San Francisco, CA Salaries by Worksite

By the H-1B Salary Data Editorial Team · Last updated: October 2026

San Francisco, CA accounts for 13,191 certified LCA cases in this dataset, with a median offered wage of $178,341 — about 45% above the national median. City pages are often the most practical pages on this site, because the prevailing wage that sets the legal floor for a filing is determined for a specific area of employment. Two otherwise identical roles can therefore carry noticeably different offered wages in different cities, and a city median captures that local pricing more faithfully than either a state or a national figure can.

At the same time, a city median is still a blend. It mixes occupations, experience levels and employers, and in smaller worksites it can be moved by a single large filer's hiring pattern in a given year. The tables below are therefore the heart of this page: they show which employers and which occupations actually make up this city's filings. If one employer accounts for a very large share, the city median largely describes that employer's filing mix, and the employer's own page becomes the more informative benchmark.

Wage Table — San Francisco, CA

Top Employers in San Francisco, CA

Employer concentration varies sharply between cities. Some worksites are dominated by a single headquarters employer; others are shared among dozens of firms, including consulting companies placing workers at client sites in the city. Both patterns are visible in the counts above. Where concentration is high, year-to-year changes in the city median often track one firm's hiring cycle. Where concentration is low, the median is a more stable picture of the local market for sponsored professional roles as a whole.

Top Occupations in San Francisco, CA

The occupation list explains most of what a city's median can and cannot tell you. A city dominated by software, finance or specialised medical filings will post a higher median than a city with a broader professional mix, without either city necessarily paying more for the same job. For a personal benchmark, find your occupation in the table above, open its occupation page for the national distribution and top employers, and then weigh this city's overall level against that occupation-specific range rather than against the city headline alone.

How These Figures Were Computed

Every figure on this page was computed by our script directly from the U.S. Department of Labor OFLC LCA disclosure files for FY2024 Q4 and FY2025 Q1–Q4, retrieved in October 2026. We kept only cases whose CASE_STATUS is exactly “Certified” — denied, withdrawn and certified-withdrawn cases are excluded. Headline medians use filings whose wage unit is a year, because annual salaries compare cleanly; hourly, weekly and monthly filings are counted in case totals but are not converted into the headline median, and our methodology page explains that choice in full. Wages below $15,080 a year (the annualized federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour) or above $1,000,000 a year are excluded from medians as likely data-entry placeholders, and the number excluded is reported in the manifest that accompanies this site. Medians are shown alongside means because a handful of very large offers can drag a mean far above what a typical filing actually offered.