Source DOL OFLC LCA disclosure FY2026 Q3 releaseCompared with BLS OEWS May 2025Status certified filings only
Occupation SOC 17-2041 in metro area CBSA 41860
Chemical Engineers in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA
39 certified H-1B, H-1B1 and E-3 Labor Condition Applications for Chemical Engineers (SOC 17-2041) in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA offered a median annual wage of $146,700. Half fall between $110,160 and $158,500, and the 10th to 90th percentile range runs from $91,853 to $187,243.
- Median wage filed
- $146,700per year
- Middle half
- $110,160
to$158,500 - 10th to 90th percentile
- $91,853
to$187,243 - Certified filings
- 39
The filings, settled
How 39 filings become one distribution
Each dot is a share of the filings.
39 certified applications, each stating the wage the employer offered. Each dot stands for an equal share of them, placed on a curve through the published percentiles, not at any one filing's wage. Scattered, they are just paperwork.
Line them up by wage.
Stack the filings on a salary axis and the shape appears: a dense middle, then a tail of higher offers stretching right.
Read the percentiles.
Half of the filings sit between $110,160 and $158,500. The median filing offered $146,700. These rules come from the filings themselves. The dots between them are placed on a curve through those rules.
No market rule here.
BLS publishes no OEWS median for Chemical Engineers in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA, so this page draws no comparison.
The ledger
Filed against the BLS median for this area
No BLS OEWS median was available for this occupation in this area, so no comparison is shown.
BLS estimates 620 people work in this occupation in the area.
Read it carefully. Filing wages are what employers offered on applications, annualized. OEWS medians cover every worker in the occupation. The two are different groups of people, so a gap between them is not a measure of fairness or of any one person's pay.
Prevailing wage level
Which wage level employers chose
A filing can name one of four prevailing wage levels for the job and area, from I (entry) to IV (fully competent), under the Department of Labor's wage guidance; some filings leave the level blank. Of the filings here that name a level, 9% were at level I, 23% at level II, 31% at level III and 37% at level IV.
By employer
Who filed for this job here
| Employer | Filings | Filings relative to the top row |
|---|---|---|
| Tesla | 5 | |
| Anthro Energy | 4 | |
| University of California, Berkeley | 3 | |
| Bayer HealthCare LLC | 2 | |
| Ammobia, Inc. | 2 |
Data release alerts
Hear when the next filing data lands
The Department of Labor publishes new LCA disclosure data a few times a year. Get a short email when Filed Wages updates, plus the occasional wage-level explainer.
Method
How these numbers are made
Clerk's note. Wages are the bottom of each filing's offered range (WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM), so medians run low against OEWS. Percentiles are unweighted: each certified filing counts once regardless of the number of worker positions requested. Hourly OEWS-only occupations are annualized at 2,080 hours, which BLS does not publish.
Full method notes
- Only applications with case status exactly "Certified" are counted. Withdrawn, denied and certified-then-withdrawn cases are dropped.
- A Labor Condition Application covers H-1B, H-1B1 (Chile and Singapore) and E-3 (Australia) workers. Certification means the Department of Labor accepted the filing; it does not mean anyone was hired or paid that amount.
- 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 pay 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 BLS comparison uses the OEWS median for the same 6-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.
- The dot field on this page is a quantile dot plot: each dot stands for an equal share of the filings and is a modelled position, not a filing's own wage. Between two published percentiles the dots are spaced log-linearly on the normal-score scale, so the curve passes exactly through the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles and every dot stays between the two percentiles that bound it. The data publishes nothing outside the 10th to 90th range, so those dots are extrapolated and drawn hollow. The share of filings above the red rule is read from the same curve.