60 days to find a job or leave: H-1B Indian techies hit hardest by Meta and Oracle layoffs

A layoff email in the US is doing something different to H-1B holders than it does to citizens: it starts a 60-day countdown to leave the country.

Under USCIS rules, an H-1B worker has 60 days from the last working day (not the last pay date) to find a new sponsoring employer, file a change of status, or depart. With Meta beginning a fresh global round of 8,000 cuts this week — notices went out in Singapore, the US and Europe within hours of each other — and Amazon, Oracle and LinkedIn already in the middle of their own reductions, the population racing that clock is large and disproportionately Indian.

The scale of exposure:

- 283,772 of the 406,348 approved H-1B petitions in FY25 went to Indian nationals (USCIS / DHS, 2026 report) — by far the single largest cohort. - Layoffs.fyi has logged 110,000+ tech layoffs across 144 companies in 2026 already; immigration practitioners estimate a substantial share are H-1B holders. - US-based attorney Rajiv Khanna told the Economic Times his firm is seeing a roughly 10x spike in Requests for Evidence (RFEs) and Notices of Intent to Deny on B-1/B-2 change-of-status applications filed by laid-off H-1B workers — 'beyond anything seen previously in his career.' - A new USCIS guidance memo dated May 22 proposes that non-immigrants on H-1B, F-1, J-1 and O-1 may no longer be allowed to remain in the US while their Green Card applications process. For Indian applicants stuck in employment-based backlogs of a decade or more, this would be a structural break.

For a candidate now on a 60-day clock, the practical playbook hasn't fundamentally changed, but the timelines have compressed:

1. Trigger a fresh H-1B transfer (Form I-129) the moment severance is signed — even a pending transfer preserves status in many cases. 2. Treat the 60 days as 30 days of useful runway. Allow the back half for paperwork, biometrics and travel. 3. If a B-1/B-2 change is the only path, file Form I-539 immediately with airtight ties-to-home documentation; assume an RFE. 4. Talk to a US immigration attorney before applying for jobs that require relocation outside the US — a quick exit can be cheaper and cleaner than burning the clock on doomed transfers.

For candidates outside the US watching this play out: assume the H-1B route into a US tech career is meaningfully riskier in 2026 than it was in 2024. Hedging with India-based GCC roles at the same parent companies (Meta, Oracle, Amazon all have large India centers) is increasingly the rational base case.