How a determination is built · Wage year 2026-27
Appendix A, and which occupations are on it
Appendix A is a list of professional occupations attached to the prevailing wage guidance. If the job is on it, requiring a degree is ordinary rather than exceptional, and the education step buys nothing.
Appendix A is a list of occupations the Department of Labor treats as professional, published as an appendix to its prevailing wage determination policy guidance. It exists to answer one question in the level determination: is a degree requirement ordinary for this occupation, or is it something extra the employer has asked for?
If the occupation is on the list, a bachelor's degree is the norm, so requiring one isn’t a step up. If the occupation isn’t on the list and the employer requires a degree anyway, the requirement sits above what the occupation usually needs, and on our reading of the guidance that’s a step.
Not the same thingAppendix A isn’t Schedule A. Schedule A is the list of occupations at 20 CFR 656.5 for which the Department of Labor has pre-certified that there aren’t sufficient US workers available, which lets a PERM case skip recruitment. The two are unrelated, they sit in different documents, and confusing them will send a case down the wrong track.
What it looks like in this data
The wage file build here carries an Appendix A flag per occupation. Of the 60 occupations covered, 59 carry it. That near-unanimity is a selection effect, not a fact about the American labor market: this site covers the occupations with the highest certified H-1B filing volume, and H-1B is a specialty occupation programme, so almost everything in the set is professional by construction.
| Occupation | SOC | Job Zone | Usual entry education | Appendix A |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers | 11-3071 | 4 | High school diploma or equivalent | No |
| Software Developers | 15-1252 | 4 | Bachelor's degree | Yes |
| Computer and Information Research Scientists | 15-1221 | 5 | Master's degree | Yes |
Appendix A flag, Job Zone and usual entry education from the OFLC occupation files in OFLC_Wages_2026-27.zip, wage year 2026-27.
The single exception in this build is Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers, SOC 11-3071, whose usual entry education is high school diploma or equivalent. That’s exactly the case Appendix A is built to catch. An employer filing for that occupation and requiring a bachelor's degree has required education above the occupational norm, and on our reading that’s a step up on its own, before experience or supervision are considered.
How to use it when preparing a filing
The check is short. Find the occupation, confirm whether it’s on Appendix A, and read the usual entry education. Then read the job description and ask whether the education requirement written there sits above that. A master's requirement in an occupation whose usual entry level is a bachelor's degree is above it. A bachelor's requirement in a professional occupation isn’t.
Two failure modes recur. The first is treating "we prefer a master's" as a requirement, which inflates the level and the wage for no reason. The second is treating a genuine hard requirement as a preference to keep the level down, which is the more dangerous direction, because the job description is a document the employer wrote and will be read against.
Where it sits in the sequence
Appendix A only governs the education step. It has nothing to say about experience, which comes from Job Zones, and how they set the experience baseline, and nothing to say about specialised requirements or supervision. The full sequence is in How the four wage levels are determined, and the occupation attributes for any single occupation are stated on its own page, for instance Computer and Information Research Scientists prevailing wage by area.
Read this firstThis is a computed reading of published federal data and published federal guidance, not legal advice. Only the Department of Labor issues prevailing wage determinations, and only the Department of Labor decides whether an obligation has been met. Where a rule below is our reading rather than a verbatim quotation, the text says so.
More in how a determination is built
- What the prevailing wage is, and why it exists. The floor, what it measures, and the statutory reason it exists at all.
- How the four wage levels are determined. The step-up logic, plus the exact arithmetic relationship between the four figures.
- Job Zones, and how they set the experience baseline. Where the experience ceiling comes from, and why five years means different things in different occupations.
- SOC codes, and how a job maps to one. How the classification is structured, how duties drive the match, and the pairs that get confused.
All 24 guides are indexed at Guides. Wage figures throughout are read from ALC_Export.csv, wage year 2026-27.