Methodology
How the data gets from the DOL
to a search result.
This page is the documentation that backs every number on h1b.report. It explains where the underlying records come from, how they are presented, and — just as importantly — what the data does not tell you. If you cite the site, this is the page to link.
Data source
Every record on this site originates from the US Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC). OFLC publishes quarterly releases of every Labor Condition Application it received in the prior fiscal quarter, along with the final case status (Certified, Withdrawn, Certified-Withdrawn, Denied).
h1b.report covers every release back to fiscal year 2002 — approximately 12 million certified records across 420,000+ unique sponsoring employers and 825 SOC occupation codes. New releases are picked up automatically within 24 hours of DOL publication.
What an LCA is — and what it isn't
A Labor Condition Application is the form an employer files with the DOL before sponsoring an H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3 worker. By signing it, the employer attests to the offered wage, the worksite, the job title, and that the offered wage meets or exceeds the federal prevailing wage for the role and location.
An LCA is not a visa, and a certified LCA is not an approved worker. After the LCA is certified, the employer must still file a Form I-129 petition with USCIS — and many certified LCAs never become petitions. h1b.report publishes the LCA layer because it is the only public, complete view of the program at the wage-and-employer level; USCIS petition outcomes are not released at the same granularity.
Our role
The raw OFLC releases are denormalized spreadsheets: the same company appears under a dozen spellings, job titles are free-text, and the schema shifts every few years. h1b.report cleans up that surface — reconciling employer name variants into canonical organizations, mapping free-text job titles to a stable occupation taxonomy, and normalizing wages onto a single annual basis — so that every page on the site answers a question about the same underlying thing across every release.
Records that fail validation against the published DOL schema are held for review rather than silently dropped. Where automated classification is uncertain, the record is flagged for human review instead of being assigned a low-confidence label.
Wage methodology
Employers may report wages as hourly, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or annual figures. Every wage on this site is normalized to annual USD using the DOL's standard conversion (2,080 working hours per year for hourly wages). Where the employer reports a wage range rather than a single figure, h1b.report uses the lower bound, since that is the wage the employer is legally bound to.
The federal prevailing wage is the wage paid to similarly employed workers in the geographic area of intended employment, derived from the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey and assigned at one of four skill levels:
- Level I — Entry. Workers with a basic understanding of duties, performing routine tasks with close supervision.
- Level II — Qualified. Workers performing moderately complex tasks under general supervision.
- Level III — Experienced. Workers using advanced skills, performing complex tasks with general direction.
- Level IV — Fully competent. Workers applying advanced knowledge to plan, evaluate, and direct work.
Median and percentile wages shown on employer, occupation, and state pages are computed across all filings for that entity, regardless of level. Where a level breakdown is shown, it is computed within the level.
Known limitations
- LCA ≠ visa approval. A certified LCA only means DOL approved the wage attestation. Whether the worker ultimately receives a visa is decided by USCIS in a separate I-129 process not visible in this dataset.
- Duplicate filings per worker. Initial petitions, extensions, amendments, and transfers each generate a fresh LCA. h1b.report deduplicates by case number but does not attempt to deduplicate by underlying worker — that link is not in the data.
- Worksite vs. headquarters. The “state” on an employer profile is the employer's registered state, not necessarily where the work happens. Per-filing worksite locations are shown on the individual filing view.
- Withdrawn ≠ denied. A “Withdrawn” LCA was pulled by the employer, often because the role was filled domestically or the candidate dropped out. It is not a denial signal.
Licensing & reuse
The underlying DOL releases are US-government public records, free of copyright. The derived data on this site — canonical employer mappings, occupation classifications, and roll-ups — is released under CC0 1.0. You may mirror or republish without attribution; a link back is appreciated but not required.
Corrections
Spotted a wrong canonical mapping, a misclassified occupation, or a wage that looks off? Email hello@h1b.report with the URL and the issue. Corrections feed into the next quarterly rebuild.