Smaller Tech Companies Pay H-1B Workers More Than Big Tech – Dice Insights

When it comes to the H-1B and the tech industry, much of the discussion tends to focus on how the largest and most-established tech companies use the visa. However, examining smaller companies relationship with the H-1B can yield additional insights.

For data on H-1B filings and average H-1B salaries by company, we can turn to theH-1B Salary Database,which indexes Labor Condition Application (LCA) disclosure data from theUnited States Department of Labor (DOL). For the purposes of this analysis, we exclude all of the companies in non-tech industries, such as medicine. Heres the resulting list:

As weve noted before, its not surprising that Netflix tops the list, considering its history of paying all employees high salaries (the theory is that extraordinary skills are worth extraordinary compensationbut if you dont deliver, youre handed an extraordinary severance package). But the other companies paying H-1B workers the highest salaries arent the largest or most prominent ones in techRoku, TikTok, and Reddit, for example, all pay far more on average than Apple, Microsoft, Google, or Salesforce.

Meanwhile, some of techs largest companies file for many thousands of visas every yearand those are only direct filings.Big tech firmstend to subcontract H-1B workersfrom subcontracting and business-services companies, which one of the reasons why the latter file for so many visas every year.Although the Trump administration took several steps to make itmore problematic for companies to subcontract H-1B workers, it seems unlikely that the practice will end anytime soon.

Critics of the H-1B system might look at a list like this and say it proves their point: smaller companies tend to use the visa to gain the highly specialized talent they need, whereas larger ones rely on it to secure software developers and other roles at a cheaper rate. Companies like Microsoft, meanwhile, argue thattheyre obeying the visas original intentbut given their size, its inevitable they would apply for thousands of visas every year to meet their diverse project needs.

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Smaller Tech Companies Pay H-1B Workers More Than Big Tech - Dice Insights