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
5,530 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.
This is the widest list we have published, and the trade that made it possible shows in two mostly empty columns.
This edition carries 5,530 open positions at 757 institutions, in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, across thirteen fields — the largest count we have published. It comes from reading postings off the search and listing pages of the services that publish them, rather than opening every posting one at a time.
The trade is visible in the data. Listing pages give a title, an employer, a location and a working link; they do not give sponsorship language, and usually no deadline. So the sponsorship column is empty on nearly every row this month, and most rows read Not stated where a closing date would be. We would rather hand you five thousand real openings with a link each than seven hundred with a fuller column beside them.
Where the jobs are
5,530 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.
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The thirteen editions
Each field has its own nineteen-page report and a sheet listing every open position we verified, with a direct application link on each row. Both are published with this edition, so what you open is always the edition you are reading.
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
Every one of the thirteen reports and thirteen position sheets is published with this edition and linked from the cards above, so what you open is always the edition you are reading, never last month's copy of it.
Postdoc-Level Jobs Hiding in Plain Sight
850 of the 5,530 open postings this month are doctoral research posts whose title never says “postdoc” — Research Associate, Research Fellow, Research Scientist, Staff Scientist — sitting at 165 different institutions. UCSF alone carries 60, Mayo Clinic 53, UC Davis 43. A job alert set to the word “postdoc” returns none of them. Add Research Associate, Research Fellow, Research Scientist and Staff Scientist to every saved search.
The fee everyone is discussing does not touch cap-exempt petitions. The rule nobody is discussing would.
Two dates land within a fortnight of this edition. Proclamation 10973 expires by its own terms around 21 September, and comments on the proposed $103,265 cap-subject fee close on 24 September, with more than 8,500 already filed. Neither reaches a petition filed by a university, an affiliated nonprofit or a nonprofit research organisation.
The measure that would reach you arrived on 11 September and has had almost no attention. DHS has proposed removing the 60-day grace period at 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2) — the window that lets an H-1B worker remain in the US and change employers after a job ends. Cap exemption is no protection: it applies to the status, not the employer. Comments close 10 November 2026.
- Where your comment is worth more
- On the grace-period rule. The fee proposal already has thousands of comments and does not affect cap-exempt filings; the grace-period rule has far fewer and would directly change what happens to a researcher whose grant ends.
- What none of this justifies
- Rushing a filing. Both fee measures are either expiring or unfinalised, and no proposal here changes a petition you would file this week.
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 $103,265 proposal widens the gap enormously, and it is still only a proposal.
The proposed cap-subject fee (91 FR 54817) would price a single cap-subject H-1B petition at more than $103,000. Cap-exempt petitions — universities, affiliated nonprofits and nonprofit research organisations — are excluded. The same researcher, filed by a cap-exempt employer, faces roughly $960 in government fees. Filed by a cap-subject employer, six figures more.
Its comment period closes 24 September with more than 8,500 comments already filed, and the arithmetic behind the figure is the kind of reasoning that draws serious objection. We are not telling anyone to rush a filing because of it.
- What it justifies
- A conversation with a department that has been treating sponsorship as an expensive favour — not urgency, and not a decision made on a rule that does not yet exist.
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.
Three measures, two deadlines, and the one that actually reaches a cap-exempt researcher
Three separate measures are live as this edition publishes, and they are routinely confused. The $100,000 proclamation reached people hired from abroad, carried no university carve-out, was vacated in June and expires around 21 September. The $103,265 proposed fee would reach every cap-subject petition and expressly excludes cap-exempt filings; comments close 24 September. And on 11 September, with almost no attention, DHS proposed removing the 60-day grace period — the only one of the three that reaches a researcher at a cap-exempt employer.
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.
On 11 September DHS proposed removing 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2), the 60-day grace period that lets an H-1B worker stay and change employers after a job ends. Cap exemption is no shield: the exemption is a feature of the employer, the grace period a feature of the status. A postdoc at a cap-exempt university whose grant ends is squarely inside this proposal. Comments close 10 November 2026 — the one worth an afternoon of your attention.