Main image of article Check Out How Much Some H-1B Holders Earn
Ever wondered how much H-1B visa holders make? Now’s your chance to find out: San Francisco-based engineer Theo Negri has released a database of H-1B applications, searchable by company. Whenever a firm based in the United States wants to bring in a worker via an H-1B visa, it must submit a Labor Condition Application (LCA) with the U.S. government. Every LCA features the potential worker’s proposed salary; compile enough LCAs into a database, and you can get a pretty good idea of how much companies are shelling out to bring in H-1B workers. Quartz combed through Negri’s LCA database and came up with a list of the average salaries for H-1B holders at a number of tech companies. Topping the list was Netflix, where the average H-1B holder could expect to earn $214,693 in 2014, followed by Box ($143,318), Etsy ($135,595), Twitter ($134,221), and Airbnb ($134,039). Many of these firms are willing to pay above the industry average for H-1B talent. Earlier this year, for example, Netflix applied for a senior database platform engineer at a $250,000 annual salary, nearly $100,000 above the average wage for that position (according to Negri’s data). Based on the LCA database, Airbnb seems willing to pay anywhere from $10,000 to $60,000 above the average for data scientists, software engineers, and other H-1B holders. Earlier this year, developer Swizec Teller crunched H-1B data from the U.S. Department of Labor and concluded that the average engineer with the visa makes $87,000 a year, while developers and programmers earn $74,000 and $61,000, respectively. His visualizations also suggested that the number of H-1B workers in the United States has increased over the past two years, even if their average salaries have dipped. Declining salaries or not, Negri’s data suggests that some H-1B holders can expect some pretty lucrative paydays.