Guide

How many Internal Medicine residency programs sponsor visas for IMGs (2027)

Of the 431 Internal Medicine programs that state a position on visa sponsorship, 206 say J-1 only, 69 say plain J-1 with H-1B never mentioned, 50 say they sponsor both J-1 and H-1B, and 104 say they sponsor no visa at all. That is the short answer. The rest of this page is how we counted it and how to read a program's own wording, because the wording is where every applicant we have talked to gets tripped up.

What "states a position" means

We have read 654 of the 702 Internal Medicine programs so far. Of those, 431 publish a sentence we can classify as a visa fact: not a mention of "diversity" or "international applicants welcome" in the abstract, but a specific statement of which visas the program will or will not sponsor. The other 223 programs we have read have not published anything specific enough to classify, and 48 programs are not yet read. Silence is not a no: a program that has not published a visa position is marked "not published" on this site, never assumed to refuse you.

Three phrasings that mean no, and one that looks like a no and is not

Programs write "we do not sponsor" in enough different ways that a search for the word "sponsor" alone misses most of them. The patterns that consistently mean no:

• "Does not sponsor visas of any kind." The plainest version, and the easiest to classify correctly.
• "US citizens and permanent residents only." No visa is named, but the effect is the same: nobody who needs one can apply.
• "Unable to consider applicants requiring J-1 or H-1B sponsorship." Names both visas and rules both out in the same sentence.

And the one that reads like a refusal but is not: "No restrictions based on visa status." That sentence is doing the opposite of what it sounds like. It means the program does not filter applicants by visa at all, which in practice means it will sponsor whichever visa you need. We have seen this exact shape of sentence misread in both directions, which is the entire reason a build guard exists rather than a person eyeballing 428 sentences under deadline.

What a blank ACGME row means

ACGME's own public directory carries a citizenship and visa field for each program, and it is blank for most of them. A blank there is not evidence of anything: it means the program did not fill in that field in ACGME's system, which is a different fact from "does not sponsor." We treat an ACGME blank exactly like a program page with nothing on the topic: not published, not counted as a no, and never shown as a reason you are ruled out.

The six states holding most of the H-1B sponsors

49 programs publish that they will consider H-1B sponsorship, alongside J-1 or on its own. They are not spread evenly: six states hold 33 of the 49, two-thirds of every H-1B sponsor we have found. In order: New York, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Massachusetts and Missouri. We publish the states because NRMP and ACGME already make the list of programs in each state public; which named program in which state sponsors what is the part we do not give away here.

Why IMG share is not a visa signal

Programs publish a separate figure, the share of current residents who trained outside the US. It is tempting to read a high share as "this program is friendly to visa sponsorship," and it is wrong often enough to be worth stating plainly: that figure counts US citizens who went to medical school abroad, who need no visa at all, alongside anyone who does. Of the 293 programs whose roster is more than half international graduates, 35 publish that they sponsor no visa. A roster full of IMGs and a program that will sponsor you are two different questions, and only one of them is answerable from a residency's public roster page.

Counted on 10 September 2026 from 654 programs read. See how we read programs for the method, and start your own list, free for the 2027 cycle.