visa has long been the default pathway for Indian tech talent aiming for a US-based role, and 2026 has made that pathway considerably more complicated — and more expensive — than it was even a year ago. If you're weighing a US opportunity against a domestic one right now, the details of where things stand actually matter to the decision.
A proposed $100,000 fee on certain new H-1B petitions, introduced in 2025, has been tied up in litigation for much of this year — reporting indicates a court struck it down and an appeals court later declined to reinstate it while the case continues. That hasn't ended the push: separately, the Department of Homeland Security has initiated formal rulemaking aimed at setting a new H-1B fee around $103,000. On top of that, an August 2026 measure extended existing $4,000 H-1B and $4,500 L-1 fees to certain visa extension petitions starting September 9 — a change reported by Business Standard to potentially affect Indian IT services and consulting firms more broadly than the headline fee does, since it touches renewals rather than just new petitions.
Whatever the final legal outcome, Indian IT majors have already been pulling back. Reporting indicates Wipro's H-1B approvals fell roughly 62% year-on-year in FY2026, while TCS approvals reportedly dropped around 53%, down to roughly 2,885 for the year. Those aren't projections — they reflect decisions companies have already made about how many visas to pursue.
Nasscom has argued the overall business impact is limited, pointing out that Indian and India-centric firms operating in the US have been steadily reducing their H-1B dependency in favor of local hiring for several years already. Equirus has estimated that if the fee applies only to new petitions, the hit to large-cap IT operating margins would be a modest 7 to 14 basis points, with a larger relative impact on mid-cap firms, and an expectation that companies will increasingly route around the cost through local hiring, subcontracting, or offshoring work back to India. Indian-born workers have historically accounted for roughly 70% of approved H-1B petitions, which is why policy shifts here land disproportionately on Indian applicants compared to other nationalities.
If a US role via H-1B sponsorship was part of your plan, the practical shift is this: fewer visas are being filed per company than a couple of years ago, approval numbers at the firms that used to sponsor heavily are down sharply, and the fee environment remains unsettled enough that employers are hedging rather than committing. That doesn't mean sponsorship has disappeared — it means it's becoming more selective and concentrated in niche, high-value roles rather than used as a routine staffing tool. It also strengthens the case for building your profile around India's own fast-growing segments — GCCs, AI/ML-linked roles, and specialised domain work — where demand has been expanding independent of what happens to US visa policy.