California Salaries by Worksite

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

Filings with a worksite in California show a median offered wage of $160,000, which sits about 30% above the national median of $123,282. State-level medians blend every occupation and every metro in the state, so they are best used as a first orientation rather than a benchmark for a specific job. A state whose filings concentrate in one expensive metropolitan area will look very different from a state whose filings are spread across smaller cities, even if pay for the same occupation in the same kind of city is similar in both places.

There are 123,286 certified cases for California in the FY2024–FY2025 files. The legal significance of the worksite is that the prevailing wage for a filing is determined for the area of intended employment. Employers must offer at least the prevailing wage or the actual wage paid to similarly employed workers, whichever is higher, and that requirement is assessed place by place. This is why the occupation and city breakdowns below matter more than the state headline: they show which roles and which local labour markets are actually producing this state's figures.

Wage Table — California

Top Employers in California

The employers at the top of a state ranking are usually a mixture of locally headquartered firms, national firms with a major site in the state, and consulting firms placing workers at client locations there. Distinguishing those three groups matters when interpreting pay: a firm placing staff at client sites files where the client is, so its presence in this state says more about its clients' locations than about its own offices. Each employer's linked page shows its national occupation mix, which helps a reader judge whether its California filings are likely to be its core workforce or client placements.

Top Occupations in California

Occupation mix is the main reason state medians differ. States with a heavy concentration of technology, finance or specialised healthcare filings show higher medians than states where filings spread across education, general healthcare and other professional services — even when each occupation is paid similarly in both states. If you are researching a specific career in California, start from the occupation row above, move to that occupation's national page, and then compare the city pages for the places in California where that occupation actually clusters. That sequence gives a far more honest benchmark than any single state-wide number.

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.