Last updated: October 9, 2026
The Labor Department suspended Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini from PERM on October 8, 2026. H-1B status was not touched. Only the green card step stopped, and only at those eight employers. Everyone else files normally.
A green card freeze at eight companies is not a labor market event. The reaction to it might be.
Most of my calls since the announcement have been with hiring managers who sponsor nobody. Not one of them has a PERM case pending anywhere. Every one of them wanted to know what the announcement meant for their Q1 reqs, which tells you something about how policy news actually moves through a hiring plan. Backwards, mostly. It arrives as anxiety first and as a date on a calendar much later, usually after the decision it should have informed has already been made.
We place technologists for a living, so you know the angle before I disclose it. When sponsorship gets slower, more companies call an IT staffing agency instead of waiting out a federal queue. That is good for us. It does not change the regulation text or the filing dates, which is most of what follows.
What the Labor Department Actually Did
Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced it from the White House. Thursday afternoon. Sonderling said the department would not accept new permanent labor certification applications involving the eight companies and would not process the ones already sitting in the queue. Officials said Microsoft and Adobe are the subject of multiple active federal investigations and that criminal charges remain possible. Vance said Microsoft laid off roughly 6,000 U.S. workers last year while obtaining about 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards.
Microsoft denies it. The company’s answer is narrow and worth repeating accurately: of roughly 6,000 H-1B petitions it filed last fiscal year, it says about 80 percent were extensions or status changes for people already on its payroll rather than new hires.
Nothing has been tested in court. Nobody on the list has been charged. Not yet, anyway.
| What the suspension stops | What it leaves alone |
|---|---|
| New PERM filings naming any of the eight employers | H-1B petitions, approvals, and extensions at those same employers |
| Adjudication of PERM cases those employers already filed | Green cards and I-140 approvals already issued |
| Any new permanent residency track that starts with labor certification | PERM filings by every other employer in the country |
| Nothing else, as announced | Current employment and work authorization of affected workers |
180 Days Is a Review Date, Not a Timer
The authority immigration lawyers point to is 20 C.F.R. § 656.31(b), which lets the department suspend processing of any labor certification application involving an employer it has referred out for investigation into possible fraud or willful misrepresentation. Most of the coverage stopped at the headline number in that paragraph. The sentence structure is where the information is.
An initial suspension may last up to 180 days. At the 180-day mark, if no criminal indictment or information has been issued and judicial proceedings have not concluded, the National Certifying Officer may resume processing some or all of the applications, or may extend the suspension until the investigation finishes.
May. Not shall.
So April 6, 2027 is not a restart date. It is the first point at which somebody at the Office of Foreign Labor Certification has to make a decision, and the regulation gives that person both doors. Plan for the extension and be pleasantly surprised. Cynical read. Also the accurate one.
The Eight Names Matter Less Than Where They Sit
Six of the eight are IT services firms. That matters. Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini staff an enormous share of mid-market application support, ERP maintenance, QA automation, and managed infrastructure in the United States. The other two build software you almost certainly run.
Which means you can be exposed without ever having filed anything.
Think about who is actually sitting on your accounts. The Workday rollout. The SAP support pod. The three people who watch your Snowflake pipelines overnight and escalate to your team at 6 a.m. Some of those people hold H-1B status at one of those six firms, and the permanent residency path they were promised at hire just stopped moving. That is not your legal problem. It is your vendor’s retention problem, and vendor retention problems show up on your side of the contract as attrition on your account, re-badging requests, and a knowledge transfer nobody budgeted for.
Here is the part that makes a pause expensive even if it ends cleanly. PERM was already slow. The Labor Department’s own processing dashboard puts average analyst review at 336 calendar days for determinations completed in August 2026. Call it eleven months. As of September 30 the prevailing wage queue was still working June 2026 receipts. A suspended case that later resumes does not slot back in where it left off in anybody’s planning. It rejoins a line measured in years.
Our average time to fill an IT role is 17 days. I am not putting those two numbers next to each other to be clever about it. The point is that sponsorship and hiring operate on timescales roughly twenty times apart, and a surprising number of workforce plans quietly treat them as the same lever.
The $100,000 H-1B Fee Is Blocked, Not Dead
Two federal courts have stopped it, from different directions, on different reasoning.
The District of Massachusetts vacated the fee policy outright. That court reasoned the fee operated as a tax and that the policy violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and the First Circuit then declined to block that ruling while the government appeals. On September 30, Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. in the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction in Global Nurse Force v. Trump, finding plaintiffs likely to succeed on claims that the Department of Homeland Security’s implementation guidance was arbitrary and capricious and that the agency skipped notice-and-comment rulemaking. That order reaches the September 2026 proclamation extending the restrictions, too.
A judge in the District of Columbia went the other way in the Chamber of Commerce case and declined to block the fee. That appeal is pending.
Not collectible today. Also not resolved. A preliminary injunction is a prediction about the merits rather than a ruling on them, and a three-district split over a presidential proclamation is exactly the shape of a case that ends up at the Supreme Court. There is also a separate DHS proposed rule from August that would impose a $103,265 fee on new cap-subject H-1B professionals through actual rulemaking, which is the version that would be much harder to challenge on procedure.
The planning implication is annoying but simple. Do not build a 2027 budget that assumes the fee stays blocked. Do not build one that prices every cap-subject hire at six figures either.
The OPT Fee Proposal Is the One Nobody Is Reading
It landed the same day, which is why it got buried.
DHS put a proposed rule titled Optional Practical Training Fees in the Federal Register on October 8, 2026, under docket ICEB-2026-0100 and RIN 1653-AB01. The proposed amounts are $70,000 for initial OPT and $30,000 for any subsequent OPT period, applied for each F-1 student engaging in OPT through a SEVP-certified institution.
Read that again. Per student. Those are not annualized figures and they are not typos.
Comments close November 9, 2026. The rule is not in effect, DHS proposes it take effect 60 days after any final rule, and it would apply to students whose designated school official recommends OPT on or after that effective date.
If it lands as written, the entry-level technical pipeline that runs through OPT does not narrow. It closes. No employer is paying $70,000 to put a new graduate on twelve months of work authorization, and no university is going to absorb it per student just to keep making the recommendation. The spring new-grad funnel for data engineering, quantitative analysis, and machine learning at any school with a large international cohort becomes a materially different funnel, and that happens in 2027, not in some distant policy future.
My colleague Mike Carter went further on that one specifically, in his breakdown of what the proposed $70K OPT fee would do to entry-level engineering hiring. The comment period is the only lever that is open right now. It costs nothing to use. Thirty minutes of somebody’s time.
What Actually Changes in Your Plan
| Your situation | Real exposure | Move this month |
|---|---|---|
| You sponsor, nothing pending at the eight | Low and indirect | Map every sponsored employee’s H-1B max-out date against their PERM filing date |
| You have a PERM pending at an affected entity | High and immediate | Counsel this week, before the six-year clock becomes the binding constraint |
| You buy services from one of the six IT firms | Medium, arrives as attrition | Ask your account lead, in writing, how many people on your pod have a stalled green card path |
| You hire new grads out of OPT | High, with a November 9 deadline | Comment on the docket and build one non-OPT sourcing path for spring 2027 |
| You sponsor nobody and never will | No direct exposure, real competitive effect | Expect more senior candidates testing the market, and more rivals chasing them |
That last row is the one most people skip. Mistake. It describes most of the companies we work with in Orange County, Austin, Denver, and the Phoenix metro. A sponsorship freeze at a large employer does not create candidates out of nowhere. It changes how long the good ones stay put, and it does that quietly, over two or three quarters. Our Q4 2026 tech job market forecast covers the rest of that demand picture.
Five Things Worth Doing Before November 9
- Pull your own filing history. USCIS publishes it. The H-1B Employer Data Hub shows approvals and denials by employer and fiscal year, and you can check your own record in about half an hour. Several executives I talked to this week were genuinely unsure how many petitions their company had filed. That is a bad thing to learn during an investigation.
- Send your IT services vendors one question, in writing, and keep the answer: how many people billing to our account hold H-1B status with a pending or planned PERM case? Vendors answer written questions differently than they answer calls, and the written answer is the one you can hand to procurement when you are arguing about who pays for the knowledge transfer.
- File a comment on docket ICEB-2026-0100. Regulations.gov, before November 9. A comment from an operating employer that describes a concrete hiring consequence carries more weight in the administrative record than a hundred form letters, and the record is what gets litigated afterward.
- Re-price the roles you were going to sponsor for. If a green card conversation has moved from 2027 to 2029, the retention math underneath your offer has changed. Compensation that held somebody for two years will not hold them for five. Our salary benchmark tool is the fast version of that exercise, and a recruiter who works the stack is the slow accurate version.
- Separate the roles that need a permanent employee from the roles that need a person on the work. They are not the same requirement and they never were. Contract staffing covers scope that has an end date. Direct hire covers the seats you are building a decade around. Sponsorship risk belongs almost entirely in the second category, which is a useful thing to notice when a req is sitting on your desk unfilled and you are deciding which lane it goes in.
What Hiring Managers Asked Us This Week
Is my H-1B employee’s status affected by this?
Their H-1B status, their work authorization, and any green card already issued are all untouched. The suspension hits one specific step, the labor certification that starts a new permanent residency case, and only at the eight named employers. Your employee keeps working. Nothing about their current petition changes.
We have a PERM pending at one of the eight. What happens to it?
It sits. The department said it will not process pending applications involving those employers, and the regulation allows an initial 180-day suspension with extensions after that. Get immigration counsel on the H-1B six-year max-out dates for anyone in that queue, because that is the deadline that actually bites. The PERM filing date is also what anchors an extension past year six, so losing time here compounds in a way that is easy to miss on a spreadsheet.
Does the suspension end automatically after six months?
No automatic end. The regulation says the certifying officer may resume processing at the 180-day mark or may extend the suspension until the investigation and any judicial proceedings conclude. Treat April 6, 2027 as a review date rather than an expiry.
Should we stop buying services from Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Cognizant, HCL, or Capgemini?
Nothing in the announcement restricts your ability to contract with any of them. They are not debarred, and no debarment has been announced. The practical question is narrower and it is about continuity: if the people on your account were counting on a green card path that has stopped, some of them will leave, and your contract probably does not say who pays for the ramp-up on their replacement. Read that clause before you renew.
Is the $100,000 fee something I need to budget for in 2027?
Two courts have it blocked and a third judge declined to block it, so the honest answer is that nobody knows yet. Carry it as a flagged contingency rather than a line item, because a budget that reserves six figures for every cap-subject hire will kill reqs the courts may well make affordable again by spring. Separately, the August DHS proposed rule for a $103,265 cap-subject fee went through notice and comment, which makes it the more durable threat of the two.
Does any of this finally make offshore cheaper than onshore?
Short answer: no, and that was never the comparison that decided these things. Rate arbitrage has been roughly stable for years while coordination cost has not, and the teams that got burned on offshore delivery in the last cycle got burned on handoffs and rework rather than on hourly rates. Six of the eight suspended firms are offshore-delivery businesses, so if anything this week added risk to that side of the ledger, not subtracted it. We worked through the real tradeoffs in our breakdown of nearshoring versus offshoring.
Where This Leaves You
Eight employers lost the green card step. Everybody else lost nothing yet and picked up a planning problem, which in some ways is worse, because a planning problem is easy to postpone until it becomes a staffing emergency.
Write down the dates. November 9, 2026 for the OPT comment period. April 6, 2027 for the first PERM review point. Sometime in 2027 for whatever the First Circuit and the D.C. Circuit decide about a fee that two courts have already stopped. Those three dates are the entire actionable content of a very noisy week, and the companies that come out of it fine will be the ones that treated them as dates instead of as news.
We have placed across more than 30 U.S. metros since 2005, and 92 percent of those placements are still in the seat at twelve months. A long way of saying we have watched a lot of workforce plans meet a policy shock. The ones that hold up are specific. They know which reqs depend on sponsorship, which vendor pods are quietly fragile, and what the fallback is for each.
If you want a second set of eyes on which of your open roles just got harder, talk to a recruiter on our team. Bring the req list. No deck. We have also kept an older piece on how H-1B uncertainty lands on employers that holds up better than it should, nine years on.
