Methodology & data sources

Data sources

Everything on the site is built from public U.S. government disclosure data, FY2017–2026:

• H-1B (LCA) — Labor Condition Applications, the wage and job an employer files for an H-1B role. One LCA can cover multiple positions.
• Green card (PERM) — the Department of Labor permanent-labor-certification step of the employment-based green-card process.
• USCIS — H-1B petition outcomes (approvals and denials), used for the approval-rate figures.

Coverage & freshness *

FY2026 is partial: the DOL releases its disclosure data in batches through the fiscal year, so the most recent year keeps filling in. We refresh as it is released.

Data last refreshed: June 2026.

How medians are computed

Medians are base-salary medians. They exclude missing wages and cap outliers at $5M, which keeps them robust to the data-entry errors (hourly/annual mix-ups, placeholder values) common in the raw DOL wage data.

Employer entity merging

A single company often files under several legal entities (subsidiaries, acquisitions, name spellings). We merge the ones we can identify (curated parents, shared federal EINs), but a company may still be split or over-merged on some pages.

Combining datasets

Some reports cross-reference one dataset with another, for example, the OPT employer list (ICE SEVP) shown next to each employer's H-1B and green-card (PERM) filing counts. These sources share no common identifier, so employers are matched by name (using the same parent-company rollup above). A count can therefore be incomplete when filings sit under a differently-named legal entity. All figures describe the public filing record only; they are not statements about any employer's hiring practices, intentions, or compliance. Each row links to the underlying filings so you can check it directly.

Green-card (PERM) timing †

Green-card (PERM) figures are reported by decision date and lag filings by ~1–2 years, so a recent-year drop can reflect that reporting lag or paused new filings, not workers losing green cards.

Footnote symbols

* marks a partial fiscal year (see Coverage above). † marks green-card (PERM) figures affected by the decision-date reporting lag.