Tech’s hiring slowdown has come to Walmart.
The retail giant submitted 312 certified H-1B visa applications in the final three months of 2025, down sharply from recent years, according to the latest data from the US Department of Labor.
The period, which marks the first quarter of the federal fiscal year, offers the first indication of how changes to the work visa program that began rolling out in September are influencing corporate hiring activity.
Walmart’s total is down more than half from roughly 860 in the same period a year earlier, and about 40% below its level two years ago.
By comparison, retailers like Target, Home Depot, and Lowe’s each had fairly consistent numbers of certified H-1B applications over the same two-year period, though all four companies posted higher numbers at the end of 2024 than at the end of 2025.
Still, Walmart’s skilled worker visa program numbers are an order of magnitude larger than the others.
The company was not immediately available to comment on this story.
Walmart’s changes track with several major tech employers — including Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — that have likewise curtailed their use of the program after President Donald Trump announced changes that made it more expensive and difficult to obtain visas.
Amazon, which had the highest number of records in Business Insider’s review of the data, saw its quarterly certified applications fall to 3,057 from 4,647 the year before — a decline of about one-third.
The Labor Department reviews and certifies H-1B and similar visa applications to ensure that prospective immigrant workers will be paid as much as typical US workers in similar roles, and won’t adversely affect employment for those workers.
Some of Trump’s changes to the H-1B program include a preference for higher-paid workers and introducing a onetime $100,000 fee for each new application.
In addition to new rules that made the visa process costlier and placed applicants under tighter scrutiny, companies have also generally focused on leaner, more specialized teams in the last year.
The median base salary in Walmart’s Q1 H1-B applications was $150,000, up from $144,000 and $145,000 from the prior two years.
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