What this data does not say

This site republishes public Department of Labor filings. That makes it unusually reliable in one narrow sense — these are legal attestations, not self-reported survey answers — and unreliable in several others that are easy to miss. Here is where it stops being able to answer your question.

It is base salary, and only base salary

The wage on a filing is base pay. It excludes bonus, equity, sign-on, relocation and every other component of an offer.

At most employers this is a modest gap. At large technology and finance companies it is enormous — equity and bonus can approach or exceed base for senior roles. A $200,000 filing at such a company and a $200,000 filing at a mid-size firm are not the same offer, and this site cannot tell you so. It has no data on the rest of the package.

It is what was filed, not what was paid

The employer attests to a wage at the time of filing. Nothing here is payroll. Actual pay may be higher, and raises after the filing do not appear until the next one.

Certification is not employment

A certified filing means the Department of Labor approved the filing. It does not mean a visa was granted, and it does not mean anyone was hired. Employers sometimes file for roles that go unfilled, and a later petition to a different agency can still be denied.

So a filing count is a count of filings. Treat it as a measure of sponsorship activity, not headcount.

Job titles are free text

Employers type the job title themselves. The same role appears as “Software Engineer”, “Software Engineer II”, “Sr. Software Engineer” and a hundred other spellings, and there are over a hundred thousand distinct title strings in this data.

That is why the occupation pages exist. They group by the federal occupation code on the same filing, which is far more consistent — though still chosen by the employer, so two companies can classify similar work differently.

Coverage is sponsorship, not the labour market

Only sponsored roles are here. If an employer rarely sponsors, it will look small or be absent regardless of how many people it employs. These figures describe what visa sponsors pay sponsored workers — not national pay for the occupation.

Location is the worksite

Filings are placed by worksite, not headquarters. A company based in one state that places staff in another appears under the second. For remote and multi-site roles the recorded worksite may be an office the person rarely visits.

It lags

DOL publishes disclosure files quarterly. There is a gap between a filing being decided and appearing here, and a further gap before the next release. Recent market movement will not show up yet.

What it is genuinely good for

With those limits stated, the data is strong evidence for a few things:

• Whether a specific employer sponsors at all, and how often.
• The base-salary band for an occupation at an employer, when the filing count is high enough to mean something.
• How base pay for a profession differs across states and cities.
• How a sponsor’s filed wages have moved across fiscal years.

For how much weight to put on any single figure, see how to read the wage percentiles. For where the data comes from and how it is processed, see about the data.