H-1B Wages at Top 20 Employers Substantially Less than U.S. Wages

I previously responded to Microsoft’s claim that it pays all of its workers, including H-1Bs, on the same pay scale by breaking down its H-1B wages by country of origin. The data showed that Microsoft’s wages vary depending upon the nationality of the worker.

I thought it would be interesting to do the same experiment for the top 20 employers of H-1B visas (excluding Microsoft). For each company, I identified its occupation with the most approved H-1B visas and then I identified the metropolitan area with the most nonimmigrants in that occupation using the 2023 and 2024 H-1B data. The purpose of this procedure was to get the largest group for each that could be compared by country. The columns for each employer are:

• Country of origin;
• Count of workers for that country;
• Median age for those nonimmigrant workers;
• Median wages for the nonimmigrant workers; and
• The median difference between the H-1B wage and the U.S. wage for the same occupation and location according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2023.

Seven of the 20 companies got all of their H-1B nonimmigrants from India, so the only wage difference is to U.S. workers. With the exception of McKinsey, Bloomberg, and Cognizant, the H-1B wages were substantially less than U.S. wages and the wages varied depending upon the country of origin. In the case of Cognizant, one has to wonder how many of its H-1B nonimmigrants are actually working in the College Park, Texas, area and whether many of them are working in higher wage locations.

We still have no answer to why Canadian H-1B nonimmigrants earn substantially more than Indian H-1B nonimmigrants in the same occupation, location, and employer.