In early March 2026, the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub went completely offline. Search stopped working. The interactive map disappeared. Three years of employer H-1B records vanished from public view. The outage lasted at least five days, and it happened at the worst possible time: during the FY2027 H-1B cap registration window, March 4-19, 2026.
For immigrants, attorneys, and researchers who rely on that data to make career decisions, this was not a minor inconvenience. Here is exactly what happened, what data went missing, and what you can do right now.
What Happened
The USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub is a public-facing tool that aggregates employer-level H-1B filing data, including approval rates, denial rates, and petition volumes by company. It is one of the primary sources immigration practitioners and job seekers use to evaluate employers before accepting offers.
In early March 2026, the hub went dark. The search function was disabled. The interactive map that showed filing patterns by geography stopped loading. USCIS acknowledged "technical difficulties" but provided no timeline for restoration. After at least five days offline, a partial restoration occurred, but the site remained degraded.
Status as of March 2026: Partial restoration only. The interactive search and map functions returned in limited form, but downloadable Excel files for the most recent fiscal years remain unavailable. FY2024-2026 datasets have not been fully restored.
What Data Disappeared
The outage removed or degraded access to three specific data sets that practitioners depend on most:
- FY2024 employer data — approval and denial counts by employer for fiscal year 2024, the most recently completed full fiscal year before the outage
- FY2025 employer data — partial-year data covering filings processed through early 2025
- FY2026 employer data — cap-exempt and transfer filings processed in the current fiscal year, covering activity through early 2026
This is not just missing context. For attorneys building strategy on which employers have clean approval histories, and for immigrants deciding between two job offers, the absence of three years of data is a meaningful gap.
The downloadable Excel files that previously let researchers do their own analysis were also pulled. Even after partial restoration of the web interface, those files have not returned.
Why the Timing Matters
The FY2027 H-1B cap registration window opened March 4, 2026 and closes March 19, 2026. This is the single most consequential two-week period of the year for H-1B applicants. Employers must register during this window for their employees to be eligible for the cap lottery.
This is also the first full year of the wage-weighted lottery system. Under the new rules, H-1B registrations are sorted into wage level tiers before the lottery runs. A Level IV wage registration has four times the effective weight of a Level I registration. The implications of that change are still being absorbed by the immigration community, and the data hub was one of the few places to research historical employer wage patterns before deciding whether to pursue a particular sponsor.
Losing that visibility during the registration window, with the highest-stakes lottery change in years underway, created real anxiety for people making major career decisions on incomplete information.
Who Is Affected
The outage hit four distinct groups differently:
- Job seekers evaluating offers: Candidates comparing two companies now cannot quickly check which employer has a stronger recent approval history. The historical data that remains is incomplete without the FY2024-2026 figures.
- Immigration attorneys: Attorneys building strategy for clients need current employer data to advise on risk, wage levels, and petition framing. Several immigration law firm newsletters flagged the outage within 24 hours.
- HR and in-house immigration teams: Employers with internal immigration programs use the hub to benchmark their own approval rates against industry peers and to verify that their legal team is achieving typical outcomes.
- Researchers and immigration data sites: Sites that aggregate or analyze H-1B employer data lost access to their primary official source during the outage.
USCIS Response
USCIS acknowledged technical difficulties. No public explanation of the root cause was provided. No timeline for full restoration was given. This is consistent with how USCIS handles most system outages: a brief acknowledgment, no estimated time to resolution, and gradual partial restoration without announcement.
The pattern is not new. The USCIS PERM tool has had similar outages. The myUSCIS case status portal goes down periodically. What made this outage different was the timing, the scope of missing data, and the downstream effect on real-time decision making during a high-stakes registration window.
What You Can Do Now
The USCIS Employer Data Hub is not the only source of H-1B employer data. It draws heavily from the same underlying Department of Labor LCA disclosure data that is published separately by DOL and remains publicly available regardless of USCIS system status.
Sites like H1BSignal aggregate the same underlying DOL LCA disclosure data that powers much of the Data Hub. This data remains publicly available regardless of USCIS system status. Search any employer on H1BSignal to see their filing history, approval trends, and wage level patterns using DOL data covering FY2020-2025.
For the most recent USCIS adjudication data (approvals, denials, RFEs), you can also download the USCIS H-1B Employer Data directly from the USCIS website when the hub is available, or request it via FOIA. The DOL OFLC Performance Data portal publishes quarterly LCA disclosure files that are independent of the Data Hub.
The Bigger Picture
The data hub outage is one of two USCIS data-related issues affecting immigrants in early 2026. A separate problem has emerged around employer withdrawals and H-1B transfer eligibility.
USCIS has been incorrectly treating employer withdrawals as immediate H-1B terminations in some cases, denying H-1B transfer petitions for workers who are within their 60-day grace period. Under the regulations, workers whose H-1B is withdrawn by their employer have 60 days to find a new sponsor and file a transfer petition. A growing number of practitioners are reporting that USCIS is not honoring that grace period correctly when adjudicating transfers filed after a withdrawal.
Together, these two issues, an inaccessible data hub during peak registration season and questionable grace period adjudications, reflect a broader transparency problem. H-1B workers are making major decisions based on data and processes that are not reliably available or consistently applied.
The underlying DOL data is public, permanent, and does not depend on USCIS system availability. Until USCIS restores and stabilizes the Data Hub, that is the most reliable source for employer-level H-1B research.