Every spring, the same phone calls start. A beach resort in Florida needs twenty seasonal staff by May. A mountain lodge in Colorado is opening for summer with half its kitchen unfilled. In American hospitality, the busy season arrives on schedule, but the workforce often does not. For many of these employers, the H-2B visa is the bridge, and in 2026 that bridge has become very crowded.
The H-2B program allows US businesses to hire foreign workers for temporary, non-agricultural jobs, and hospitality is one of its heaviest users. Congress caps the program at 66,000 visas per fiscal year, split into two halves: 33,000 for workers starting between October and March, and 33,000 for those starting between April and September. For an industry the size of American hospitality, that is a small number, and it shows.
A cap that disappears in days
This year, US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced on March 20 that the cap for the second half of fiscal year 2026 had already been reached. March 10 was the final receipt date for new petitions with start dates between April 1 and September 30. In other words, the entire summer allocation was spoken for before spring even began. Employers who missed that window were left staring at a fully booked season with no regular channel to bring in the workers they had planned on.
Washington saw this coming. On January 30, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor jointly announced a temporary final rule adding up to 64,716 supplemental H-2B visas for fiscal year 2026, nearly doubling the regular cap. Of those, 46,226 are reserved for returning workers, people who held H-2B status in one of the last three fiscal years, while 18,490 carry no returning worker requirement.
The window that is still open
The supplemental visas are released in three allocations, and the first two have already come and gone. What remains is the third allocation: 18,490 visas, plus anything left over from the earlier rounds, for employment start dates between May 1 and September 30, 2026. Petitions for this allocation are accepted from April 24 through September 15, 2026. Crucially, this is the allocation that does not require a returning worker, which makes it the most realistic route for employers hiring international hospitality staff for the first time.
There are conditions. Employers must attest that they would suffer irreparable harm without these workers, must demonstrate a genuinely temporary or seasonal need, and must complete a labor certification with the Department of Labor before filing. None of this is impossible, but it rewards preparation. Petitions filed in a rush, with thin documentation, are the ones that stall.
What this means for Italian talent
We built ItalianExperience around a simple observation: American hotels and restaurants want the service culture that Italian hospitality professionals grow up in, and those professionals want international careers. Programs like the H-2B are the plumbing that makes this exchange possible. When an employer understands the calendar, the allocations and the paperwork, a seasonal hire from Italy stops being an administrative gamble and becomes a repeatable strategy. And a worker who completes a season well becomes a returning worker, with access to the much larger reserved pool in future years.
Our advice, for employers reading this in July: if you have late season needs through September, the third allocation is still accepting petitions, but the runway shortens every week. And whether or not you file this year, start planning for fiscal year 2027 now. The employers who win at H-2B treat it as an annual cycle, not an emergency measure.
Data referenced from US Citizenship and Immigration Services announcements and the joint DHS and Department of Labor temporary final rule for fiscal year 2026.
The season always arrives on time. The question is whether your team does.