Office of Foreign Labor Certification

What this funds

The primary factors contributing to the risk of delays in the FLC programs are large annual increases in application volumes and the concentration of H-2B applications filed in January by employers seeking workers for the spring and summer seasons. Most of OFLC's operations are financed by Congressional appropriations rather than application fees. The resources available to the Department to process applications, therefore, do not automatically adjust due to increases in employer-filed applications. OFLC's budget requests are driven by application workload levels and the goal to stabilize and improve processing times. OFLC issued its highest-ever level of determinations in FY 2025 (1,030,719). Application levels in both the H-2A and H-2B programs set new records. Despite continuing administrative and technological improvements to increase operational flexibility and efficiency, persistent increases in employer demand for foreign labor to fill permanent and temporary job opportunities continue to place significant strain on the Department's ability to process applications in a timely manner during peak filing seasons. Rising demand for a limited number of H-2B visas continues to condense the peak H-2B filing season during the month of January, as an increasing number of employers submit their applications requesting temporary labor certification for the upcoming spring and summer seasons within a few hours or days of the beginning of the allowable application period. Employers do this to increase their chances of obtaining their requested visas under the mandated semi-annual cap administered by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). More than half of the annual H-2B applications are submitted during a three-day filing window in early January. In January 2026, the Department received 10,062 H-2B applications requesting a record 162,603 workers within the first three days that applications could be submitted - the largest 3-day filing volume ever and nearly five times the statutory semi-annual cap of 33,000 workers. These application spikes can temporarily overload OFLC's case-processing capacity and increase the risk of delays for applications filed during these periods. Demand for seasonal agricultural labor under the H-2A program is also at record levels, with the annual number of H-2A worker positions requested increasing more than sixfold from FY 2006 agricultural workers continues to strain labor certification processing capacity at both the state and federal levels and significantly increases the risk of processing delays. The Department understands that access to a reliable and timely agricultural workforce is critical to ensuring the nation's food supply and, as a result, OFLC places a high priority on maintaining an adequate number of federal and contract staff to help meet statutory and regulatory H-2A adjudication To partially offset the risk of delays due to rising application volumes, OFLC continues to enhance the FLAG system used to submit and process employer-filed applications, authorize overtime for federal staff, and cross-train its analysts to increase the number of trained personnel that can adjudicate applications across multiple programs. The initiation of the FLEX division, whose cross-trained members may be rotated to process applications in different programs,

Extracted from Departmental Management, p. 11. Verbatim; nothing here is paraphrased.

Contracts funded by this line

16 linked contracts. These are obligations — lifetime awarded money — and they are not comparable to the request above and are never added to it. No total is shown: an award linked to several lines is counted in full on each, so the sum would not be a fact.

Showing 8 of 16 — most confidently matched first, largest within a confidence tier. These are not necessarily the largest 8.

Confidence mix · 16 medium

Linked contracts are a floor, not a census. Coverage is bounded by how distinctively a program is named and, for performer links, to RDT&E and Procurement — O&M and military construction publish no performers. Budget figures are FY2027 request dollars; contract figures are obligations. The two measure different things and must never be summed together.

Ask this budget line

Answers come from the figures on this page and nothing else. These dollars are parsed from Labor's Congressional Justification and are approximate — confirm anything that matters against the cited page.