How employers are classified

The four grounds

The H-1B category is limited to 65,000 new visas a year plus 20,000 for holders of a US master's degree or higher. Section 214(g)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, implemented at 8 CFR 214.2(h)(8)(iii)(F), takes certain petitions out of that count. The register tags each employer with the ground that appears to apply.

The regulation also exempts a beneficiary who is employed at a qualifying institution by a non-qualifying employer when the majority of the work furthers the institution's essential purpose, and allows concurrent cap-subject employment alongside a cap-exempt job. The register does not model those situations; it lists employers, not jobs.

What "Verified" and "IPEDS match" mean

Verified An editor has checked the employer by hand: the legal entity behind the USCIS record was identified, its public or nonprofit status and full Employer Identification Number were confirmed against IRS records or state filings, and a piece of affiliation or accreditation evidence was found and linked. For ground 2 employers the affiliation document itself (bylaws, affiliation agreement, annual report naming the parent) is what is sought.

IPEDS match The employer passed all automatic tests but nobody has reviewed it individually. The tests are: its name in the USCIS Employer Data Hub matches an institution in the IPEDS directory after normalisation with a similarity score of 85 or better, the last four digits of the EIN agree where IPEDS has them, and the institution is public or private nonprofit. These entries are reliable as a class but any single one could be wrong, which is why the badge is different.

Rows in the underlying register that did not pass both tests, or that an editor rejected, are not published at all. An employer missing from the site is therefore not a statement that it is cap-subject.

Data sources

USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, FY2026

Named petitioning employers with counts of approved and denied petitions by type (initial employment, continuing employment). This is where the approval figures and the list of candidate employers come from.

NCES IPEDS, HD2025 institutional characteristics

The Department of Education's directory of Title IV institutions: legal name, control (public, private nonprofit, private for-profit), location and accreditation status. Used to test ground 1.

DOL OFLC LCA disclosure data, FY2025

Certified Labor Condition Applications, grouped here by employer and Standard Occupational Classification. Supplies the "What they hire on H-1B" tables and median offered wages.

IRS Form 990 filings via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer

Confirms 501(c)(3) status, the full EIN and, for affiliated entities, the parent relationship disclosed in Schedule R.

Accreditor directories

Regional and national accreditors' institution lists, used when IPEDS is ambiguous or out of date.

Employer career sites and ATS feeds

Workday, Oracle HCM, PeopleAdmin, PageUp, SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse, Lever and USAJOBS public endpoints, read with an identifying user agent at a polite rate. Only title, location, department, posting date and the link to the original posting are kept.

All of the government data is free at the source. CapExempt adds the joining, the review and the daily collection of openings, nothing else.

Update cadence

• Register (employers, grounds, badges, evidence): reviewed weekly. Newly verified employers and corrections are published in that pass.
• Openings: collected every day at 06:00 UTC from each connected employer's career site. Postings that appeared since the previous run are marked new. A feed that fails one night is retried the next; the status of every feed is published in status.json.
• Hiring data: the LCA layer follows the Department of Labor's quarterly disclosure releases and is relabelled when a new fiscal year is complete.
• Approval counts: the USCIS Employer Data Hub is refreshed on USCIS's schedule; the fiscal year shown is the latest complete file.

Limits

• Ground 1 is close to complete. Grounds 2, 3 and 4 are still being verified employer by employer, so hospitals, research institutes and government laboratories are under-represented.
• Only 34 of 1,028 employers have a connected openings feed. "Feed not yet connected" is a statement about this site, not about the employer.
• A past filing record says that an employer has sponsored H-1B workers; it does not say that it will sponsor a given job or a given person.
• LCA counts are filings, not hires. An employer can certify an LCA and never file the petition.
• The "related or affiliated nonprofit" test is fact-specific and USCIS decisions on it have not been uniform. A ground 2 entry, even when Verified, deserves a conversation with the employer's immigration counsel.
• Legal names in the USCIS file are sometimes abbreviated or truncated; the register shows the name as filed next to the display name so you can check.

Request a correction

Employers, their staff and readers can report an error or ask for an entry or feed to be removed. Write to [email protected] with the employer's name and what should change; include a link to a public document where possible. Removal requests from an employer about its own feed are honoured without question.

Not legal advice