Over 78% of top paid H-1B applicants were from India

Among the Indians whose wage rate exceeded $1 million per year, over 25% were women.

In the last four years, more than 78% of the top paid H-1B applicants (whose proposed wage rate exceeded $1 million per year) were from India. Among the Indians whose wage rate exceeded $1 million per year, over 25% were women. Also, over 65% of these high-paid H-1B applicants from India were sponsored by relatively smaller companies in the U.S.

Moreover, the salary range of H-1B applicants whose sponsors were U.S.-based companies was in general higher than the salary range of H-1B applicants whose sponsors were India-based companies. The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows U.S. companies to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise.

These conclusions are based on data obtained by Bloomberg from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Each April, the USCIS conducts a random lottery to determine which H-1B applicants can proceed to submit visa petitions. Candidates may have multiple registrations submitted by different employers. Once selected, an employer can file an H-1B petition on behalf of the beneficiary.

These petitions include details about the proposed job, such as salary and location, and form the basis of the conclusions presented in the story. Only about 1 lakh approved H-1B petitions, filed in the 2021-2024 period, for which all relevant data were available, were taken for the analysis.

While an approved H-1B petition is necessary for obtaining an H-1B visa, it does not guarantee one. After receiving approval from the USCIS, applicants may either apply for an H-1B visa at a U.S. consulate abroad or seek an Adjustment of Status with the USCIS if they are already in the U.S.

Chart 1 shows the proposed yearly wage rate in $ (vertical axis) against the number of workers employed by the sponsor in the U.S. (horizontal axis). Each circle corresponds to an applicant whose application got selected in the lottery and whose H-1B petition was approved. The higher the circle, the higher the proposed salary. The farther to the right, the bigger the company size of the sponsor. Indian applicants are highlighted in a different colour.

Chart appears incomplete? Click to remove AMP mode

Of the 1 lakh H-1B applications, only 123 had a proposed salary of $1 million and above per year. Of them, 96 (78%) were from India. Over 90% of the proposed salaries were in and around the $1,00,000 range.

Chart 2 shows the same information, but only for Indians. Here, female and male applicants are differentiated using colours. Of the 96 applicants from India identified in Chart 1, 25 (26%) were women.

As can be seen in both charts, most of the applications with a higher pay — circles on the top — are crowded towards the left of the chart, pointing to the low employee count for those sponsors. Sixty-three of the 96 applicants identified in Chart 1 were sponsored by U.S. companies which had fewer than 1,000 employees in the U.S.

Click to subscribe to our Data newsletter

In other words, bigger companies — both U.S.-based and India-based — did not sponsor many high-paid H1B applicants. Most of their applicants’ proposed salaries were in the lower range, with very few exceptions.

Chart 3 shows the proposed yearly wage rate in $ for H-1B applicants of well-known sponsors (big-sized firms), in the 2021-2024 period. It ignores outlier salaries to find the usual salary range proposed for most applicants.

The proposed salary range of U.S.-based employers such as Apple and Google were considerably higher than the proposed salary range of Indian-based companies such as Infosys and TCS.

Also read:Indian Americans are the least poor among Asians in the United States | Data

Source: The data for the charts were sourced by the Bloomberg under the Freedom of Information Act