About H1BVisaTracker

Why combine approval rate, wage, and volume on one page

Public H-1B data products typically expose one dimension at a time. The DOL OFLC quarterly file lists every LCA filing with a wage and a certification status. The USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub publishes approval and denial counts. Industry trackers focus on volume rankings. None of those individually answer the question a worker actually has: is this employer a good sponsor?

H1BVisaTracker exists to combine those signals on one per-employer page. The sponsorship score weights approval rate (40%) heavily because approval rate is the most direct signal of a company’s ability to actually deliver the visa. Wage premium versus the prevailing-wage benchmark (30%) is the second-heaviest factor because it indicates whether the company is paying market rates or using the visa as cost leverage. Filing-volume consistency (20%) captures whether the company’s immigration program is mature or sporadic. Denial rate (10%) is the inverse of approval rate but weighted separately so a few denials in an otherwise clean pattern don’t dominate.

What this data cannot tell you

Three limits worth being explicit about. First, the LCA is not the H-1B petition. An employer files an LCA before filing the actual I-129 petition with USCIS; the LCA confirms the wage attestation but does not approve the visa. Approval rates in this dataset reflect LCA certifications, not USCIS petition approvals — those happen at a different agency with their own approval rate that varies by employer category, fiscal year, and policy environment.

Second, wage figures here are the employer-attested H-1B wages. They must equal or exceed the prevailing-wage benchmark for the role and geography, but they do not tell you what the employer pays U.S. workers in the same role, what total compensation looks like (equity, bonuses, benefits often dwarf base wage at large tech employers), or what private-network commercial rates look like at competitor companies.

Third, the data has a cap-lottery filter on it. Companies with strong cap-exempt pipelines (academic medical centers, universities, research institutes) often look different from companies dependent on the H-1B cap lottery. The sponsorship grade does not currently differentiate, which means a worker should read the underlying employer-type information alongside the score.

How to read an employer page

Each /company/[slug] page has five blocks. The header shows total LCA filings, approval rate, wage versus prevailing-wage, geographic spread, and the LakeQuality sponsorship score (A-F). The narrative section translates those numbers into plain English, branched on the specific profile of the employer (large tech vs. specialized consulting vs. academic medical center vs. staffing firm).

Below the narrative, we surface the multi-year filing trend, the top H-1B roles at the company, the top cities, and the wage distribution against the prevailing-wage benchmark. Each chart links to the underlying DOL filings for verification.

For workers comparing employers, the most useful entry points are the role-specific pages (e.g., /role/software-engineer) and the city-specific pages (e.g., /city/seattle-wa), which control for the role-and-geography variation that interacts heavily with H-1B prevailing-wage rules.