Why One Job Title Can Carry Four Different Prevailing Wages

Two engineers can do the same job, at the same company, in the same city, and still be sponsored at wages that differ by tens of thousands of dollars a year. Nothing about that is a mistake. It is how the H-1B wage system was built to work.

By law, DOL must set four H-1B wage levels. Every prevailing-wage determination a sponsor requests comes back pinned to one of those four rungs, and which rung applies can matter as much as the job description itself. That single choice ripples through the rest of the filing: the wage a company promises to pay, the paperwork it has to keep on hand, and how the position compares if a competitor later challenges the classification.

Four levels, one occupation

The levels are meant to track experience: entry-level work sits at the bottom, work requiring unusual skill or independent judgment sits at the top. In practice, sponsors are supposed to choose the level that matches the position they are actually filling, not the most impressive title they could plausibly claim.

The math behind the levels comes from local wage-survey data for the occupation, not from what any individual company happens to pay its own staff. That is what makes two nearly identical job postings in different metro areas land on very different dollar figures even at the same level. None of the four levels asks what a specific employer can afford, or what a candidate might accept. The comparison is always to the local labor market for that occupation, which keeps the floor tied to reality rather than to any one company's own budget.

Where most H-1B jobs actually land

A widely cited analysis of federal filing data found that a total of 60% of H-1B positions certified by DOL had been assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation. Specifically, 14% were at H-1B Level 1, the 17th percentile, and 46% were at H-1B Level 2, the 34th percentile.

Read plainly, that means most certified H-1B positions are not benchmarked anywhere near the middle of the local pay scale. They sit well beneath it, which is legal under the current rule but leaves plenty of room for two employers in the same office park to sponsor the same role at very different pay. None of this means every sponsor is gaming the system. Plenty of Level 1 and Level 2 filings genuinely describe entry-level work filled by someone early in their career. The pattern only becomes a problem when a senior role gets filed at a junior wage level to save money rather than to reflect the job.

Why a handful of employers shape the picture

The wage-level choice is not evenly distributed across the employer base either. In 2019, 53,377 employers had at least one petition approved for an H-1B worker. Yet the top 30 H-1B employers accounted for more than a quarter, or one in four, of all H-1B petitions approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for initial and continuing H-1B employment.

A small number of very large filers can therefore shape what looks "typical" across an entire dataset, even though most sponsors are companies filing for a handful of specialists a year, not a warehouse of interchangeable roles. A mid-size employer's wage choices get compared against a distribution that a few outsized filers are quietly dragging downward. For a mid-size sponsor, the practical lesson is not to copy what a giant filer does. A wage level chosen to match a competitor's public filings, rather than the actual duties of the role, is exactly the kind of shortcut an auditor is trained to notice.

What this means for the sponsor filling out the form

None of this is optional trivia for a mobility team. The wage level a sponsor selects becomes the wage a company is legally bound to pay for the life of the petition, and switching levels later is rarely a paperwork formality; it usually means a new filing.

The safer approach treats level selection as a real judgment call made early, with input from whoever actually manages the role, rather than a box a junior recruiter fills in because it matches last year's filing. A role that has grown in scope since the last renewal probably belongs at a higher level than the one still on file.

Choosing the honest level costs more upfront. It also tends to cost far less than defending a mismatched one later, once a worker's actual duties and a stale wage determination stop lining up. A wage level, once filed, becomes part of the public record for that position. Treating the choice with the same care as the job description itself is the cheapest insurance a sponsor can buy.