The Cap-Exempt Advantage.

On 1 October the H-1B workers selected in this year's lottery started work, and everyone who was not selected began a twelve-month wait for the next registration window. 211,600 people registered for FY2027, 38.5 percent fewer than the year before, and there was no second round. A large share of them were never obliged to be in that queue.

Institutions of higher education, nonprofits affiliated with them, and nonprofit or governmental research organisations are exempt from the numerical cap. A petition filed by an exempt employer is not entered in the lottery, is not counted against the cap, and can be filed on any day of the year, up to six months before the start date. It can request a change of status directly from F-1, which is the point that matters most this month, as section 11 explains. No March registration window. No April result. No October start.

Figures are government filing fees only and vary with employer size and premium processing. Attorney or preparer costs are separate.

October is when the academic year's hiring is decided. More than half of this list, 3,851 postings, went up in the last thirty days, and the employer-stated deadlines pile into four dates: 1 November (172 postings), 15 November (160), 15 October (136) and 1 December (117). Faculty searches run the calendar; postdoc and research-staff postings are spread across it and mostly recruit until filled.

Employer-stated deadlines only. Listing-close dates are excluded here because they describe the advertisement, not the search; Verdict 02 explains the difference.

The twelve-week plan this calendar implies

• Now to 31 October. The 15 October and 31 October deadlines are faculty-heavy. If you are applying to a tenure-track line that closes this month, the sponsorship conversation belongs after the interview invitation, not in the cover letter.
• 1 to 15 November. The peak. 332 stated deadlines fall on those two dates alone. Economics, mathematics and physics run on this calendar, which is why those three fields have the highest shares of stated deadlines in the edition.
• December. 1 December and 15 December carry the last large waves of faculty searches; the biological sciences, neuroscience and pharmacy fields peak here. Postdoc postings keep arriving through the month.
• The parallel track. Comments on the OPT fee proposal close on 9 November and on the grace-period proposal on 10 November. Section 11 explains why both reach a researcher at a cap-exempt employer.

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.

The sweep read twenty-one sources: the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed job boards, Nature Careers, Science Careers and THE unijobs, AcademicJobsOnline and MathJobs, the AEA's JOE listings and the accounting, finance, management, INFORMS and AACSB career centers, the AGU, Physics Today and American Statistical Association boards, USAJOBS and the NIH institutes, all nine open University of California recruitment sites, fourteen national laboratories, and the Workday careers sites of fifty universities, medical centers and research institutes. Every posting that passed the geography, status, role and employer rules was opened and read in full.

The clean step records a reason for every one of the 37,772 rows it removed; the full ladder is in section 13.

Two things that are easy to get wrong

A date is not always a deadline. Job boards attach an expiry to every advertisement. We label those as listing closes and keep them separate from the 2,241 deadlines an employer actually wrote. Silence is not a refusal. Ninety percent of postings say nothing about sponsorship, and a posting that requires existing work authorization is labelled as exactly that, not as a no.

Open research and faculty positions at cap-exempt US employers on 10 October 2026, sorted into thirteen fields. The biological sciences, business and engineering account for more than half of the list. Faculty lines are 59 percent of the rows, which is the autumn calendar showing; the postdoc share rises every month from here as the searches close.

Every one of these positions is listed individually in section 05, with a direct application link. The per-field reports and position sheets are in section 06.

The University of Pennsylvania posts more openly than any employer in the country, 271 positions across the thirteen fields, 163 of them in the biological sciences. Los Alamos National Laboratory is the second largest employer in the edition and the largest postdoc employer in it. Nineteen percent of the rows sit at the twenty-four elite institutions, and seven percent at national laboratories, which pay a median of $115,925 where they state a figure.

Every position from all thirteen position sheets, in one place. Pick a field, filter by role, employer type, state, deadline window or sponsorship language, search by institution or keyword, then apply directly. Nothing here routes through us.

Each field has its own twenty-page report and a sheet listing every open position we kept, with its deadline and deadline type, stated salary, sponsorship language, source and a direct application link on each row. Both are published with this edition, so what you open is always the edition you are reading.

This is the first edition in which the sponsorship column is populated wherever the employer said anything, because the full text of every readable posting was opened. The result is less dramatic than either optimists or pessimists expect. Ninety percent of postings are silent. Of the ten percent that speak, written refusals outnumber written commitments by more than two to one, and the single largest group of statements is the ambiguous one: applicants must already hold work authorization.

The two lists at the top of the yes and no columns overlap. The University of Missouri states it will sponsor on 16 postings and will not on 27; the University of Arkansas, 14 and 24. Both print a sponsorship field on every requisition, so the record is clean: sponsorship there is decided role by role, by the funding and the unit, not by an institutional policy. The National Institutes of Health is the most consistent affirmative sponsor in the edition at 29 postings. The University of Colorado carries the most written refusals at 21, followed by the University of Central Florida at 15, Princeton at 14 and Oak Ridge National Laboratory at 13.

This is the most expensive mistake in an academic job search and almost nobody knows about it. A large share of US institutions never use the word "postdoc" on a requisition. They hire the identical role under a different title, and every search run for "postdoc" returns nothing from them.

The live list shows it directly. 1,223 of the 7,583 postings are doctoral research posts whose title never says postdoc: Research Associate, Research Fellow, Research Scientist, Staff Scientist, Project Scientist, Specialist. They sit at 142 employers, and the concentrations are not marginal: Los Alamos carries 87 of them, the national laboratories together 199, and the elite universities 307. The filing record from FY2025 says the same thing about the institutions that sponsor most.

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. The Department of Labor's disclosure site has refused automated access since August, so the FY2025 analysis published in July stands this month without a FY2026 update; the field reports carry the full institution tables.

Two sources, deliberately kept apart. The first is what employers printed in this month's postings: 2,987 of the 7,583 rows state pay, and the medians below use the midpoint of any range. The second is what cap-exempt employers put on certified FY2025 petitions, which is the floor a negotiation can cite.

This section is the one most likely to be out of date in any advice a candidate reads elsewhere, including this page. Verify it against the dockets before anyone files. Five measures are live as this edition publishes, and they are routinely confused with one another.

Three readers, three different consequences

Everything above assumes an institution files on your behalf. For a large share of researchers that assumption is unnecessary. If your record already carries publications, citations, invited talks, grant participation or journal review work, the strongest routes are the ones you control yourself.

USCIS accepts employment-based adjustment filings in October against the Dates for Filing chart, under which EB-2 worldwide stands at 15 March 2026 and EB-1 China and India at 1 July 2024. A filing accepted under that chart still waits for the final action date above.