Geography, vintage and the underlying survey · Wage year 2026-27
Area of intended employment, and why the county matters more than the city
Every prevailing wage figure is attached to a geographic area, and the area is a set of counties. The city name on the offer letter has no role in the lookup.
The regulations define the area of intended employment as the area within normal commuting distance of the place of employment. The Department of Labor operationalises that with metropolitan areas, and the wage file publishes one row per area and occupation. So the practical question is never "what city is this job in", it’s "which area code does this worksite fall into".
The mapping lives in a file called Geography.csv, shipped in the same archive as the wage table. It assigns every county and town to exactly one area. There are 530 areas in the 2026-27 file. This site carries pages for 40 of them, the ones with the highest certified filing volume.
What an area actually is
New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ isn’t New York City. In this file it’s 22 counties spanning more than one state, and every one of them shares the same wage table. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is 11 counties. A worksite in any of them gets the same figures as a worksite downtown.
| Area | Counties | Certified filings |
|---|---|---|
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 22 | 1,290 |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 11 | 1,023 |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 2 | 875 |
| Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, AR | 3 | 48 |
County counts from Geography.csv in OFLC_Wages_2026-27.zip. Filing counts computed from the OFLC LCA disclosure data, FY2025 Q1 to Q4.
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA is the opposite case: 2 counties, San Benito County and Santa Clara County. It sits next to a much larger neighbouring area, and the boundary between them is a county line that carries real money. For Software Developers at Level II, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA is $187,075 a year and New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is $137,717. Two employers with the same job description, in adjacent counties, can owe different floors.
Computed from ALC_Export.csv in OFLC_Wages_2026-27.zip, wage year 2026-27.
Where addresses go wrong
- A mailing address in one county and a worksite in another. The place of employment governs, not the payroll address or the headquarters address.
- A city that straddles a county line, or a suburb whose postal city belongs to a different county than the physical site. The county is the authoritative input, and postal geography isn’t county geography.
- A worksite that’s the employee's home. Remote work still has a physical location, and that location has a county and therefore an area.
- A site just outside a metropolitan area. Counties outside every metropolitan boundary are assigned to non-metropolitan areas, which have their own wage tables and are frequently a good deal lower.
The failure mode isn’t usually fraud. It’s a form filled from the address block on the offer letter rather than from the address of the desk. That’s a correctable error before filing and an awkward one after.
One filing, more than one area
A position that spans two areas isn’t a single lookup. The application has room for multiple worksites, and the obligation follows each of them, which is the subject of Multiple worksite locations on one filing. A later move to a different area is a separate question again, covered in Amended petitions and material change.
Checking a specific area
Each area page here lists every county in that area and the occupations with a surveyed figure there. For instance Prevailing wage in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ enumerates all 22. The full list is at All 40 areas. If the figure you get back isn’t actually a survey of that area, that’s a different problem, and it has its own guide: What GeoLvl means, and when a wage figure is imputed.
More in geography, vintage and the underlying survey
- What GeoLvl means, and when a wage figure is imputed. The flag that says whether your wage is a local survey or a borrowed one, and what to do when it’s borrowed.
- The wage year calendar, and when the figures change. When the figures change, what happens to a case that straddles the rollover, and how to date a number.
- Where the DOL wage data comes from, and the OEWS survey behind it. The survey underneath the tables, what it measures, and the limits that come with it.
All 24 guides are indexed at Guides. Wage figures throughout are read from ALC_Export.csv, wage year 2026-27.