Three of the biggest names in Indian IT services have all but stepped back from the United States H-1B visa lottery. A Congressional Research Service (CRS) report titled H-1B Executive Actions in 2026, published on October 14, records steep falls in registrations for fiscal year 2027 at Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Cognizant, according to reporting by The American Bazaar and VisaVerge.
Source: The American Bazaar
Infosys submitted 759 registrations for FY2027, down from 8,886 in FY2026 — a fall of 91%. TCS registered 284 candidates, down from 5,955 — a fall of 95%. Cognizant recorded no registrations at all in the FY2027 figures, down from 3,752 — a 100% decline. Combined registrations by the largest IT staffing and outsourcing firms fell by roughly 92%, from 24,946 to 2,055, and eligible registrations across the whole FY2027 lottery fell 38.5% from the previous year, according to USCIS data cited by VisaVerge.
Source: VisaVerge
A wage-weighted lottery replaced the random draw
In February 2026 the Department of Homeland Security replaced random selection with a weighted system that favours higher-skilled and higher-paid workers, and it first applied to the lottery for jobs beginning in October 2026. USCIS said the rule prioritizes allocating visas to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants to better protect the wages, working conditions and job opportunities of American workers. The regular annual cap remains 65,000, with another 20,000 places for workers holding a master's degree or higher from a US university.
Cost is the other pressure. A proclamation issued on September 19, 2025 introduced a $100,000 payment for certain new H-1B petitions involving workers entering the United States from abroad; the CRS report described that charge as temporarily blocked amid ongoing litigation. Separately, in August 2026 DHS proposed — but has not finalised — a $103,265 fee for each cap-subject H-1B petition, and the Labor Department proposed raising prevailing-wage benchmarks at all four skill levels, a change it estimated could add about $1.46 billion in employer costs in its first year.
What the numbers do not mean
The CRS report documents the reduction but does not establish that any single policy caused the companies' decisions. Registrations are also not the same as approved visas, actual hires or a company's total H-1B workforce: a selected registration only allows an employer to file a petition, and approval is not guaranteed. Existing H-1B visa holders do not automatically lose their status because their employer submitted fewer new registrations.
For Indian and Punjabi technology professionals hoping to work in the United States, the reporting suggests sponsorship is becoming more dependent on salary level, job requirements and an employer's willingness to bear higher costs, and that the big IT firms may lean more on hiring people already in the US, extending existing visas or delivering more work from India. Those are implications drawn by the outlets reporting the figures, not outcomes the CRS data itself proves.