About the data
SponsorWage republishes wage data that US employers are legally required to disclose. It currently holds 581,380 certified filings from 65,846 employers across 110,978 job titles.
Where it comes from
An employer hiring on an H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 visa must file a Labor Condition Application with the Department of Labor stating the wage it will pay. The Office of Foreign Labor Certification publishes every determination quarterly as a public disclosure file. Those files are the sole source here.
What we do to it
- Annualise. Wages are filed hourly, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or yearly. Everything is converted to an annual figure so filings can be compared at all.
- Merge employer name variants. The same company appears under many spellings across filings. Names are normalised so one employer means one page.
- Keep only certified filings. Denied and withdrawn applications say nothing about what an employer pays.
- Drop implausible wages. Filings contain data-entry errors. Annualised figures outside a plausible band are excluded so they cannot distort a median.
- Report distributions, not averages. Pay is skewed; a mean is misleading. Every page shows the 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile.
What the numbers are not
- Not total compensation. Filings state base salary. Bonuses, equity and sign-on payments are invisible here, which is why real pay at large technology employers runs well above these figures.
- Not verified payroll. A filing is a commitment made at application time, not a record of what was paid.
- Not all employees. Only visa-sponsored roles appear. US-citizen colleagues in the same job are not in this data.
- Not immigration advice. Nothing here is legal advice. For your own case, consult a licensed immigration attorney.
Corrections
If an employer page merges two genuinely different companies, or a figure looks wrong, the underlying filing is public and checkable against the DOL source file. Corrections are welcome.