H1B

How this data is built

Coverage: 6,125,573 certified H-1B Labor Condition Applications from fiscal year 2016 through 2026, with decisions through June 2026. Updated each time the Department of Labor releases a new quarterly disclosure file.

Source

Every record comes from the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) LCA disclosure data, the public files the agency publishes for each fiscal quarter. We download the files directly from dol.gov, ingest every row, and keep the raw values alongside the cleaned ones. No data is scraped from other websites and no figures are estimated.

What is counted

  • One row per LCA case number. Filings are counted, not workers: one LCA can cover several positions, and one worker can appear on more than one LCA.
  • H-1B only. The DOL file also contains H-1B1 (Chile, Singapore) and E-3 (Australia) cases; those are excluded.
  • Certified LCAs are used for salary figures and rankings. Denied and withdrawn cases are kept but not counted toward pay statistics.
  • Years are DOL fiscal years, October to September. "FY2025" means October 2024 to September 2025. The most recent year may be partial until its last quarter is published.
  • Location is the primary worksite on the LCA; secondary worksites are not yet included.

Salaries

  • The figure is the base wage offered on the LCA ("wage rate of pay from"), converted to an annual amount using the wage unit on the filing. Bonus, equity and benefits are not included.
  • Percentiles (P10, P25, median, P75, P90) are computed over certified filings; we prefer the median to the average because a few very high or mis-keyed wages distort averages.
  • Wages above $5,000,000 a year are treated as data-entry errors (typically hourly rates recorded as annual) and excluded from every statistic.
  • Prevailing-wage levels I–IV are the OES tiers assigned on the LCA; roughly entry (I) to fully competent (IV). Older files that spell them "Level II" are normalised.

Employers, job titles and cities

  • Employer names are normalised from the raw DOL strings (case, punctuation, common suffixes) and matched exactly; distinct legal entities stay separate, so "Amazon.com Services" and "Amazon Web Services" have separate pages. We do not merge companies by fuzzy name matching.
  • Job titles are the raw titles on the filing with internal pay-grade codes stripped (for example a trailing "JC50" or "Level 2"). A job-title page exists only for titles with at least 50 certified filings.
  • City names are trimmed and title-cased, and anything after a comma is dropped; a city page exists only for cities with at least 50 certified filings.
  • "Cap-exempt" sponsors are identified by NAICS codes 6112 and 6113 (colleges and universities). This is a best-effort indicator, not an official designation.

What the figures do not mean

An LCA is not a visa. It is the Department of Labor attestation an employer must have before filing an H-1B petition with USCIS. A certified LCA does not mean a petition was filed, approved, or selected in the lottery, and USCIS outcomes are not in this data. Filing counts therefore measure intent to sponsor, not headcount.

Checks

Every ingest runs an automated data-quality sweep (invalid states, implausible wages, duplicate case numbers, formula-cell artefacts in the DOL export) before the data is published. Known issues and fixes are recorded in the project's change history.

See also: About · Terms · DOL OFLC performance data