On 8 October 2026, the US Department of Labor suspended eight large technology employers — including Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies, Cognizant, Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe — from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) programme. PERM is the route an employer uses to sponsor an existing foreign employee for an employment-based green card. The Department will stop accepting new applications and processing pending ones for these firms.

Indian IT stocks sold off and the Nifty closed at a fresh 52-week low. But most commentary conflated two things. PERM concerns permanent residency for people already working in the US. It is not the H-1B work visa, and it revokes nobody's existing right to work. No company's delivery capacity shrank yesterday.

That moves where the damage should show up: attrition and US wage costs, not revenue. And on the companies' own disclosures, the exposure map is close to inverted from the one the market traded.

The named firms already cut their visa dependence

HCL Technologies pre-empted this on its Q2 FY26 earnings call (transcript filed 17 October 2025): "Over the years, we've made conscious effort to reduce our reliance on visas by strategically strengthening our global delivery model. Our dependence on visa is now down to a few hundred visas a year."

A few hundred, for a company with well over 200,000 employees. TCS said much the same: asked on its 12 April 2025 call whether anti-immigration policy would force changes, HR head Milind Lakkad replied that "whatever we got the H1B visas last year, our actual ratios are even better this year."

Tech Mahindra, which was not on the suspension list, put the hardest numbers to it (Q2 FY26 call, 17 October 2025). CEO Mohit Joshi: "Under 1% of our global workforce is on H-1Bs. And our visa dependence in the US is under 30%." Its deck shows onsite staff at 21.7% of IT headcount, down from 23.7% a year before.

The large caps spent the post-2017 decade engineering this risk out. Suspending their green-card pipeline is a retention problem — US salary hikes, senior attrition — not a delivery problem to their US clients.

Infosys's real visa disclosure went unmentioned

There is a specific, material visa exposure at Infosys, and it is not PERM. In its FY2026 annual report (filed 29 May 2026), under Legal proceedings — Government Investigation, Infosys discloses: "The US Department of Justice ('DOJ') is conducting an investigation regarding how the Company classified certain H-1B visa-recipient employees working for one of its clients in immigration documents filed with certain US government authorities." Infosys says it is in discussions with the DOJ, has begun its own inquiry, and is "unable to predict the outcome," including whether it "could have a material adverse effect on the Company's business and results of operations."

That language has run in Infosys filings since at least July 2025 and was still live in January 2026. An open DOJ immigration-documentation investigation, in a week when the Labor Department is making examples of IT employers, is a more concrete overhang than a green-card queue.

Where the onsite cost base actually sits

If the real mechanism is rising US labour cost, the metric that matters is onsite revenue mix: how much of the P&L is earned on US soil by expensive people. Here the mid-caps, none of them named, carry more than the giants.

Zensar Technologies is the clearest case. Its latest investor presentation (29 July 2026) shows onsite at 47.4% of revenue against 52.6% offshore — from just 2,014 onsite technical staff versus 7,707 offshore. Roughly 21% of its technical headcount produces nearly half its revenue: extreme leverage to US wages, either way. Cigniti Technologies is the most US-concentrated name in our search — Americas at 83.3% of revenue, onsite at 44.0% (Q3 FY25 results, 23 January 2025). Mphasis names the mechanism itself. Its FY2026 annual report (1 July 2026) risk register warns that "increasing costs associated with visa programs such as H-1B and potential wage increases for visa holders may increase onsite delivery costs." Yet an analyst on its 29 April 2025 call noted Mphasis's onsite contribution was "up almost 8% over the last 6 quarters," while "in absolute terms, your offshore revenues have fallen."

Two companies say in writing that they are insulated

Sagility is unusually explicit: "No tangible impact H-1B policy. Sagility does not rely on the H-1B program. Over 99% of Sagility employees in the US are citizens or green card holders." It serves US healthcare payers — a business that needs US-based staff and hired them locally. Hexaware Technologies was blunter still (transcript, 12 March 2025): "maybe 80 people with H-1B that went to the U.S., even should that go to zero, it's not going to create any material impact to our business."

For scale on the cost line, LatentView Analytics disclosed (Q1 FY25 presentation, 1 August 2024) that incremental visa costs plus acquisition-related professional and advisory fees made up about 0.9% of its EBITDA margin contraction — a real margin line, but measured in tens of basis points.

What retail investors should do

Don't trade this off the list of eight names. It is a green-card action, and the Indian firms on it are, by their own filed disclosures, among the least visa-dependent in the sector. For them it shows up slowly, in attrition and salary lines, not revenue or delivery.

Two things deserve attention. First, the Infosys DOJ investigation into H-1B employee classification is a disclosed, unquantified legal risk the company itself says could be material — read that note in the FY26 annual report before concluding the selloff is pure sentiment. Second, if you hold onsite-heavy mid-caps, know what you own: Zensar at 47.4% onsite revenue and Cigniti at 83.3% Americas exposure carry far more US-soil cost base per rupee of revenue than the large caps, and nobody is discussing them.

One caveat to hold honestly: onsite revenue mix tells you where cost sits, not how many of those people hold visas. High onsite mix with fully localised staff means exposure to US wage inflation, not to visa policy. Only Sagility, Hexaware and Tech Mahindra disclose that split clearly enough to tell the difference. For the rest, the number is not in the filings yet. Ask for it.

Data sourced from company filings on NSE via Xaro.