Every spring, a landscaping company in Ohio, a crab-picking house in Maryland, and a ski lodge in Colorado all run into the same wall: there simply aren't enough local workers willing to take on physically demanding, short-term seasonal jobs. For decades, the fix has been the same two federal visa programs — H-2A for agricultural work and H-2B for everything else seasonal. In 2026, both programs look different than they did even two years ago, and the changes matter a lot if you're a small business owner trying to staff up for the season without stepping on a regulatory landmine.
This guide walks through what H-2A and H-2B actually require, what they cost, and — more importantly — how to keep your books and payroll clean once you've brought workers on board. Getting the visa is only half the job. The other half is proving, with paper, that you paid what you promised, housed workers the way the law requires, and didn't quietly shift program costs onto the people you hired.
H-2A vs. H-2B: Which Program Applies to You
The two programs sound similar but serve very different employers.
H-2A is for agricultural labor — planting, harvesting, dairy work, herding, and similar farm jobs. There's no annual cap on H-2A visas, which is why it's grown steadily as the primary legal channel for seasonal farm labor.
H-2B covers non-agricultural seasonal, peak-load, intermittent, or one-time labor needs — think landscaping, seafood processing, hospitality, forestry, and amusement parks. Unlike H-2A, H-2B is capped by statute at 66,000 visas per fiscal year, split 33,000 for the first half (October–March) and 33,000 for the second half (April–September).
That cap is the single biggest planning constraint for H-2B employers, and it's exactly where 2026 brought a major change.
The Bigger 2026 Cap
For fiscal year 2026, the Department of Homeland Security authorized a supplemental increase of roughly 64,716 additional H-2B visas on top of the standard 66,000 statutory cap — bringing total FY2026 availability to around 130,716 visas, nearly double the base allocation (Federal Register).
This matters for two practical reasons:
- A higher cap means a real shot at getting visas, even if you're a smaller employer without a long H-2B filing history. In years when the cap fills within days, small businesses without in-house immigration counsel often lose out to larger repeat filers who move faster. A near-doubled cap eases (though doesn't eliminate) that scramble.
- Supplemental visas historically come with strings attached — typically a returning-worker requirement or an attestation that the employer's business will suffer "irreparable harm" without the labor, plus additional DOL wage attestations and the possibility of unannounced worksite inspections (USCIS). DHS has also signaled it will cross-reference H-2B petition data with the Social Security Administration and state labor agencies specifically to catch wage theft and document fraud. Translation: the compliance bar hasn't dropped just because the visa count went up.
What It Actually Costs
Employers routinely underestimate H-2B and H-2A costs because they only budget for the visa filing fee and forget the rest of the stack.
For H-2B, a realistic per-worker cost for a six-month season runs $8,000–$12,000, and can reach $12,000–$18,000 for a longer or annual position once housing and petition renewal are factored in. That breaks down roughly as:
- $460 USCIS filing fee (per petition, not per worker)
- $1,500–$3,500 in attorney or agent fees
- ~$35 per required recruitment advertisement
- $500–$800 round-trip transportation per worker
- $1,200–$3,600 in employer-provided or subsidized housing
- $150–$300 in consular visa fees
- $100–$200 in border-crossing processing costs
Because filing fees and legal costs are largely fixed per petition, per-worker cost drops as crew size grows — a business petitioning for 15 workers spreads that $460 filing fee and $2,000 legal bill across a much larger group than a business petitioning for 2. Housing and transportation costs, by contrast, stay roughly constant per head regardless of petition size.
H-2A costs run differently because the program layers in mandatory wage floors and housing obligations that H-2B doesn't carry in the same form:
- Wages: employers must pay the highest of the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), the local prevailing wage, any applicable collective bargaining rate, or the state/federal minimum wage. For 2026, non-range AEWRs run from about $14.83/hour in states like Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi up to $20.08/hour in Hawaii, with a separate monthly rate of $2,132.41 for range livestock and herding occupations (DOL Fact Sheet #26).
- Housing: free housing is mandatory for any worker not reasonably able to commute home daily, and the cost cannot be passed to the worker.
- Transportation: employers must cover daily transport between housing and the worksite at no cost, and must reimburse inbound travel/subsistence once a worker hits the halfway point of the contract — with return transport and subsistence covered in full at the end of the season. 2026 subsistence reimbursement runs $16.78/day without receipts, or up to $68.00/day with receipts.
- The 75% guarantee: H-2A employers must guarantee work equal to at least 75% of the contract period's workdays — meaning you can't just send workers home early in a slow week without paying the shortfall.
Where Small Businesses Get Burned
A few patterns show up again and again in DOL wage-and-hour enforcement actions against H-2A/H-2B employers:
- Charging workers for things the employer must legally cover. Recruitment fees, most visa/border costs, and (for H-2A) housing and required transportation cannot be deducted from wages or billed to the worker, even indirectly through a staffing agency. DOL Fact Sheet #78F spells this out specifically for H-2B inbound/outbound transportation and visa-related fees (DOL).
- Paying below the effective wage floor. The applicable rate is whichever of AEWR, prevailing wage, CBA rate, or minimum wage is highest — not whichever is easiest to hit. Employers who set a flat seasonal wage without checking all four benchmarks are a common audit finding.
- Sloppy hours records. The 75% work guarantee under H-2A, and general FLSA overtime rules for both programs, require accurate daily hour logs. If your books show a flat "seasonal wages" line with no worker-level, week-level detail, you can't demonstrate compliance if DOL asks.
- Mixing visa-program costs into general G&A. Recruitment advertising, attorney fees, and housing costs racked up for an H-2A/H-2B petition are real, program-specific costs of goods/labor — not generic overhead — and should be tracked that way both for your own margin visibility and in case of an audit trail request.
Keeping the Books Straight
The compliance risk here isn't really about immigration law — it's about being able to prove, months or years later, exactly what you paid, when, and to whom. A few practical bookkeeping habits go a long way:
- Track cost centers separately per program and per season. Recruitment, legal/filing fees, housing, and transportation for H-2A/H-2B labor should sit in their own accounts, not blended into "payroll" or "contract labor." This makes per-worker cost visible for pricing your services and makes an audit response fast instead of a fire drill.
- Reconcile wage payments against the posted wage rate every pay period, not just once at hiring. AEWR and prevailing wage determinations can be updated mid-season, and a payroll system that doesn't flag rate changes will quietly let you fall out of compliance.
- Log reimbursements (transportation, subsistence) as distinct line items, not folded into gross wages — DOL treats these as separate obligations with separate timing rules (e.g., the 50%-of-contract inbound reimbursement trigger under H-2A), and your records should mirror that distinction.
- Keep petition-level and worker-level records that tie together — which workers were on which petition, what recruitment steps preceded it, and what was paid to whom. When records live in a spreadsheet that gets overwritten each season, this history disappears exactly when you need it.
Plain-text accounting works well here because every transaction is a discrete, timestamped, tagged entry rather than a row in a UI you have to export. You can tag every H-2A/H-2B-related transaction — housing, transport, recruitment ad spend, wage payments — with the worker, the petition, and the season, then query the whole history with a script instead of digging through old spreadsheets when a DOL inquiry lands two years later.
Simplify Your Financial Management
Seasonal hiring under H-2A or H-2B already means juggling wage floors, housing costs, and reimbursement deadlines — the last thing you need is bookkeeping that can't answer a basic question like "what did we actually pay this worker across the whole season." Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and version-controlled history over every transaction, with no black-box software standing between you and your records. Get started for free and see why small businesses managing complex seasonal labor costs are switching to plain-text accounting.