Amazon
AMZNThe Undisputed King of H-1B
Amazon isn't just a big H-1B sponsor. They are the biggest. Number one. The single largest consumer of H-1B visas in the United States, with over 23,000 approved petitions in FY2022 alone. That's not a typo. Twenty-three thousand.
When Amazon talks about "talent acquisition," they mean building a workforce pipeline from overseas that dwarfs what most Fortune 500 companies even attempt. They operate across 20+ legal entities - Amazon.com Services LLC, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Development Center, Amazon Data Services, Amazon Advertising - each filing separately, making the true scale harder to see unless you combine them all.
72 total denials across all years (0.1% of filings) - too small to display on this chart.
130,000 LCA Filings in Six Years
Between FY2020 and FY2025, Amazon filed 130,479 Labor Condition Applications across all its entities. Add in the 3,377 already filed in FY2026 Q1, and you're looking at over 133,000 LCA filings in six years. That's more than most companies file in a generation.
The pattern is clear: massive surges in FY2022 (24,589 filings) and FY2023 (24,207), with smaller dips in between. Amazon treats the H-1B program like a spigot - crank it open when hiring is hot, dial it back during freezes, then crank it right back open again.
The 74% Approval Collapse of FY2023
In FY2022, Amazon had 23,619 H-1B approvals. One year later, that number plummeted to 6,126 - a 74% drop. Initial approvals (new hires) fell from 6,396 to just 337, a 95% collapse.
This was the tech hiring freeze hitting in real time. Amazon laid off 27,000 workers in late 2022 and early 2023. But notice what happened: they didn't stop filing LCAs. They filed 24,207 in FY2023, and then 21,655 in FY2024. The machine never actually stops. It just throttles.
Seattle: The H-1B Capital of America
Amazon's H-1B workforce is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Seattle metro area. Over 48,900 LCA filings list Seattle as the worksite, with another 9,500 in nearby Bellevue. That's nearly half of all filings in a single metro.
But look at the secondary cities: Sunnyvale (7,590), New York (7,559), Austin (6,216), Dallas (4,323). Amazon is building satellite tech hubs in lower cost-of-living areas, just like JPMorgan does with Plano. The playbook is the same. The scale is just bigger.
The Prevailing Wage Gap
Amazon's average H-1B salary in FY2025 is $167,818. Sounds generous, right? But look at the prevailing wage they're benchmarked against: $140,676. That's a $27,000 gap.
Go back to FY2020 and the gap was even wider: $136,772 offered vs. $104,158 prevailing wage - a $32,600 spread. Amazon is paying above the legal minimum, but the legal minimum is set by a system that systematically undervalues these roles. When the floor is artificially low, "above the floor" still means below market.
"Software Development Engineer" - The Assembly Line Title
The top H-1B job title at Amazon is "Software Development Engineer II." That's 4,264 filings. Add in SDE I (2,587) and SDE III (1,244), and the various "Software Dev Engineer" variants, and you're looking at over 9,000 filings for essentially the same role at different levels.
This isn't niche talent. This isn't "we can't find Americans who can do this." There are hundreds of thousands of software engineers in the United States. Amazon is using the H-1B program to staff its core engineering pipeline - the kind of work American CS graduates are trained to do.
25,000 Green Card Sponsorships - The Lock-In
Amazon has filed over 25,400 PERM (green card) applications in our dataset. To put that in perspective: JPMorgan filed about 3,200. Capital One filed around 900. Amazon's PERM volume is nearly 8x JPMorgan's.
This is the final step of the playbook. You bring a worker in on H-1B, they perform well, and then you sponsor their green card. That process takes years. During that time, the worker effectively cannot change employers without restarting the process. It's a golden handcuff built into immigration law, and Amazon uses it at industrial scale.
The 20-Entity Shell Game
Amazon doesn't file H-1B applications as "Amazon." They file through a maze of subsidiaries: Amazon.com Services LLC, Amazon Web Services Inc., Amazon Development Center U.S. Inc., Amazon Data Services Inc., Amazon Advertising LLC, Amazon Capital Services, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Payments, Amazon Studios, Amazon Kuiper Manufacturing, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Retail - the list goes on.
This fragmentation means that no single entity shows up as the top sponsor in raw USCIS data. You have to combine them manually. Amazon.com Services LLC alone had 2,008 initial approvals in the USCIS hub - but that's just one piece. Add AWS (331), Development Center (224), and Data Services (98), and you start to see the real picture. The total is staggering.
A Company of 1.5 Million - and Growing
Amazon employs approximately 1.55 million people worldwide. H-1B filings represent a tiny fraction of total headcount - roughly 0.25-0.35%. But that small percentage masks the real story: these filings are concentrated in Amazon's highest-value engineering and technical roles.
Amazon's warehouse workers don't need H-1B visas. The visa program is being used for the roles that pay $150K-$200K+ - exactly the kind of jobs American tech workers are competing for. The percentage of total headcount is meaningless. What matters is the percentage of tech roles being filled this way.
The Bottom Line
Amazon is operating the largest H-1B operation in American history. They file thousands of LCAs per year, maintain a 97-98% approval rate, funnel workers through 20+ legal entities, concentrate them in Seattle while expanding to lower-cost cities, and then lock them in with green card sponsorship at a scale that makes every other employer in this dataset look like a rounding error.
This is the company that told Congress it couldn't find enough American engineers. Meanwhile, it laid off 27,000 workers in 2022-2023 and was right back filing 21,655 LCAs the next year. The "talent shortage" isn't a shortage. It's a preference.
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| # | Job Title | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Software Development Engineer II | 19,723 |
| 2 | Software Development Engineer I | 13,183 |
| 3 | Software Development Engineer III | 4,812 |
| 4 | Business Intelligence Engineer II | 3,429 |
| 5 | Manager III, Software Development | 3,333 |
| 6 | Applied Scientist II | 2,046 |
| 7 | Program Manager III | 1,766 |
| 8 | Program Manager II | 1,687 |
| 9 | Data Engineer II | 1,675 |
| 10 | Technical Program Manager III | 1,528 |
Data Sources
- LCA filings: DOL OFLC Disclosure Data (FY2020-FY2026), filtered across 20+ Amazon entities
- H-1B approvals: USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub (FY2020-FY2023)
- Salary data: Aggregated from LCA disclosure filings (annual wage rates)
- Workforce: Amazon 10-K annual filings (total headcount)
- BLS wages: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2023
- PERM data: DOL OFLC PERM Disclosure Data (FY2020-FY2024), 25,462 records across all Amazon entities
- Citizenship discrimination complaint: A.S. v. Amazon Web Services, Inc., OCAHO Case No. 1381, DOJ Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (2021)
- Senate probe: Senate panel investigation of Amazon, Apple, and Meta over H-1B visa hiring practices (HR Dive, October 2025)
- Green card pause: Amazon suspended PERM/green card sponsorship for foreign workers (Business Insider, reported May 2024)
- Concurrent layoffs and H-1B hiring: Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate workers (October 2025) while holding 10,044 approved H-1B positions in FY2025 - the most of any U.S. employer (HR Dive, October 2025)
- H-1B remote work restrictions: Internal Amazon memo barred India-stranded H-1B workers from coding, testing, or customer interaction while on remote status (Times of India, January 2026)