H1B Salaries: When to Trust the Data (and when to ask more questions)
Each year since 1990, the Department of Labor has allowed 85,000 college-educated foreign workers to legally work in skilled labor positions in the United States under the H-1B visa. If you find yourself in this category, you've likely consulted one of the many H1B-specific salary databases, such as H-1B Salary Database, for guidance regarding compensation for common job titles. These websites index data from the US Department of Labor's (DOL) Labor Condition Application (LCA), which specifically requires employers to provide information regarding wages and benefits they intend to pay the visa holder. The LCA is a matter of public record, and a prerequisite to filing an H-1B petition with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Essentially, these sites document basic salary data and make it easily accessible to the public.
While this data is an excellent starting point for understanding the market for a given role and geographic location, it is often misleading or incomplete because it only states base salary information for the job title. Compensation structures vary greatly across industries, and rarely is base salary the sole indicator of how much an individual will receive in total take home pay. For instance, let's review the 2019 salary data for a Facebook Security Engineer in Menlo Park, CA:
