A Labor Condition Application (LCA, Form ETA-9035) is the filing a US employer must have certified by the Department of Labor before it petitions for an H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 worker (DOL, H-1B program). It states the job title, the worksite, the prevailing wage and the wage the employer will pay, as a single rate or a range, and it has no field for bonus, equity or commission. The record layout for DOL’s public LCA disclosure files defines that wage as the wage paid to nonimmigrant workers at the first worksite location.
In an offer
The public files show what an employer offered as base pay for a named title, which helps when a recruiter asks for your expectations. In H-1B filings certified from October 2024 to June 2026, 387 LCAs had “forward deployed” or “forward-deployed” in the job title, and their offered base wage, taken at the lower bound of each filed range, had a median of $161,637, a 25th percentile of $145,000 and a 75th percentile of $190,000. Source 1LCA_Disclosure_Data_FY2026_Q3.xlsx (DOL OFLC LCA disclosure data)PublisherUS Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor CertificationSource typeUS Department of Labor filing dataHow we used this dataSource 2LCA_Disclosure_Data_FY2025_Q1.xlsx (DOL OFLC LCA disclosure data)PublisherUS Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor CertificationSource typeUS Department of Labor filing dataHow we used this dataSource 3LCA_Disclosure_Data_FY2025_Q2.xlsx (DOL OFLC LCA disclosure data)PublisherUS Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor CertificationSource typeUS Department of Labor filing dataHow we used this dataSource 4LCA_Disclosure_Data_FY2025_Q3.xlsx (DOL OFLC LCA disclosure data)PublisherUS Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor CertificationSource typeUS Department of Labor filing dataHow we used this dataSource 5LCA_Disclosure_Data_FY2025_Q4.xlsx (DOL OFLC LCA disclosure data)PublisherUS Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor CertificationSource typeUS Department of Labor filing dataHow we used this data
A strong candidate filters the DOL disclosure file by EMPLOYER_NAME and a JOB_TITLE containing their target title, reads WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM and WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_TO, PW_WAGE_LEVEL (I to IV, a rough seniority signal, filled only when the employer used the OEWS survey wage and otherwise N/A) and the worksite, and sets that beside the posted band. A lower bound can understate pay within a wide filed range, and an LCA figure is never total compensation or what FDEs earn: it covers sponsored workers only, and base only.
Related: profit participation unit, OTE.