Offered Wages Are Not Actual Pay
The most important sentence on this site is the one repeated in the disclaimer on every data page: LCA wages are offered wages stated on filings, not guaranteed actual pay. The LCA is filed before the employment relationship it supports, and it records what the employer attests it will pay — specifically, a rate at least equal to the higher of the prevailing wage and the employer's actual wage for similarly employed workers. It is a compliance document with legal consequences for the employer, which makes it far more serious than a job posting, but it is still a statement of intent made at filing time, not a record of money that changed hands.
Several ordinary events can separate the filed figure from eventual pay. The worker may receive raises, promotion adjustments or bonuses after starting, none of which appear in the original filing. The role may start later than planned, be performed part-year, or change level. The petition that follows the LCA may not be approved, the worker may not start at all, or the employment may end early — and none of those outcomes amend the disclosure row, which continues to sit in the file as a certified case. Conversely, an employer may file an amended or new LCA when material terms change, adding a second row for what a reader might count as the same job.
None of this makes the data useless; it defines what the data is good for. Offered wages are an excellent record of the price employers publicly committed to for defined occupations in defined places at a defined time, across hundreds of thousands of filings — a scale no salary survey matches. They are a poor record of any individual's earnings, of total compensation including equity and benefits, and of the current pay of people already in post, whose salaries reflect years of adjustments after their filing date. This site's pages are written to the first use and against the second: distributions and medians, never individual claims.
Readers using these figures in a negotiation or a news story should carry the distinction into their own sentences. The accurate phrasing is that an employer offered a median wage of a stated amount across its certified filings in a stated period. The inaccurate phrasing is that the employer pays its workers that amount. The difference is not pedantry: the first sentence is provable from a public file, and the second asserts payroll facts that neither this site nor the disclosure data can establish. Where a figure matters, cite the period, the status filter and the dataset alongside the number, as our pages do.
There is also a fairness point in the other direction. Because many offers are set with reference to the prevailing-wage floor, a filing at the lower end of a distribution may reflect the legal pricing of an entry-level role rather than an employer choosing to underpay relative to its own workforce — the actual-wage prong exists precisely to police that gap internally. Judging an employer's pay practices from LCA medians alone, without occupation, level and worksite, repeats the exact error this site's structure is designed to prevent. Use the employer figure as the start of a question, and the occupation and city pages as the way to answer it.
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.