Pay, records and enforcement · Wage year 2026-27

How to check whether you're being paid correctly as a visa holder

You can verify the published half of your wage obligation without asking anyone's permission. It takes about ten minutes and needs five pieces of information, all of which you’re entitled to have.

What you need: Your certified LCATime: About ten minutesWage year here: 2026-27

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.

Your employer promised a specific wage on a specific form, and that form is a public record. Checking it’s arithmetic, not confrontation, and doing it before raising anything is what makes a conversation about pay a conversation about facts.

Step 1. Get the filing

Ask your employer for a copy of the certified Labor Condition Application supporting your status. You’re also entitled to examine the public access file, which contains it, along with the wage documentation behind it. Both are described in What a public access file has to contain.

Step 2. Read five fields

The occupation code. Six digits, in the form XX-XXXX, with an official title next to it. This isn’t your job title.
The worksite county and state. Not the city, and not the headquarters address.
The prevailing wage stated on the form, its unit, its source and the year of the source.
The offered wage range. The bottom of the range is the promise, not the top.
The period of employment. The obligation runs with those dates.

Where each of these sits on the form is covered in Reading an LCA: the fields that matter.

Step 3. Look up the published figure

Find the metropolitan area your worksite county belongs to, then find your occupation code, then read the four levels for the wage year on your filing. Every occupation and area page here does that lookup for you: start from All 60 occupations or All 40 areas. A worked example, Software Developers in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ for wage year 2026-27:

Level	Hourly	Annual at 2,080 hours
Level I	$52.81	$109,845
Level II	$66.21	$137,717
Level III	$79.61	$165,589
Level IV	$93.01	$193,461

Computed from ALC_Export.csv in OFLC_Wages_2026-27.zip, wage year 2026-27.

If the prevailing wage on your filing matches one of these figures, you now know which level your job was filed at, even if the form doesn’t say so in words. If it matches none of them, either a different wage year was used, or a different source, or something is off.

Step 4. Compare against what you’re paid

Convert both sides to the same unit. Annual salary divided by 2,080 gives an hourly figure; published hourly multiplied by 2,080 gives an annual figure. Compare gross pay before deductions. Bonuses and equity are generally not part of this comparison, and a bonus doesn’t repair a base salary that sits below the floor.

Check the periods too. Weeks where you weren’t working because there was no work assigned are still weeks the obligation runs through, on our reading of the nonproductive-time rule described in Full time versus part time, and how the wage is stated.

Step 5. The half you can’t see

The published figure is a floor, not the whole obligation. Your employer also owes at least what it pays comparable staff at your location, and that number is internal. It can only push what you’re owed higher. See Prevailing wage versus actual wage, and the two-part obligation.

If the numbers don’t meet

Check your own arithmetic first, particularly the county, the wage year and the bottom of the offered range, because those three account for most false alarms. If a gap survives that, get advice. Complaints about the wage obligation go to the Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division on Form WH-4, there are time limits, and what the department can do about a shortfall is set out in What happens when the offered wage is below the prevailing wage.

One caution about comparisons with colleagues: the published figure isn’t a market rate. Across the 60 occupations covered here, the median wage actually offered on certified filings runs well above Level I in most of them, and being paid above the floor is the normal case rather than evidence of anything. For Software Developers, the median offered wage in FY2025 Q1 to Q4 was $140,000 across 33,157 filings.

Computed from the OFLC LCA disclosure data, FY2025 Q1 to Q4, certified H-1B filings only.