TCS Says Green Cards Were Never the Workforce Plan

TCS Chief Executive K Krithivasan said green cards have never been central to how the company staffs America, after Washington froze the filings that lead to them. The line landed on October 8, 2026, the same day the US Department of Labor barred Tata Consultancy Services and seven other firms from the permanent labor certification program known as PERM. Krithivasan told analysts his HR chief, Sudeep Kunnumal, had been filing “a single-digit kind of green card permanent residency” in recent years.

Labor Department disclosure files compiled for fiscal 2026 through June 30 show why the company can say that. The freeze closes a door TCS had already stopped using. It leaves untouched the temporary visas that still put thousands of its people on US client sites.

Washington Froze a Path TCS Rarely Used

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling named Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini, then added Microsoft and Adobe, which he said faced active federal investigations. Vice President JD Vance stood with him. Sonderling said the department would take no new PERM cases involving those employers and would stop work on cases already filed. Vance said the halt would last as long as it needs to. No end date was set.

We’re cutting off the head of the snake and protecting American Workers.

Beginning today, @USDOL is SUSPENDING Microsoft and Adobe among other companies from the permanent visa program. After a pipeline of systemic fraud has flooded our country for years with foreign labor,… pic.twitter.com/6uyJgdYfyb

— Secretary Keith Sonderling (@Sonderling47) October 8, 2026

PERM is the labor-market test an employer must pass before it can sponsor most employment-based green cards. The employer advertises the job, explains why no qualified US worker was hired, and asks the department to certify that a foreign hire will not undercut American pay. Freeze that step and the usual on-ramp from an H-1B work visa to permanent residency stops. Existing H-1B status is not cancelled. People already holding green cards keep them.

THE OCTOBER TIMELINE

1. September 2026: The Labor Department’s inspector general first stops new PERM filings by Cognizant as a standalone case.
2. October 8, 2026: Sonderling extends that halt to eight employers, including TCS, while TCS reports its September quarter on the same afternoon.
3. October 9, 2026: TCS tells exchanges it will comply with any Labor Department directive and does not expect the freeze to change its workforce plan or client work.

Sonderling bundled the eight firms into one charge sheet stretching back to 2009. He said they had sought almost three million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals, and obtained more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. Those are combined, multi-year totals. They describe a history. They do not describe TCS’s current filing desk.

We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies.

Keith Sonderling, US Secretary of Labor, White House announcement, October 8, 2026

Two Green Cards Against Thousands of Visas

TCS’s own count and the department’s files now sit side by side. In a statement on October 9, the company said its PERM applications were in single digits over the last two years, so it does not expect the suspension to hit staffing or client work. Department of Labor Office of Foreign Labor Certification records for fiscal 2026, covering decisions from October 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026, show 2,881 H-1B filings and two green cards for Tata Consultancy Services Limited, with a median committed wage of $92,394.

That median sits well below the $126,372 median across all certified H-1B filings in the same window. Microsoft, listed in the same freeze, shows 5,107 H-1B filings, a $177,000 median, and 1,600 certified PERM cases. The contrast is the policy problem in one row: Washington grouped a rotation-led outsourcer with a product company that still runs a large green-card machine.

H-1B FILINGS VERSUS CERTIFIED PERM, FY2026 THROUGH JUNE 30

Indian IT’s retreat from PERM is older than this freeze. An analysis of Labor Department issuances from 2008 through 2025 found the five largest Indian IT employers received fewer than 58,000 of 1.45 million certifications, about 4% of the total. Their share fell from about 10% of grants to under 1%. They took about 1,440 certificates in fiscal 2025, against 7,798 in fiscal 2015. Infosys and Wipro show zero certified PERM cases in the fiscal 2026 window; HCL shows 59. Peter Bendor-Samuel, founder of Constellation Research, said he does not anticipate a material hit to delivery, because the administration is trying to restrain on-site entry of foreign labor and the firms have already moved.

The remaining exposure is the visa TCS still uses. The company had about 11,000 H-1B employees in a 30,000-strong US workforce when Krithivasan spoke. Locally hired staff now account for 50% of that US base. The freeze does not touch those 11,000 visas. It only blocks the paperwork that would let a slice of them settle.

After Two or Three Years, Staff Head Home

TCS’s US model was never built around permanence. People travel from India to work on client projects for two to three years, then return. Krithivasan called it a continuous movement of talent between onsite and offshore. A green card breaks that loop. It turns a posting into a US career, with US pay, US attrition, and a worker who no longer rotates back to the India bench. Filing almost no PERM cases is how the loop stays closed.

In the last few years, what Sudeep and his team have been applying for is a single-digit kind of green card permanent residency.

K Krithivasan, Chief Executive and Managing Director, TCS earnings call, October 8, 2026

Chief Operating Officer Aarthi Subramanian has made the same point in the days since the freeze: H-1B-to-green-card filings are not how TCS now serves US clients, because the firm has shifted toward hiring and investing in local talent. That is the public phrasing. The operating fact is the tour length. Two to three years is long enough to sit on a client site and short enough to send the person home before the six-year H-1B cap becomes a crisis the company has to solve with a green card.

Chief Financial Officer Samir Seksaria said TCS raised its use of subcontractors in the September quarter to cover near-term skill gaps, in India as well as overseas. Subcontractor costs were 6.8% of revenue, up from 5.9% in the June quarter. Seksaria said some of that could be linked to visa friction, but not all of it. A higher subcon line is a faster way to put people on a US project than waiting on a petition. It is also a wage the company can turn off when the project ends.

The 15,000 Jobs TCS Promised in America

TCS has spent years building a local employer brand in the United States, and the freeze is the moment it wants that brand on camera. The company said it has a large local workforce across 31 offices and delivery centres, and that it still intends to hire an additional 15,000 people in the country over the next five years. That 15,000 is a future intake. It is not the same figure as the 50% of the current 30,000 who were hired locally.

TCS IN THE UNITED STATES

• US workforce: About 30,000 people, with locally hired staff now half of the total.
• H-1B bench: About 11,000 employees still on the specialty-occupation visa.
• Footprint: 31 offices and delivery centres, plus a campus hiring track the company says now carries most new US demand.
• Five-year plan: 15,000 additional local hires, a target first set before this freeze and repeated after it.

In late 2025 Krithivasan said TCS had flown about 500 people from India to the United States on H-1B visas in that financial year, and that even among approved petitions the firm deploys fewer people than it is allowed. Kunnumal said most current US requirements were already being met through local hiring. The 15,000 plan is how TCS answers a Washington that wants to see American payrolls. It is also cheaper politically than arguing about the 11,000 who remain on visas.

Campus hiring in India is being run on a different logic. TCS onboarded 10,000 freshers in the September quarter, after 14,000 in the June quarter, and said intake will follow demand rather than a fixed 40,000 target. Kunnumal said the firm has raised its intake of AI-native graduates from Indian universities by 50%, because those hires are proving natural in front of clients. The freeze in Washington does not slow that pipeline. It makes the India campus more useful, because the work that used to justify a long US stay can sit in Bengaluru or Pune.

AI Campuses in India Take the Permanent Work

The same earnings call that shrugged at PERM was a call about AI. TCS posted annualized AI revenue of $3.1 billion, more than 10% of the firm, on a quarter when constant-currency revenue rose 0.5% sequentially and 2.8% from a year earlier. Dollar revenue was $7,642 million. The order book was $9.6 billion, a figure Krithivasan said excludes the Porsche and Best Buy deals. Operating margin held at 24.0%. Net profit was $1,450 million, a 19.0% net margin. The closing headcount of 598,056 was up 4,258 from 593,798 a quarter earlier. Voluntary last-twelve-months attrition in IT services was 13.3%.

Those AI deals are not a US immigration story, and that is the point. TCS said it will take over Best Buy’s global capability center in India and turn it into an AI capability center. It announced a five-year partnership with Porsche AG, including an AI mobility centre of excellence, and a plan, still subject to approvals, to buy Porsche’s German consulting unit MHP. Krithivasan described a new class of work in which TCS helps a client rebuild its operating model rather than chase or defend a slice of existing revenue. He put the wait for AI-led work to offset productivity-driven price cuts in older services at somewhere between six quarters and three years.

A green card in New Jersey does not staff a Best Buy center in India or a mobility lab for Porsche. The freeze, sold in Washington as a way to stop Indian IT from parking foreign workers in American jobs, meets a company that is already winning the work that never had to sit in America. Discretionary US programs without a near-term payoff remain under scrutiny, Krithivasan said, and technology budgets may stay flat or rise only slightly as clients spend on AI, modernization, and operations. The people TCS wants for that shift are the AI-native graduates it is taking in greater numbers at home.

What the Freeze Does to People on H-1B

The company can absorb a PERM freeze because it had already stopped asking for green cards in any volume. The people on its US visas cannot. H-1B status usually runs six years. The standard way to go beyond that cap is to have a PERM case or an I-140 immigrant petition in motion. TCS is now barred from filing new PERM cases and from moving pending ones. Workers who already hold an approved certification or petition are in a different legal bucket. Workers who were waiting for TCS to start the process are not.

WHERE THE HIT ACTUALLY FALLS

• No automatic exits: Valid H-1B visas are not revoked by the freeze, and people already holding green cards keep them.
• A closed on-ramp: TCS cannot start or advance PERM cases, so staff who needed that filing to stay past six years lose the usual extension path.
• The rotation default: A two-to-three-year tour, followed by a return to India, becomes the only plan the employer is still running at scale.
• A weaker offer: Without a green-card promise, TCS is less able to hold experienced people in the US against employers that still sponsor, including firms not on Sonderling’s list.

That is the irony the earnings language papers over. Washington presented the freeze as a strike against outsourcing firms that take American jobs and then lock the hires in with residency. TCS’s filing record shows it had already given up the lock. What it kept is the temporary visa, the cheaper median wage, and the right to send people home. Google, Meta, and Amazon were not named on October 8. Microsoft, which still certified 1,600 PERM cases in the same window, was named and still looks like the larger green-card shop in the department’s own files.

Indian officials called Vance’s broader remarks on foreign tech workers unwarranted. Nasscom, the industry body, said immigration and the movement of skilled people for project work are distinct issues and should not be treated as one. Neither statement changes the paperwork. For TCS, the next five years of US hiring will be argued in local headcount, not in PERM receipts. For the 11,000 people already on its H-1B visas, the path that used to turn a tour into a life in America is the one thing this freeze actually closed.