IBM Ends Visa Sponsorship for Majority of Roles in Its Largest Unit

IBM will stop sponsoring visas and green cards for the majority of roles in IBM Consulting, its largest unit, according to a company statement reported by Bloomberg. The unit employs more than 150,000 consultants worldwide, per IBM's own website.

The change lands amid a federal squeeze on high-skilled immigration. For HR leaders at multinational employers, it raises immediate questions about mobility pipelines, retention timelines and relocation policy design.

Affected employees face a hard deadline. Bloomberg reported that they can either continue working for IBM outside the US or leave the company by the end of the year. That structure converts an immigration policy shift into an operational one: workforce planning teams must now model attrition, internal transfers and country-staffing demand on a compressed clock.

What did IBM actually say?

The company framed the decision as the endpoint of a long decline rather than a sudden cut. "IBM Consulting participates in U.S. high-skilled visa programs to address skill shortages," an IBM spokesperson said in a statement. "That participation has been declining for a number of years and as skill availability and client need have evolved, we have opted to discontinue visa and green card sponsorship for the majority of such roles in IBM Consulting."

Two threads run through that statement. First, IBM argues the business case for sponsorship has weakened as skills became more available domestically. Second, the company points to "client need" — a signal that consulting staffing decisions now track where client work sits, not where US visas allow.

How steep is the sponsorship decline?

Federal records show a steady three-year slide. IBM had just over 1,600 H-1B petitions approved in fiscal year 2026, down from more than 2,000 in FY 2025 and nearly 3,000 in FY 2024.

The records carry two caveats that matter for benchmarking. They cover IBM as a whole, so they do not isolate how many IBM Consulting employees hold sponsorship. They also include amended or extended petitions for existing staff, not only new hires, so the totals overstate new-worker inflow.

Even so, the trajectory is unambiguous. Approval volume fell roughly 45% between FY 2024 and FY 2026 — a contraction that predates this week's announcement and suggests the policy formalizes an existing retreat.

What is the policy backdrop?

The IBM decision follows a sequence of aggressive federal moves against tech-sector reliance on foreign workers. In September 2025, President Donald Trump introduced a $100,000 fee on some H-1B applicants; that proposal remains tied up in the courts.

Last month, Vice President JD Vance announced the administration was suspending Microsoft from a federal program companies use to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency. Vance said Microsoft had abused the Permanent Labor Certification process, commonly called PERM. For employers with PERM programs, the Microsoft suspension signaled that sponsorship processes once treated as routine now carry enforcement risk.

IBM's overall footprint frames the scale of the consulting decision. The company's 2025 annual report counts 264,300 employees across IBM and its wholly owned subsidiaries, which means the consulting unit represents well over half the global workforce.

What should employers watch next?

Three questions now matter for people teams at any sponsor-dependent organization:

• Cost exposure. If the $100,000 H-1B fee survives litigation, sponsorship economics change overnight for every large employer, not just IBM.
• Retention risk. Employees facing a leave-by-year-end deadline will test transfer policies and rehiring frameworks at speed.
• Talent geography. IBM's option to move sponsored staff to roles outside the US points to a broader shift toward distributed consulting delivery models.

IBM has effectively priced US sponsorship out of its largest business line and shifted the burden of adjustment onto affected employees. Whether other large consulting employers follow — and how quickly the courts resolve the H-1B fee — will define the sponsorship landscape for the next hiring cycle.