PlainVisa

H-1B Occupations With the Broadest Employer Demand

Which H-1B occupations are sponsored by the most distinct employers, a measure of how widely a skill is in demand across the economy rather than concentrated in a few large filers.

Research period:

Reviewed by PlainVisa Editorial on 2026-06-02

Research question

Across the 1,200-plus SOC occupations in PlainVisa's database, which are sponsored by the largest number of distinct employers, and how does breadth of demand differ from raw petition volume?

Why breadth, not just volume

Most H-1B coverage fixates on raw petition counts, and those counts are dominated by a handful of very large technology and consulting employers. But petition volume conflates two different things: how many companies want a skill, and how aggressively the biggest filers stockpile it. An occupation can rank high on volume because three giant outsourcing firms each file thousands of applications for it, even though relatively few other employers sponsor that role. Employer breadth, the number of distinct companies that sponsor a given occupation, isolates the first signal. A role sponsored by tens of thousands of distinct employers reflects genuinely widespread, economy-wide demand; a role with enormous volume but a narrow employer base reflects concentration in a few large staffing operations.

For a worker weighing which skills carry durable labor-market demand, breadth is arguably the more useful measure. Concentrated demand can evaporate when one large filer changes strategy; broad demand across thousands of employers is structurally more resilient. Pairing the two measures, breadth and petitions-per-employer, gives a fuller picture of how an occupation sits in the H-1B program than either number alone.

Methodology

We query the PlainVisa occupations table at server render time, ranking by the total_employers column, the count of distinct employers that filed at least one H-1B LCA for each SOC occupation. The population aggregate runs against the same filtered set, so the totals quoted in the prose match the leaderboard exactly. The secondary chart derives a petitions-per-employer ratio for the same top roles by dividing total petitions by distinct employers, a simple concentration gauge. Every figure is computed live from a SELECT at request time; none is hardcoded, and the values refresh whenever the DOL LCA dataset is reingested.

Occupations with a null or zero distinct-employer count are excluded rather than shown as zero, because a missing aggregate is not the same as an occupation with no sponsors. The SOC taxonomy is the Bureau of Labor Statistics Standard Occupational Classification system, which groups jobs by the work performed; a single SOC code can therefore span a range of job titles and seniority levels, which is why we report breadth at the SOC level and link each row to its detail page for the underlying title mix.

See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.

Occupations sponsored by the most distinct employers

Distinct H-1B sponsoring employers per SOC occupation, FY2023–FY2026

employers

What this shows Across 1,207 occupations, the broadest-demand roles draw sponsorship from a strikingly large and diverse base of employers, not just the largest filers.

Source U.S. Department of Labor OFLC As of FY2023–FY2026

The ranked top 10

Every row is a live SELECT against the occupations table, ranked by distinct sponsoring employers.

# Occupation (SOC) Distinct employers Total petitions Petitions / employer
1 Software Developers 29,594 594,191 20
2 Data Scientists 9,869 48,744 5
3 Information Technology Project Managers 8,313 64,681 8
4 Business Intelligence Analysts 8,074 36,316 4
5 Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers 7,830 58,883 8
6 Computer Systems Engineers/Architects 7,725 92,828 12
7 Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists 7,288 16,369 2
8 Computer Systems Analysts 7,275 64,155 9
9 Computer and Information Systems Managers 6,446 43,046 7
10 Mechanical Engineers 6,372 31,143 5

Source: U.S. Department of Labor — DOL LCA Disclosure Data. Distinct-employer counts per occupation queried live from the PlainVisa snapshot at request time. U.S. Department of Labor — DOL LCA Disclosure Data. Distinct-employer counts per occupation queried live from the PlainVisa snapshot at request time.

Findings

Breadth versus concentration

The petitions-per-employer chart below tells the second half of the story. Roles with both high breadth and a low petitions-per-employer ratio represent the healthiest, most diffuse demand: many companies each sponsoring a few workers. Roles where the ratio spikes are where a small number of large filers dominate, so even a high total can rest on a narrow base. Reading the two charts together separates skills that are broadly wanted across the economy from skills that are heavily stockpiled by a few large sponsors.

What broad demand signals for workers

An occupation sponsored by many thousands of distinct employers offers a worker more exit options and more bargaining leverage: if one sponsor's plans change, comparable roles exist across a wide field of companies. That resilience is invisible in a raw petition-count ranking, which is why surfacing the distinct-employer count is genuinely additive information rather than a restatement of the volume leaderboard.

Software roles dominate both measures, but not identically

Computing and engineering occupations tend to lead both the volume and the breadth rankings, because specialty-occupation software work is the core use case the H-1B program was built around. Yet the two lists are not interchangeable. Some roles climb the breadth ranking because they appear in nearly every industry, finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and government contracting all sponsor software developers and data analysts, so the employer base is enormous even where any single firm files modestly. Other roles rank high on volume but lower on breadth because their demand is concentrated in a small number of very large outsourcing and product companies. Treating these as two separate questions, how many companies want a skill versus how aggressively the largest filers stockpile it, is the analytical payoff of measuring breadth at all.

Using breadth alongside wage and geography

Breadth is most useful when combined with the other dimensions PlainVisa tracks. A role with wide employer demand and high prevailing wages signals durable, well-compensated opportunity; a broad-but-low-wage role signals widely available but less lucrative work. Pairing the distinct-employer count on this page with the wage and state breakdowns on each occupation's detail page gives a worker the fullest available read on where a skill sits in the H-1B labor market.

Petitions per employer for the broadest-demand roles

Lower means more diffuse demand; higher means a few large filers dominate

petitions / employer
Source U.S. Department of Labor OFLC As of FY2023–FY2026

What this analysis cannot tell us

Distinct-employer counts are at the SOC-occupation level, so a single code can blend several distinct job titles and seniority levels. Breadth counts any employer that filed at least one LCA for the role, regardless of how many; it measures participation, not commitment. Petitions-per-employer is a coarse concentration proxy that does not capture the distribution within an occupation (a few giant filers can pull the ratio up even when most employers file once). LCA filings reflect intent to sponsor, not approved visas or filled positions. Comparisons across occupations should account for differing total labor-market sizes, a niche specialty with few total U.S. workers will naturally show fewer sponsoring employers than a large general field.

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