OPT Employment Report 2026

Key findings

• Amazon.com Services LLC employed 5,379 students on OPT in 2024, more than any other employer in ICE's data.
• The roughly 200 employers on ICE's top OPT and STEM OPT list accounted for 110,042 students in 2024, up from 37,385 in 2019, the most recent prior report year.
• 178 of the 198 employers on the 2024 OPT and STEM OPT list (89.9 percent) also filed certified H-1B Labor Condition Applications between FY2021 and FY2026; 20 (10.1 percent) filed none under the same employer record.
• Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services was the largest sector, with 34,704 OPT and STEM OPT students across 85 top employers in 2024.
• California was home to 45 of the top employers, together accounting for 21,744 OPT and STEM OPT students in 2024.

Top OPT employers

Optional Practical Training (OPT) lets F-1 students work in jobs related to their field of study, most commonly for 12 months after graduation. These are the employers with the most students on OPT in ICE's 2024 data. Each employer links to its Osito profile with sponsorship and salary detail.

Top STEM OPT employers

The STEM OPT extension adds 24 months of work authorization for students with qualifying science, technology, engineering, and math degrees, and requires the employer to be enrolled in E-Verify. These employers had the most students on STEM OPT in 2024.

Top CPT employers

Curricular Practical Training (CPT) is work authorization for internships and other training that is part of a student's curriculum, used while the student is still enrolled. These employers had the most students on CPT in 2024.

Employers by state

Each employer is assigned to the state that appears most often as its employer address in DOL filings. 259 of the 2024 top employers could be placed this way; employers with no DOL filings, including most universities that appear in ICE data as systemwide entities, are not included in this table.

Employers by industry

Industry comes from the NAICS sector each employer reports in its DOL filings. Employers with no DOL filings have no industry code and are shown as a separate row.

The OPT-to-H-1B pipeline

OPT and STEM OPT together allow up to three years of work, after which most students who stay in the US long term need an employer to file for another status, most commonly H-1B. Joining the ICE employer lists to DOL's Labor Condition Application (LCA) records shows which top OPT employers also participate in the H-1B process and which do not. An LCA is a required early step in an H-1B filing, not an approved petition, so these figures describe filing behavior, not hiring outcomes.

Of the 198 employers on ICE's 2024 OPT and STEM OPT list, 178 (89.9 percent) filed at least one certified H-1B LCA between FY2021 and FY2026, and 20 (10.1 percent) filed none under the same employer record. Some organizations in the second group have related entities that file separately: University of California appears in ICE data as one systemwide employer while individual campuses file their own LCAs, and Walmart's ICE record is a different corporate entity from the one that files its H-1B LCAs.

Change over time

ICE's top employer lists are available for 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2024. The totals below are the sums of each year's published list, so they describe the top of the market rather than all OPT employment.

Citing this report

Cite as: Osito OPT Employment Report 2026, published July 16, 2026. This URL always holds the current edition; prior editions move to archived year URLs when a new edition is published. Journalists and researchers are welcome to reuse these figures with a link to this page.

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• What is OPT?
• Find out when you can work on OPT