The companies sponsoring the most employment-based green cards aren’t the ones most people would guess. Microsoft leads the current window with 4,840 PERM filings, but half of the top ten are food processors, staffing firms and trailer manufacturers, because PERM is how employers of every kind hire permanently when the domestic pipeline can’t fill the role.
Everything below comes from the Department of Labor's own quarterly disclosure files: 259,489 unique decided cases, unioned across quarters and de-duplicated by case number. Nothing is modeled. The live, searchable version of this table covers the top hundred on our employers page.
The top ten sponsors right now
| Employer | PERM filings | Certified | Approval rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Corporation | 4,840 | 4,526 | 99.7% |
| Management Health Systems, LLC | 2,624 | 2,536 | 100% |
| FPL Food, LLC | 2,322 | 2,320 | 100% |
| JCG Foods of Georgia, LLC | 2,159 | 2,156 | 100% |
| Labor Guys, LLC | 2,072 | 2,029 | 99.0% |
| Consolidated Catfish Producers, LLC | 2,044 | 2,039 | 100% |
| Stoughton Trailers, LLC | 1,590 | 1,580 | 100% |
| WAL-MART ASSOCIATES, INC. | 1,564 | 1,558 | 99.9% |
| Oracle America, Inc. | 1,557 | 1,514 | 99.9% |
| JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. | 1,489 | 1,451 | 99.9% |
Names appear exactly as DOL prints them, which is why they read as legal entities. A company you know by one name can file under several.
What the list actually says
Tech is the volume leader, not the whole story. Microsoft, Oracle, JPMorgan Chase and NVIDIA all sit in the top eleven, and Software Developers alone account for 57,876 filings, by far the largest occupation. But a beef processor in Georgia, a catfish producer in Mississippi and a trailer plant in Wisconsin each out-file Walmart. Sponsorship concentration follows labor shortage, not industry glamour.
Approval rates run high for everyone. Nearly every top sponsor certifies above 99%. That’s what the process looks like when recruitment is run correctly at scale: PERM denials concentrate in one-off filings with documentation problems, not in the high-volume programs. The visible exception is NVIDIA at 92.8% in this window; the files record the outcome, not the reason, so we won’t guess at one.
A big sponsor isn’t a faster one. DOL works a single national queue, oldest first, whoever filed the case. Your employer's volume says how practiced their process is; your own decision date depends on your filing month, which the decision estimator reads against the live queue.
How to use this if you’re the beneficiary
Search your employer on the full top-100 table. Three things are worth reading off their row: filings (a practiced program), the approval rate (a clean one), and the median days (which will sit near the national median, because the queue is national). If your employer isn’t in the top hundred, that says nothing bad. The field has tens of thousands of sponsors, and most file a handful of cases a year.
How to use this if you’re filing
The medians are the benchmark: the current national median runs around 480 days from filing to decision, and it barely moves by state or by sponsor. The state map and the wages page carry the other two cuts of the same files, and the methodology shows every figure's recipe.
Why the list is not the ranking people expect
A volume ranking of PERM sponsors surprises most people, and the reasons are worth understanding before drawing any conclusion from it.
One company can appear several times. DOL stores the employer name exactly as it was typed on the form, and does not normalise it. A large firm files under several spellings, so its true total is higher than any single row and its rank is approximate. This is not a small effect: one immigration practice appears under six different spellings in the law-firm data.
Volume is not prestige. The heaviest filers include food processing and staffing companies alongside the technology names, because PERM covers every occupation. A high count means the company files a lot of cases, nothing more.
A quarter is not a year. These come from DOL's quarterly disclosure files, which record determinations rather than filings. A case filed in one year and decided in the next appears in the later file, so a single quarter mixes cohorts.
What a sponsor's record does and does not predict
You can look up any employer and see its volume, approval rate, median days, the law firms it uses, and the wage requests it filed before each case. That is genuinely useful for understanding an employer's practice.
It predicts very little about an individual case. Approval rates at large sponsors cluster tightly, the queue is national so median days barely move by employer, and a company with a hundred approvals can still have yours audited. There is a fuller argument in what an employer's PERM record does not tell you.
Checking a specific employer
- Search any sponsor by name for its full filing record.
- Find a case number by employer, job title and filing month if you were never given one.
- Wage requests show the step before the PERM, which is often where a case actually is.
What this list cannot tell you
- Whether a company is currently hiring or sponsoring. These are decided cases, so the newest are months old.
- How likely your own case is to be approved. See the caveats above.
- Anything about companies that file under many names. Their true totals are higher than shown.
