A flat fee crushes volume hiring, spares specialist roles

Deciding which roles need a desk in the building is a question firms have not had to answer. The largest Indian IT firms just had it priced for them. H-1B registrations by those firms for the FY27 cap fell about 92%, from 21,919 to 1,763, which TradingView reported, citing USCIS figures, on September 29. A proclamation issued September 19 attached an additional $100,000 payment to certain petitions filed on or after September 21. The work did not stop. It moved off US desks.

The split in the data is the story. Infosys dropped 91.5%, TCS 95.2%, Tech Mahindra 95.8%. Microsoft fell 31.8% and Apple 16.3%. Same fee, wildly different reaction.

Who flinched and who did not

A fixed fee is brutal on a volume model and survivable on a specialist one. Lakshmi Iyer of StudyIn India told TradingView that the payment changed the economics of sending entry-level and mid-level talent to the US, particularly on services contracts priced on tight margins. Microsoft's 31.8% is a third of its filings, gone, so nobody shrugged. But a third is not 95%, and the gap between them is a question about what the role was for.

Which means the fee did not test demand for foreign talent. It tested whether the role needed to be in the room. Roles that needed the room stayed, and the ones that did not were never about the room to begin with.

What the annual reports already said

TradingView notes that TCS's FY26 annual report describes local hiring and diversified sourcing to cut dependence on work visas. Tech Mahindra reported 112,609 employees offshore in FY26, 80.31% of its workforce, against 110,958 the year before. The pipelines were built years ago. The $100,000 payment was collected on a decision these firms had already made.

The constraint arrived as a price, and these firms already had their answer built.