Top 50 SOC Codes that Small Sponsors Filed

In many forums or internet communities, most discussions about the H-1B system focus on a small set of companies:

• Big Tech
• Large consulting firms
• Major global corporations

But a deep look at FY2025 petition data reveals something surprising: the vast majority of H-1B employers are actually very small sponsors.

Check out those numbers:

• Total employers analyzed: 65,676
• Employers filing fewer than 10 H-1Bs: 56,300
• Share of all employers: 85.72%

That means more than 8 out of 10 companies participating in the H-1B system only file a handful of petitions. These smaller sponsors collectively filed 139,328 H-1B cases in FY2025, with an average of just 2.47 petitions per employer.

In other words:

Most employers in the system aren’t running large visa programs at all.
They’re filing one or two petitions when they need a specific skill.

These Employers Exist Everywhere

Another common assumption is that H-1B opportunities are concentrated in a few tech hubs.

While places like California and New York still lead in volume, smaller sponsors are distributed across the entire country.

Top states with the most small sponsors include:

• California — 10,671 employers
• New York — 6,932
• Texas — 5,934
• Florida — 3,084
• New Jersey — 2,717
• Illinois — 2,596
• Massachusetts — 2,467

But what’s more interesting is the long tail. These small sponsors appear in every single state, including places like Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, and South Dakota. This suggests that H-1B hiring is not limited to traditional tech ecosystems. It’s happening in regional industries across the country.

What Jobs Are Small Sponsors Filing For?

Another misconception is that H-1B sponsorship mostly revolves around software development.

While software is indeed the largest category, the data shows a much broader picture.

Top occupations filed by small sponsors include:

• Software Developers — 25,712 cases
• Data Scientists — 4,255
• Market Research Analysts — 3,998
• Mechanical Engineers — 3,779
• Accountants & Auditors — 3,757
• Financial & Investment Analysts — 3,698
• Civil Engineers — 3,480
• Business Intelligence Analysts — 2,659

Beyond these, the dataset includes over 700 different SOC occupations.

Examples range from:

• architects
• chemists
• dentists
• teachers
• physical therapists
• database administrators
• sales engineers
• statisticians

This diversity shows that small sponsors operate across engineering, finance, healthcare, research, education, marketing, and design.

Examples of companies likely represented in this category include:

• regional engineering firms
• hospitals and medical practices
• local banks and financial institutions
• manufacturing companies
• architecture firms
• mid-size SaaS companies
• research organizations
• marketing agencies

Many of these companies simply file one or two petitions when they cannot find the specialized skill locally.

However – the Salary Data Is Surprisingly Strong!

One particularly interesting finding from the dataset is compensation.

Across the cases filed by these small sponsors, the reported statistics show:

• Average minimum salary: $326,618
• Average median salary: $435,624
• Average maximum salary: $931,296

For context, the overall median salary across all H-1B cases is about $98,800.

While these figures reflect aggregated statistics and may include high-end outliers or multi-case employer averages, they indicate that small sponsors are often filing for highly skilled, high-value roles.

This aligns with the types of occupations seen in the data:

• software engineers
• data scientists
• financial analysts
• specialized engineers
• medical professionals

These are positions where companies may struggle to fill roles locally, even outside major tech hubs.

What Does This Reveals?

Looking at the system as a whole, the employer landscape appears very different from the popular narrative. Instead of being dominated only by a few large employers, the H-1B ecosystem actually looks more like this:

A small number of very large filers combined with tens of thousands of small employers filing just one or two petitions.

This means the program is not only used by large tech companies — it is also used by thousands of smaller businesses across many industries and regions.

These companies may not appear on the usual “top H-1B sponsors” lists, but collectively they represent a large portion of the opportunity landscape.