H-1B Approval Rates Hold Steady at 97% in FY 2025 Data

(UNITED STATES) — U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services adjudicated H-1B petitions in FY 2025 at approval rates that remained in the high 90s, even as online claims circulated that approvals had “crashed” to a five-year low.

The recurring “approval crash” narrative hinges on mixing up different stages of the system, including cap-lottery selections and later petition decisions, rather than on any single USCIS headline number.

USCIS data for FY 2025 showed new employment petitions achieved a 97% approval rate, a level consistent with prior years’ stability above 94%.

From January 1 to June 30, 2025, USCIS adjudicated 214,040 H-1B petitions with a 97.8% approval rate, up slightly from 97.7% in the same 2024 period, when the agency adjudicated 196,717 petitions.

In immigration terms, “adjudicated” refers to cases USCIS decided, which is why approval rates are calculated on approvals versus denials among decisions issued, not against raw lottery registrations.

Overall denial rates remained low at 3-4%, reflecting policy clarifications post-*ITServe Alliance v. Cissna* and the USCIS Modernization Rule effective January 17, 2025.

Confusion intensifies around the cap-subject lottery because the beneficiary-centric lottery changed the way registrations map to people, reducing duplicates and shrinking the pool that can even reach the petition stage.

FY 2025 cap statistics highlighted that shift, with eligible registrations at 470,342, down 38.6% from FY 2024’s 758,994, a drop that affects how many workers can file petitions without implying anything about approval outcomes.

Selections also came in rounds that USCIS reported as both registrations and unique beneficiaries, with initial selections of 120,603 registrations for 114,017 unique beneficiaries and a second round adding 14,534 registrations for 13,607 beneficiaries, totaling 135,137 at about a 30% selection rate.

USCIS reported about 442,000 unique beneficiaries and about 52,700 unique employers in the FY 2025 registration system, figures that shaped the odds of selection before any petition review began.

Employer results in adjudications, however, showed heavy volumes among large U.S. technology companies, with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google ranking as the top four for new petitions and posting denial rates of 1% or less.

Amazon also led continuing employment approvals with more than 14,000, a sign that a large share of adjudicated volume reflected existing employment relationships rather than first-time, cap-subject starts.

Beyond the largest filers, the distribution remained broad: more than 28,000 unique employers received at least one new approval, and 95% got 10 or fewer.

Shifts in the roster of top recipients also fed the online debate, with Indian firms described as seeing a 70% drop from FY 2015 and 37% from FY 2024, and only three appearing in the top 25.

Those changes aligned with the beneficiary-centric lottery’s duplicate-reduction effect, which can alter how employer strategies show up in selection and filing counts without changing how USCIS decides petitions it receives.

The sharpest misconception in “approval crash” posts is treating the low chance of selection under the statutory cap as if it were a denial rate, when the cap-lottery step and USCIS adjudications measure different things.

NFAP has cited a restrictive roughly 20% “approval” for new cap-subject entrants versus the 85,000 limit from 423,028 or more registrations, but that framing reflects the cap and registration volume rather than USCIS denying filed cases.

Eligibility and filing quality still matter after selection, but the adjudication record described in FY 2025 data pointed to consistently high approval rates once petitions reached a decision.

Policy changes also shaped filing behavior during the period, including a September 19, 2025, Presidential Proclamation that imposed a $100,000 fee for certain new H-1B petitions and restricted entries effective September 21, 2025.

That combination of fees and entry limits, alongside concerns over IT firm layoffs and H-1B abuse, added pressure points that could change who files and how many petitions arrive, even if approval rates remain high.

As of February 25, 2026, publicly available USCIS reporting and NFAP analysis did not support an “approval crash” framing when focusing on adjudicated petitions, underscoring the gap between lottery volumes and H-1B approvals.