How to Compare an Offer Against This Data
Filing data can benchmark an offer usefully, but only in the right order. The common approach — searching for the employer's headline median and comparing a salary to it — is the weakest use of the data on this site, because an employer's overall median blends every occupation, level and worksite it files for. An offer can sit below that headline and still be strong for its role, or sit above it and still be weak for a senior specialty in an expensive city. The steps below use the site's pages in the sequence the underlying wage was actually constructed: occupation and area set the legal floor, level sets the position within the range, and the employer's own pattern comes last.
Step one: find the occupation page for the role's SOC code, or the closest code if the employer's mapping is unclear, and note the median and the middle-half range. If the role is in software, read the 15-1252 caveat guide as well, because developer-type titles are split across neighbouring codes and the closest match may not be the obvious one. Step two: open the city page for the worksite and compare its overall level with the national occupation figures; a high-cost city should shift your expectation upward within the occupation range, and a lower-cost city downward. Step three: open the employer page and check two things — how much of its filing volume is in your occupation, and whether its overall median is driven by roles like yours or by an unrelated mix.
Step four: place the offer inside the ranges rather than against a point. An offer inside the occupation's middle half, in a city whose level matches, from an employer whose filings include many similar roles, is broadly consistent with the filing record. An offer below the occupation's 25th percentile deserves questions, not automatic rejection: ask which wage level the filing used, which prevailing-wage source and year, and whether the worksite of record matches where the work will actually be performed. Those three answers explain most low outliers legitimately — and their absence is itself informative when they cannot be given.
Two limits should stay in view throughout. First, the filing records the offered wage at filing time for a defined role; total compensation — bonuses, equity, benefits, signing payments — is outside the form entirely, and comparing a total-compensation offer to a base-wage median misleads in the employer's favour. Compare base to base. Second, the data describe FY2024 Q4 and FY2025 filings. Labour markets move, prevailing-wage surveys are updated annually, and a two-year median is a benchmark, not a quotation. Treat a gap of a few percent as noise, a gap beyond the middle-half range as a finding, and anything in between as a prompt for the level-and-source questions above.
Used this way, public filing data do something valuable: they replace rumour with a reproducible reference point that both sides of a negotiation can inspect. The employer filed these figures with the federal government under attestation; a candidate or a journalist reading them back, carefully and in context, is using the disclosure system for exactly the transparency it was built to provide.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does the data behind this guide come from?
All figures referenced in this guide come from the U.S. Department of Labor OFLC LCA disclosure files for FY2024 Q4 and FY2025 Q1–Q4, retrieved in October 2026, filtered to 662,198 cases with a status of exactly Certified. The methodology page documents the full cleaning process.