Tech Pay Atlas
EN|한국어

How the salary data is built

At a glance

What these numbers are

  • The wage an employer stated on a certified H-1B Labor Condition Application (LCA). By law, the employer must pay at least this amount.
  • Base salary at the low end of the stated range.
  • The median: half of the filings are above it and half are below.
  • Filings from employers that sponsor H-1B workers, counted by filing.

What these numbers are not

  • Not actual paychecks or W-2 earnings. Real pay can be higher than the filed wage.
  • Not total compensation. Stock (RSUs), bonuses, and sign-on pay are not included.
  • Not a sample of all U.S. tech workers. Companies that sponsor H-1B visas, and the roles they file for, differ from the overall market.
  • Not the number of hires or approved visas.

Use these figures as a reference point for an offer or a negotiation, not as a guarantee of what a company will pay you.

Source

The salary data on this site is derived from the Labor Condition Application (LCA) disclosure files published by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC). An LCA is the form an employer files with the Department of Labor to sponsor an H-1B worker, stating the offered wage and working conditions. The database is updated quarterly and includes filings from the most recent three years (12 quarters). Please refer to the footer on each page for the exact reporting window covered by the current release.

What is counted

Only certified LCA filings for the H-1B visa program designated as full-time employment are included in the statistics. Records are strictly filtered to 10 standard occupational classification (SOC) codes: 15-1252 (Software Developers), 15-1253 (Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers), 15-1211 (Computer Systems Analysts), 15-1212 (Information Security Analysts), 15-1241 (Computer Network Architects), 15-1242 (Database Administrators), 15-1243 (Database Architects), 15-1244 (Network and Computer Systems Administrators), 15-1299 (Computer Occupations, All Other), and 15-2051 (Data Scientists). Filings with withdrawn, denied, or pending status, or non-full-time positions, are excluded.

Salary

Salaries are calculated using the starting wage rate specified in the WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM field. Non-annual wage rates are annualized using standard conversion multipliers: hourly wages multiplied by 2,080, weekly wages by 52, bi-weekly wages by 26, and monthly wages by 12. Records with annualized salaries below $30,000 or above $1,000,000 are excluded as out-of-range or filing anomalies. Displayed amounts are rounded to the nearest $100.

Many filings state a wage range (for example, $120,000 to $150,000). The site uses the lower end because every filing must include it, while the upper end is optional on the form. Read a median as a typical floor of the offered wage, not the midpoint of the range.

Deduplication

To prevent duplicate counts from multiple filings or administrative resubmissions, deduplication is applied in two stages. First, unique filings are identified by case number (CASE_NUMBER). Second, identical filings sharing the same employer key (company_key), SOC code (soc), job title (JOB_TITLE), annualized wage (wage), worksite postal code (WORKSITE_POSTAL_CODE), and employment begin date (BEGIN_DATE) are deduplicated.

Companies

Employers are grouped strictly by their Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN). No manual merging or parent-subsidiary consolidation is performed. If an organization files under multiple FEINs, each FEIN is tracked and displayed as an independent company. For filings from October 2022 to September 2023 (no FEIN column), companies are grouped by a normalized employer name instead. Name-based grouping can split one company into several entries when names are written differently, so company totals for those quarters may be under- or over-counted.

Metro areas

Worksite locations are mapped to core-based statistical areas using the U.S. Census Bureau CBSA 2023 delineations. Only Metropolitan Statistical Areas are retained for metro statistics. Filings whose worksite county and state cannot be matched to a metropolitan area are excluded from metro area aggregations.

Limits

LCA filing counts reflect petitions filed with the Department of Labor, not actual hires or visa issuances. The filed salary represents base salary only, excluding equity grants, signing bonuses, and other variable compensation. Employers that sponsor H-1B workers are not a random sample of the U.S. job market, so these medians can differ from survey data that covers all workers. Occupational classification reflects each employer's coding choice. Medians based on a small number of filings can change noticeably from one quarterly release to the next, so check the filing count shown on each page. Combinations with fewer than 5 filings are not published, to protect privacy.