Every year we come back to State's "Nonimmigrant Visas by Individual Class of Admission" table to see how many H-1Bs, H-2As, H-2Bs and other work visas the U.S. actually issued. This year the FY2025 table (fiscal year ended September 30, 2025) simply isn't there — nearly eleven months after the year closed, well past the usual publishing lag. State does keep publishing monthly issuance PDFs on schedule, though, so we pulled and parsed all twelve of them ourselves and reconstructed the FY2025 numbers directly.
State publishes two different products from the same underlying consular database. The annual table
(Table XV(B) in recent years, formerly XVI(B)) gives class-of-admission totals for a full fiscal year, but
as of this writing it stops at FY2024. The monthly product — "NIV Issuances by Nationality and Visa Class,"
a roughly 80-page PDF per month listing every (country, visa class) pair — is current through September 2025.
We fetched all twelve FY2025 monthly PDFs directly (October 2024 through September 2025) and parsed each one's
raw PDF content streams — decompressing the embedded text objects and reading off each row's nationality,
visa class, and issuance count — rather than transcribing ~1,000 pages by hand. Every month's reconstructed
total was cross-checked against that same PDF's own printed grand total: 10 of 12 months matched exactly,
and the other two (December and April) were off by 11 and 2 units respectively out of totals near 900,000 —
rounding noise, not a methodology problem. The one systematic quirk: Mexico's Border Crossing Card entries
(B1/B2/BCC and B1/B2/BCV) render with a font-encoding glitch in State's own PDF
generator that garbles the label text; the issuance counts themselves are unaffected and we relabeled them
correctly before publishing.
| Class | What It Is | FY2024 (Official) | FY2025 (Reconstructed) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| H-1B | Specialty occupation worker | 219,659 | 214,596 | -2.3% |
| H-1B1 | Chile/Singapore treaty specialty worker | 3,070 | 3,009 | -2.0% |
| H-2A | Temporary agricultural worker | 315,328 | 318,317 | +0.9% |
| H-2B | Temporary non-agricultural worker | 139,541 | 139,736 | +0.1% |
| H-3 | Trainee | 924 | 533 | -42.3% |
| H-4 | Dependent of H visa holder | 139,874 | 146,158 | +4.5% |
| L-1 | Intracompany transferee | 71,799 | 77,247 | +7.6% |
| L-2 | Dependent of L-1 holder | 73,317 | 77,029 | +5.1% |
| TN | USMCA professional (Canada/Mexico) | 15,672 | 16,877 | +7.7% |
| E-3 | Australia treaty specialty worker | 3,933 | 3,758 | -4.4% |
| E-3D | Dependent of E-3 holder | 3,574 | 3,463 | -3.1% |
| E-3R | E-3 visa renewal | 3,100 | 2,812 | -9.3% |
| CW-1 | CNMI transitional worker | 2,517 | 1,110 | -55.9% |
| CW-2 | Dependent of CW-1 holder | 651 | 268 | -58.8% |
| All NIV classes, total | 10,969,936 | 10,707,238 | -2.4% | |
FY2024 figures are State's own published Table XV(B) numbers. FY2025 figures are this reconstruction. The CW-1/CW-2 drop tracks the CNMI transitional-worker program's statutory phase-down, not a parsing artifact.
We loaded the full 77-class FY2025 breakdown into visa_browser.php alongside every fiscal year back to 1987 — annual totals, per-class trends, a full year-by-year breakdown, and search. It's the same tool we've published every year; FY2025 just arrived a different way this time.
| Explore | What you'll find |
|---|---|
| Annual Totals | All 39 fiscal years, 1987-2025, worker/dependent/tricky category breakdown, visas-per-job vs. BLS payroll data |
| By Visa Class | Trend line for any single class (H1B, H2A, TN, etc.) across every year we have data for |
| FY2025 Full Breakdown | All 77 classes reconstructed for FY2025, ranked by volume, with category badges and % of total |
| Search | Find any class by code or description across all years |
This investigation is produced independently — one person, 23 years of data work, living on $1,419/month Social Security. If this work matters to you, a small donation makes a real difference.
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