Sources

Wages come from the Department of Labor's Office of Foreign Labor Certification LCA disclosure data for fiscal year 2026, third-quarter release (determinations from October 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026), and are compared with Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS estimates for May 2025. Metro areas come from the Census Bureau's July 2023 delineation files. In the third-quarter file, 400,956 certified filings had a usable wage. Federal government data is public domain; BLS asks to be cited as the source, and every page here cites both sources with the data date.

What is counted

Only applications whose case status is exactly Certified. Withdrawn, denied and certified-then-withdrawn cases are dropped.
H-1B, H-1B1 (Chile and Singapore) and E-3 (Australia) filings are pooled, since they share one file.
Each filing counts once, whatever the number of worker positions it requests. Percentiles are unweighted.

How wages are made comparable

Each wage is annualized from the stated rate: hourly times 2,080, weekly times 52, bi-weekly times 26, monthly times 12.
Likely entry errors are dropped: wages with a missing or unrecognized unit, annualized values under $15,000, hourly rates over $1,000, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly amounts that look like annual salaries, and annualized values over $1,000,000 (yearly salaries up to $3,000,000 are kept for physicians and chief or general executives).
Percentiles use linear interpolation. Groups with fewer than 5 filings are not published.

The OEWS comparison

Each filing is matched to the OEWS median for the same six-digit SOC occupation in the worksite metro area, or the worksite state when no metro figure exists. The matched ratio is each filing's wage over that median, then the median across filings. OEWS hourly-only occupations are annualized at 2,080 hours, which BLS does not publish.

The bottom-of-range caveat

The wage used is WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM, the bottom of each filing's offered range, so medians run low against OEWS. See how to read LCA data and LCA versus OEWS.

What is published

The ledger holds 10,250 employer pages, 2,993 job-and-metro pages and 51 state pages. Every employer with at least 5 certified filings has a page, unless its page would be nearly identical to another filer's page; the offer check then shows that employer's own median and middle half. Pages for employers with fewer than 10 filings show no 10th or 90th percentile and carry a small-sample note; they, and pages where no single job title reached 5 filings, are kept out of search engine indexes. A job-and-metro page needs at least 10 filings and a published BLS OEWS median for the same job and metro, or 30 filings. Employers with 1 to 4 filings are named in the offer check with their filing count only, because groups that small are not published. The Wage Data API is built with the same rules. No page republishes individual filings; only employer-level fields are read, and no preparer or contact fields.

Offer check estimates

The offer check places a wage in the published percentiles by linear interpolation. Its wage level estimate places Levels I to IV at the 17th, 34th, 50th and 67th percentiles of the OEWS wages for the job and metro, the approximate positions DOL describes in its March 27, 2026 proposed rule. They are not DOL's official thresholds.

Refresh

Data is rebuilt when OFLC publishes a new quarter. DOL does not announce release dates in advance. Corrections are made by rebuilding from the source files; the privacy page says what the site stores.

Methodology