The H-1B work visa program just got a lot more expensive, and Wall Street is feeling it. New Department of Labor data shows that major financial firms dramatically cut their visa petitions in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, with some household names pulling back hard while scrappy competitors seized the moment. It’s the clearest signal yet of how Trump’s sweeping changes to the program are reshaping hiring decisions across the financial industry.
The numbers tell a striking story. JPMorgan Chase saw its certified H-1B applications plummet by nearly 29 percent, dropping from 724 filings to 516. Goldman Sachs got hit even harder with a staggering 60 percent decline, from 256 applications down to just 101. These weren’t marginal adjustments. These were serious retreats from two of the world’s most powerful financial institutions.
But here’s where it gets interesting. While the titans stumbled, their competitors didn’t necessarily follow suit. Citigroup increased filings by nearly 20 percent. Barclays jumped up by roughly two-thirds. Morgan Stanley rose more than a quarter. Capital One, smaller but hungry in certain niches, ticked up 4 percent while aggressively filing for machine learning and data science roles.
What Changed and Why It Matters
The Trump administration rolled out a new $100,000 fee for H-1B applications late last September, paired with social media vetting requirements and a wage-based lottery system that favors higher-paid workers. That’s a massive jump from the old system and enough to make any CFO think twice about filing en masse.
Immigration lawyers previously told Business Insider that the constant policy shifts and uncertainty are spooking corporate sponsorship of work visas. When you don’t know what the rules will be next month, you stop betting on them. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, with their massive compliance infrastructure, probably calculated that the new costs and unpredictability weren’t worth the gamble right now. Their pullback suggests a wait-and-see posture rather than full retreat.
The competitors, meanwhile, may have seen an opening. If giants are sitting out, there’s less competition for the talent pool. Barclays’ near-doubling of filings might reflect exactly that calculus: grab market share while the big boys are distracted. Or they simply have different hiring needs, more concentrated geographic bases, or less sensitivity to the fee structure.
The Real Test Hasn’t Come Yet
These first-quarter numbers only scratch the surface. The real impact will show up when the H-1B lottery results come in, typically when the bulk of applications get filed. Right now we’re looking at Labor Department certifications, which is just one step in the process. Multiple filings can correspond to a single worker. The actual visa approvals and lottery selections, which happen later, will tell us whether this is a temporary pullback or a genuine shift in hiring strategy.
There’s another factor lurking beneath all this: fear about generative AI and its threat to white-collar and technical workers. These are exactly the people technology and finance firms typically sponsor through H-1B. If companies are already worried about AI replacing engineers and data scientists, would they really invest $100,000 per visa petition to bring in foreign talent? The economics get murkier by the day.
Who’s Hiring for What
The type of roles being pursued also shifted. JPMorgan’s filings lean heavily toward tech positions. Goldman Sachs mixed financial and technical roles. Capital One’s increase came specifically from data science and machine learning positions, including director and senior-lead roles. That’s not random. It’s where the strategic value lies, where companies still believe they need outside talent regardless of policy headwinds.
The financial industry’s response to Trump’s H-1B overhaul wasn’t uniform, and that fragmentation might matter more than any single headline number. The firms pulling back are signaling that the new costs and regulatory friction aren’t worth it at current hiring levels. The firms pushing forward are either betting that the policy winds will shift again or have figured out a business case that justifies the spend. Neither group issued public statements about their decisions, so we’re left reading the data itself.
What we don’t know yet is whether this divergence reflects genuine confidence or just different risk tolerances. When the full year’s H-1B lottery data drops, we’ll finally see if Wall Street’s initial caution was justified or if it was just the usual bureaucratic inertia in response to change.
