About Visa Wage Index

Every employer in the United States that hires on an H-1B, E-3 or H-1B1 visa must first file a Labor Condition Application stating the wage it will pay. Every employer sponsoring an employment-based green card must first get a permanent labour certification. Both are public. Neither is usable: the quarterly releases are 250 MB spreadsheets of 98 columns that a spreadsheet application will not open, an employer is keyed by a name spelled dozens of ways, and a wage means nothing until it is set against the prevailing wage for the area that governs it. This site does that work.

Where the data comes from

• LCA disclosure data — every H-1B, E-3 and H-1B1 filing decided in the fiscal year to date, from the OFLC performance page. Refreshed when a new quarterly release appears, which OFLC publishes without a calendar.
• PERM disclosure data — permanent labour certifications, from the same page and on the same cadence.
• The OFLC prevailing wage library — the four wage levels for every occupation and area, from flag.dol.gov. Published once a year, in July.
• Census ZCTA-to-county relationships — used only to place a worksite whose county field holds a town name, which is how New England fills it in.

All of it is a work of the US Government and in the public domain. We add the joining, the arithmetic and the wording.

What we do to it

We fold the spellings of an employer’s name together so one company is one page, but we do not merge employers that share a tax identifier: one state university system files under a single identifier for institutions that are separate places to work. We convert every wage to a yearly figure using the Department’s own 2,080-hour year, so an hourly filing and a salaried one can sit in the same column. We resolve each worksite to the wage area that governs it — by county where the file names one, by ZIP code where it names a town instead, and not at all for a few hundred filings in Connecticut and the Northern Marianas, which say so rather than guess.

What we leave out

The source files carry contact details on nearly every row: employer and attorney names, street addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, federal tax identifiers and state bar numbers. The Department’s own documentation says this information is excluded from the disclosure data. It is not. We read those columns and discard them at the point the file is parsed; they are not stored, and there is no column for them in our database.

We do not build pages that rank individual attorneys or law firms, though the PERM file names the filing attorney on most rows.

Corrections and removals

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it — corrections@visawageindex.com.

Some employers are named after the person who owns them. If that is you and you want your page reconsidered, write to privacy@visawageindex.com. We will read it, reply, and explain what we can and cannot change — the underlying filings are the Department of Labor’s public record and we cannot alter those, but what we choose to republish and how prominently is ours.

Who runs it

Ospan (Nevada, USA), 1285 Baring Blvd #704, Sparks, NV 89434. Not a law firm, not an agency, and not affiliated with either.