Pay, records and enforcement · Wage year 2026-27

What happens when the offered wage is below the prevailing wage

A shortfall against the required wage is a live obligation, not a filing defect. It accrues, it’s enforceable, and the certification on the application is no answer to it.

Enforced by: DOL Wage and Hour DivisionComplaint form: WH-4Wage year: 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.

The employer attested that it would pay the required wage. If it pays less, the promise is broken from the date the shortfall starts, and the size of it accrues week by week. Nothing about the application having been certified changes that, for the reasons in What an LCA actually certifies, and what it doesn’t.

How shortfalls arise

The level was set too low for the job as described, so the published figure used was the wrong one of four.
The wrong area was used. A wage looked up for one metropolitan area doesn’t cover a worksite in another.
The wage year rolled over and an old figure carried forward into a new filing.
Comparable staff received raises and the internal actual wage rose above what the visa holder is paid.
The person was benched. Nonproductive time caused by the employer doesn’t suspend the obligation.
Deductions. Reducing pay by amounts that are properly the employer's own business expenses can push the effective wage below the floor.

The arithmetic is unforgiving because the gaps between levels and between areas are large. For Software Developers at Level II, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA is $187,075 a year and Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX is $116,896. Using the wrong one of those for a year is a $70,179 shortfall, on one person.

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

How it comes to light

Three routes, roughly in order of frequency. A complaint by the worker or by someone else with knowledge of the facts, filed with the Wage and Hour Division on Form WH-4. A department-initiated investigation. Or an internal discovery during an audit, an acquisition, or the preparation of a later filing that requires the earlier one to be reconciled.

The last of those is the good outcome, because it’s the one where the employer still controls the timing. The evidence involved is largely documents the employer already has to keep, which is the point of What a public access file has to contain.

What the department can do

The Wage and Hour Division administers the wage obligation. The remedies available to it include ordering payment of back wages to make the worker whole, assessing civil money penalties, and, in more serious cases, barring the employer from the immigration programmes for a period. We aren’t stating penalty amounts or debarment periods here, because those are set by regulation, they change, and a stale figure would be worse than none.

The exposure is per worker and per pay period, which is what makes a small hourly gap into a large number over a multi-year filing.

If you find one

Establish the correct figure first: the occupation code, the county, the wage year, the level, and the internal actual wage. A shortfall against the wrong benchmark isn’t a shortfall.
Work out the period. The date the obligation started is usually the date employment began under the filing, not the date somebody noticed.
Get advice before deciding what to do about it. The choice between correcting without a record, correcting and documenting, and disclosing has consequences this page can’t evaluate.
Fix the process that produced it. A single wrong lookup rarely stays single, because the same process runs on every case.

If you’re the person being underpaid

Start by checking the published figure against your own pay, which is set out step by step in How to check whether you're being paid correctly as a visa holder. Complaints go to the Wage and Hour Division on Form WH-4, and there are time limits on when a complaint can be brought, so the timing question is worth asking early rather than late.

The published half of the obligation is the half you can verify without the employer. The other half is described in Prevailing wage versus actual wage, and the two-part obligation, and it can only make the number owed larger, never smaller.