Universities and nonprofit research institutes sit outside the H-1B cap by statute. No March lottery, no 30% odds — you can file in any month. We map that hidden market.
Outside the lottery, by statute
Cap-exempt employers file under INA §214(g)(5). No quota, no lottery, no seasonal window — a petition can go in the month you're hired.
Only the ones who actually sponsor
Every opening is cross-referenced against real Department of Labor H-1B filing records, so you see who has a track record — not just who's hiring.
Every position, one link away
3,908 verified openings across thirteen fields. Each field has a full report and a positions tracker, free to download.
What we counted, and the two things that are easy to get wrong
The report has two independent halves, and keeping them apart is the whole design. The position sweep says who is hiring right now. The filing data says who has actually sponsored. Neither substitutes for the other.
Trap one — the column count moves between quarters
The FY2025 Q1 file carried 97 columns and Q2–Q4 carried 98. Reading a wage field by position shifts it by one for three quarters of the year and produces medians that look plausible and are wrong. Every field here is extracted by column name.
Trap two — rows are worksites, not petitions
A single petition covering four locations appears four times. Raw row counts overstate the market roughly fourfold. Everything above is deduplicated on case number before anything is counted.
Why we publish a count rather than a claim of completeness.
An early draft of this release said we had compiled every cap-exempt job in the country. The half of that sentence that says we are giving it away is true; the half that claims completeness is contradicted by our own limitations — portals that block automated reading are absent despite being active hirers, and off-cycle fields are undercounted.
So we cut it. An absolute claim invites exactly one response — “you missed X, Y and Z” — and then the conversation is about our credibility rather than our findings. A specific count is both defensible and more persuasive: 3,908 is a stronger number than “every single”.
Where the jobs are
3,908 verified openings across thirteen fields. Each field has a full report and a positions tracker, free to download.
Browse every position
Every position from all thirteen spreadsheets, in one place. Pick a field, filter by role, tier or state, search by institution or keyword, then apply directly. Nothing here routes through us.
| Institution | Position | Role | Location | Deadline | Apply |
|---|
See every position — free
Showing the first three positions.
Leave a first name and an email and the full table unlocks: every verified posting with its direct application link, plus each new edition as it publishes.
A first name and a working email unlock the list.
No spam, unsubscribe anytime. StraightGreenCard is an immigration services company, not a law firm.
The thirteen editions
Each field has its own thirteen-page report and a spreadsheet listing every open position we verified, with a direct application link on each row. Both are free to read, free to share, and both open in Google Drive.
Biological Sciences
Computer Science & AI
Engineering
Chemistry & Chemical Biology
Physics & Astronomy
Mathematics & Statistics
Materials Science & Nanotech
Earth, Environmental & Climate
Public Health & Epidemiology
Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical
Agriculture, Plant & Food
Neuroscience & Psychology
Economics, Finance & Business
The complete folder, all thirteen reports and all thirteen trackers, is at the Cap-Exempt Advantage library on Google Drive. Nothing there asks for an email address.
Postdoc-Level Jobs Hiding in Plain Sight
Across the twelve highest-volume institutions — Mayo, Massachusetts General, the NIH and Dana-Farber among them — 1,180 postdoctoral petitions were filed under other titles in FY2025. Exactly one was labelled “postdoc.” Search the title and you find none of them. Add Research Fellow, Research Associate, Research Scholar, Staff Scientist, Scientist I/II and Investigator to every alert.
“180 open positions” and “126 certified petitions” are not the same measurement.
One is a vacancy count from our live sweep. The other is a filing count from a federal dataset with its own occupational coding. Printed within a few pages of each other and both labelled with the field name, the smaller number reads as a correction of the larger one — and a reader concludes the market is worse than it is. It is not.
Our caveat was present and honest, but it sat after the table rather than before it, doing a great deal of work in a small font. That is on us to fix, not on the reader to notice.
- What we are changing
- Labelling the two halves visually and permanently: Open positions in one colour, Certified petitions in another, with the definition attached to the column header rather than the footnote. The two will never appear in the same table again.
Who actually files, and why the usual advice is backwards
Every cap-exempt institution could sponsor. Far fewer demonstrably do. When a department says “we only do J-1”, the filing record is the evidence that this is one administrator's habit rather than an institutional policy.
| Institution | State | Tier | Postdoc petitions | Relative volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| University of Michigan | MI | Elite | 179 | |
| Stanford University | CA | Elite | 129 | |
| Princeton University | NJ | Elite | 106 | |
| University of California San Francisco | CA | Elite | 99 | |
| Thomas Jefferson University | PA | T2–3 | 2 | |
| Creighton University | NE | T2–3 | 1 |
The standard advice is to target lower-ranked schools because they are supposedly more willing to sponsor. The filing record says the opposite. The four highest-volume postdoc sponsors in the country are all elite institutions. Advising a researcher to avoid them for immigration reasons sends them away from where the sponsorship actually happens.
The analysis is free to read. The full position list asks for a name and an email.
Everything above the position explorer — the statute, the method, the market analysis and the field notes — is free to read with no signup. The full explorer, with every verified posting and its direct application link, unlocks when you leave a first name and an email, and the page says so before you type rather than after.
We use the address to send the next edition when it publishes, and nothing else. No drip sequence, no resale, and every email tells you how to stop them. Each edition keeps its own permanent link, so nothing you cite is repointed or quietly rewritten.
- Why we are saying it here
- A promise a page quietly breaks is found within minutes of being shared. We would rather be held to this in writing.
What the sector actually pays
Wages here are the offered rate, annualised from the stated unit of pay. Where an employer filed a range, the low end is used, so every figure below is conservative.
| Benchmark | Value | What it means for a negotiation |
|---|---|---|
| Median offered wage | $67,830 | The midpoint of what cap-exempt employers actually put on certified petitions. |
| Median DOL prevailing floor | $57,970 | The legal minimum for the occupation and metro area. |
| Typical premium over floor | ≈17% | Institutions generally offer well above the floor, so the floor is rarely the constraint. |
| Lawrence Livermore National Lab | $128,916 | DOE national labs pay roughly double the academic median and are equally cap-exempt. |
The prevailing wage is the real objection to sponsorship, not the cost. If a posted salary already clears the OES prevailing wage for the relevant occupational code and metro area, the department's main obstacle to filing has already been met — and saying so out loud removes it. National laboratories are the most under-considered route in the whole dataset: cap-exempt, roughly double the pay, and almost never discussed as an immigration pathway.
The $100,000 fee, as it stands today
This is the single fact most likely to be out of date in any advice a candidate reads elsewhere, including this page. Verify it against the docket before anyone files. The $100,000 proclamation carried no university carve-out, was vacated in June, and a later $103,265 proposal published in August expressly excludes cap-exempt filings — the timeline carries both in order.
Proclamation 10973 takes effect
$100,000 payment required. No exemption for universities or nonprofit research.
D.D.C. upholds the proclamation
Chamber of Commerce & AAU v. DHS. Appealed.
D. Mass. vacates it nationwide
Held the payment is a tax, not a fee; INA 212(f) does not reach it.
The government appeals to the First Circuit
The appeal remains pending; DHS itself describes the vacatur as operative.
DHS proposes a $103,265 cap-subject fee
91 FR 54817. Reaches cap-subject petitions, expressly not cap-exempt filings.
DHS corrects the proposal
C1-2026-17324 repairs a receipts table. Fee, scope and cap-exempt exclusion unchanged.
DHS proposes ending the 60-day grace period
Would remove 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2). Unlike the fee, this reaches people already at cap-exempt employers. Comments to 10 Nov 2026.
Built-in sunset of the proclamation
Expires twelve months after the effective date, absent extension.
Comments close on the proposed fee
More than 8,500 filed. Agencies must respond to substantive comments.
Comments close on the grace-period proposal
The one most likely to touch a researcher already in the US on a cap-exempt petition.
If you are already in the United States on F-1 OPT or a J-1 not subject to 212(e), and the petition requests a change of status, you were never exposed to this payment and are not exposed now. If you would be hired from abroad, you were exposed and are currently protected. Re-verify within days of anyone filing on your behalf, because only the implementing policy was vacated, not the proclamation itself.