H-1B workers are quietly draining out of Texas, and three pressures hitting at once explain why: a wave of tech layoffs that has cut close to 103,000 industry jobs nationwide so far in 2026, a new $100,000 federal fee that reprices every fresh H-1B hire, and a January 2026 order from Governor Greg Abbott that froze new H-1B sponsorship at every Texas public university and state agency. Each force on its own would sting. Together they are pulling a slice of high-earning foreign talent out of Austin, Dallas, and Houston at the exact moment the state’s housing market is cooling.

Texas holds the second-largest H-1B population in the country after California, with more than 40,000 workers currently authorized in the state and roughly 389,988 certified labor-condition petitions on file from about 35,017 employers. These are not marginal earners. The typical H-1B holder in Texas pulls a tech or research salary well into six figures, rents Class A apartments, and buys starter and move-up homes. When even a fraction of that group leaves or never arrives, the demand it represented disappears from the top of the market first.

The timing is what makes this matter. Austin home values have fallen between roughly 3% and 7% year over year depending on the gauge, and sit close to 20% below their May 2022 peak. Inventory across the Austin metro has climbed to about 6.5 months of supply, the highest in more than a decade. A market already absorbing higher mortgage rates and a construction surge is now losing one of the buyer segments that powered its 2020 to 2022 boom.

This article breaks down the three forces pushing H-1B workers out of Texas, how large the affected workforce actually is, and the concrete ways their departure is showing up in home prices, rents, and the state’s slowing growth story.

The three forces pushing H-1B workers out

An H-1B worker does not leave a state for one reason. The current exodus is the product of three separate shocks stacking on top of each other, and the order matters. Layoffs create the immediate emergency, the $100,000 fee blocks the easy recovery, and the Abbott freeze removes one of the steadiest employers of foreign talent in the state.

The most urgent pressure is job loss. Oracle, Amazon, Meta, and Dell shed thousands of positions in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the heaviest first-quarter total since 2023. For a US citizen, a layoff is a setback. For an H-1B holder, it is a countdown. Status is tied directly to the sponsoring job, and a laid-off worker generally has a 60-day grace period to find a new sponsor, change status, or leave the country. Many of the lessons from the last downturn, covered in our look at what 2025 layoffs taught visa holders and employers, are repeating now with higher stakes.

The second force is cost. Since September 21, 2025, a presidential proclamation has attached a $100,000 supplemental fee to certain new H-1B petitions. The third is uniquely local: Abbott’s freeze took a reliable channel of Texas H-1B sponsorship, the public university and research system, and switched it off. A worker who loses a private-sector tech job in Austin can no longer fall back on a research post at UT or a hospital appointment at MD Anderson without special permission.

How many H-1B workers Texas actually has

The raw scale explains why even a partial pullback registers in the housing data. Texas employers filed roughly 389,988 certified H-1B labor-condition petitions, and the program concentrates heavily in a handful of large IT and consulting firms. Infosys leads with about 11,638 petitions at an average salary near $83,716, followed by Tata Consultancy Services with 7,224 petitions at roughly $100,782, and Tech Mahindra with 5,635 at about $78,207.

The clearest sign of how confused the moment is comes from Oracle, which moved its headquarters to Austin. Federal data show Oracle filed for 2,690 H-1B visas in fiscal year 2025 and 436 so far in fiscal year 2026, even as it laid off thousands of workers. Companies are cutting domestic staff and petitioning for foreign talent in the same breath, which leaves individual H-1B workers caught between a hiring freeze in front of them and a layoff behind them.

For workers, the practical risk is that a layoff during this stretch is far harder to recover from than it was two years ago. When a new employer has to weigh a six-figure surcharge before extending an offer, the laid-off H-1B holder in Dallas becomes a more expensive hire than an equally qualified candidate who needs no sponsorship. Our breakdown of how H-1B layoffs strain homeowners under mortgage and visa rules shows how quickly that pressure reaches anyone carrying a Texas mortgage on a visa-dependent income.

The $100,000 fee changed the hiring math

The supplemental fee does not hit every petition, and that detail matters for who actually leaves. It applies primarily to certain new petitions filed on or after September 21, 2025, mainly for beneficiaries outside the United States or petitions requesting consular notification. Status changes from F-1, along with extensions, amendments, and transfers for workers already in the country, are generally exempt. The full breakdown of who must pay the $100K H-1B fee spells out the exemptions petition by petition.

Even with the carve-outs, the fee reshapes employer behavior. For companies that depend on foreign talent, the change alters hiring economics, lottery selection odds, compliance exposure, and retention strategy at the same time. A startup in Austin that once sponsored two or three entry-level engineers now has to weigh a $100,000 line item against the same budget, and the practical answer is often to sponsor fewer people or none. Our explainer on what employers and workers should know about the $100,000 fee covers how firms are restructuring around it.

The fee is tied to a proclamation set to expire in September 2026, and several lawsuits challenging it are moving through the courts, with initial rulings expected before the March 2026 H-1B lottery. That uncertainty is its own drag. Workers and employers cannot plan a multi-year move to Texas around a fee that may or may not exist in twelve months, so many simply wait, and waiting means not buying a house.

Abbott’s freeze on universities and agencies

In January 2026, Governor Abbott ordered every public university and state agency in Texas to stop initiating new H-1B petitions without written permission from the Texas Workforce Commission, a freeze that runs through May 31, 2027. The order reaches the University of Texas System, Texas A&M, UT Southwestern Medical Center, MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Dallas Independent School District, and agencies including the Department of State Health Services.

The headcounts at these institutions are small as a share of total staff. Texas A&M employs about 200 H-1B workers out of 30,000, UT Southwestern 228 out of 25,000, and MD Anderson 171 out of 27,000. But these are researchers, physicians, and faculty whose work anchors entire labs and grants. Immigration attorney Jason Finkelman put the risk plainly: “Those researchers and professors are just going to go to other US universities.” Talent that leaves a Houston cancer lab for one in North Carolina takes its household, and its housing demand, with it.

The freeze also sends a signal larger than its raw numbers. A graduate student finishing a PhD in Austin now reads Texas as a state actively closing doors, and weighs an offer in California or Massachusetts more seriously. That deterrent effect does not show up in any single layoff statistic, but it shapes where the next several years of skilled arrivals choose to settle.

Why this lands hardest on housing

Housing markets are set at the margin. Prices are determined not by the average resident but by the last buyer willing to pay, and in Austin’s boom that marginal buyer was disproportionately a well-paid tech worker, a meaningful share of them on H-1B visas. Remove that buyer and the whole price ladder loses its top rung. Texas housing economist Amy Nixon has noted that tech layoffs carry an outsized impact in cities like Austin precisely because so many workers there are concentrated in tech.

The mechanism runs through household formation, not just sales. An H-1B worker who loses a job and leaves frees up an apartment or lists a condo. A worker who never arrives because the fee killed the offer never forms a household in Texas at all. Multiply that across thousands of would-be renters and buyers and the result is what local economists describe as a “no hire, no fire” market: layoffs stay limited, but the lack of new job creation starves the demand that turns renters into owners.

This is also why rents soften alongside prices. The same high earners who buy homes occupy the newest, priciest rentals, and a construction wave delivering thousands of new units into thinning demand pushes vacancy up and concessions back into the market. The visa-dependent slice of that demand is small in absolute terms but sits exactly where the market is most sensitive.

Austin’s reset, in numbers

Austin shows the pattern most sharply because it ran hottest. Zillow data put the average Austin home value near $494,727, down about 3.6% year over year, with median sale prices in the metro down roughly 2.9%, the steepest decline among major Texas metros. Measured against the May 2022 peak of about $552,000, values have given back close to a fifth of their gains. None of this is a crash. It is a correction in the market that overshot the most.

Migration data confirm the demand drain. Travis County’s net domestic migration turned negative for a second straight year, meaning more people left Austin for other US locations than arrived. The metro only kept growing because international migration and natural increase added roughly 25,000 residents, and Abbott’s freeze plus the federal fee both bite directly into that international channel. Annual population growth around Austin has settled near 2%, down from peaks above 4%.

The same softening appears statewide in muted form. The Texas median sale price was $341,800 in March 2026, down 1.8% year over year, after the statewide median closed 2025 near $330,000. Texas remains a growth state, but the era of double-digit price gains and bidding wars has clearly ended.

What it means for Texas growth

Texas lost its long-held title as the top state for net domestic migration. Census Vintage 2025 estimates, released January 27, 2026, show the state drew only 67,299 residents from other states, a sharp drop from the 222,154 it pulled in at its 2022 peak. North Carolina took the top spot with 84,064. The slowdown has many causes, but tighter immigration policy and a cooling tech sector sit near the center of it.

The growth engine has not stalled, though. The Dallas Fed projects about 1.1% employment growth for Texas in 2026, roughly 155,000 new jobs, led by data-center construction, AI-related activity, and an easing tax environment. The question is whether that next wave of growth can run on a smaller pipeline of foreign talent. Data centers and AI infrastructure are exactly the fields that lean hardest on H-1B engineers, the talent the fee and the freeze make harder to bring in.

The longer-term risk for Texas is reputational. A state that built its economic identity on being open, affordable, and easy to move to is now sending a more complicated message to the skilled workers who fueled that reputation. Housing prices can recover in a cycle. A perception that Texas has turned unwelcoming to foreign professionals takes far longer to reverse.

What H-1B workers in Texas should do now

If your status is tied to a Texas tech job, the single most important number is your grace period. A layoff generally starts a 60-day clock to find a new sponsor, change status, or depart. Knowing the exact deadlines that govern your case is the difference between an orderly transfer and a forced exit, and our guide to H-1B key dates, deadlines, and timelines lays out the windows that matter most.

• Confirm whether any future petition for you is fee-exempt. Most extensions, amendments, and transfers for workers already in the US are not subject to the $100,000 surcharge, which makes you a cheaper hire than the headlines suggest.
• If you carry a Texas mortgage, model your worst case early. Lenders move slowly, and a 60-day status clock is far shorter than most refinance or sale timelines.
• Keep documentation of continuous status, pay stubs, and any prior approvals in one place, so a new employer can move fast if an offer appears.
• Treat the Abbott freeze as a planning fact, not background noise. Public universities and state agencies in Texas cannot sponsor you fresh through May 31, 2027 without special clearance.

For workers weighing whether to stay, the calculus is no longer just about salary or sunshine. It is about which state still offers a sponsor willing to absorb the new costs, and where a 60-day emergency is most survivable. For now, more of those answers point away from Texas than toward it, and the state’s housing market is registering the difference one empty listing at a time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are H-1B workers leaving Texas in 2026?

Three pressures hit at once: nearly 103,000 US tech layoffs in 2026, a new $100,000 federal fee on certain new H-1B petitions since September 21, 2025, and Governor Abbott’s January 2026 freeze on new H-1B sponsorship at Texas public universities and state agencies through May 31, 2027.

How is the H-1B pullback affecting the Texas housing market?

H-1B holders are high earners who buy and rent at the top of the market, so their departure removes demand where prices are most sensitive. Austin home values now sit roughly 20% below their May 2022 peak, and metro inventory has climbed to about 6.5 months, the highest in over a decade.

What is the $100,000 H-1B fee and who pays it?

A presidential proclamation effective September 21, 2025 attached a $100,000 supplemental fee to certain new H-1B petitions, mainly for beneficiaries outside the US or those requesting consular notification. F-1 status changes, extensions, amendments, and transfers for workers already in the country are generally exempt.

What did Governor Abbott do about H-1B visas in Texas?

In January 2026, Abbott ordered all Texas public universities and state agencies to stop initiating new H-1B petitions without written permission from the Texas Workforce Commission. The freeze runs through May 31, 2027 and affects the UT System, Texas A&M, UT Southwestern, MD Anderson, and the Dallas ISD.

How many H-1B workers does Texas have?

Texas holds the second-largest H-1B population after California, with more than 40,000 workers currently authorized and roughly 389,988 certified labor-condition petitions from about 35,017 employers. Top sponsors include Infosys with 11,638 petitions and Tata Consultancy Services with 7,224.

How much have Austin home prices fallen?

Zillow data put the average Austin home value near $494,727, down about 3.6% year over year, with median sale prices down roughly 2.9%, the steepest among major Texas metros. Against the May 2022 peak of about $552,000, values have given back close to a fifth of their gains.

Did Texas lose its top spot for migration?

Yes. Census Vintage 2025 estimates released January 27, 2026 show Texas drew only 67,299 residents from other states, down from a 222,154 peak in 2022. North Carolina took the top spot with 84,064, and Travis County saw negative net domestic migration for a second straight year.

What should an H-1B worker in Texas do after a layoff?

Act on the 60-day grace period immediately to find a new sponsor, change status, or depart. Confirm whether any future petition is fee-exempt, keep status documentation ready for a fast transfer, and if you carry a mortgage, model your worst case early since lenders move slower than the 60-day clock.