How LCA Disclosure Data Works
The Labor Condition Application, known as the LCA or Form ETA-9035, is the document an employer files with the U.S. Department of Labor before petitioning to employ a worker in the H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 visa classes. In it the employer attests to four core things: it will pay the worker at least the higher of the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of employment or the actual wage it pays similarly employed workers; the employment will not adversely affect working conditions of U.S. workers; there is no strike or lockout in the occupation at the worksite; and it has notified workers of the filing. The Department certifies the application if it is complete and contains no obvious inaccuracies — a point readers must hold onto, because certification is a review of the form, not an investigation of the employer.
Each row in the public disclosure file is one case. The fields used on this site record the employer's name, the job title, the Standard Occupational Classification code and title, the offered wage rate and its unit (year, hour, week, month or bi-weekly), the prevailing wage and its source and level, and the worksite city and state. A case can cover more than one worker position, and the same worker can appear in more than one case over time — for an amendment, a change of employer, or a new role — so case counts on this site are counts of filings, never counts of individual people. That single distinction explains most misreadings of LCA statistics in the press.
The case status field is where careful reading starts. Cases can be Certified, Certified - Withdrawn, Denied or Withdrawn. This site uses only cases whose status is exactly Certified. Certified - Withdrawn is a separate status meaning the employer withdrew a case after certification; including those rows — as some quick analyses do — double-counts intentions that the employer itself abandoned. Denied and withdrawn cases are likewise excluded, because they never represented an attested offer the Department accepted.
The fiscal-year files are published quarterly, and each quarterly file contains that quarter's cases — the Q4 file is not a cumulative full-year file, a common misreading. This site uses the FY2024 Q4 file together with all four FY2025 quarterly files, retrieved from the Department's foreign labour performance data page in October 2026, so the dataset covers five quarters: the last quarter of FY2024 and the full FY2025 fiscal year. Combining quarters smooths one-off hiring spikes, but it also means figures describe that five-quarter period as a whole rather than the most recent quarter — a trade-off the methodology page states openly.
What the data cannot show is equally important. It does not show whether the subsequent visa petition was approved, whether the worker actually started, how long they stayed, what they were ultimately paid including bonuses and raises, or whether the employment ended early. It also does not include programmes that use different forms: PERM labour certification for permanent employment and the H-2A and H-2B programmes each have their own disclosure files, and this site excludes them entirely. Used within those limits, LCA data is the most complete public record of offered wages for these visa classes; used outside them, it misleads.
Finally, a note on wage units. Most filings state an annual salary, but a meaningful minority state an hourly, weekly, monthly or bi-weekly rate. Converting every rate to an annual figure requires assuming hours and weeks that the filing does not always support, so this site's headline medians use annual-unit filings only, while case counts include all certified filings. The wage-unit guide page works through that decision with examples, and the methodology page reports how many filings fall into each unit so readers can judge the effect for themselves.
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.