What different H-1B workers are actually paid

Across the 244,862 petitions we hold for the H-1B cap lottery as a whole, the I-129 filing records the beneficiary's actual pay alongside their country of birth, education and gender. A raw pay gap between two groups is mostly a statement about which jobs they hold — so each gap below is shown twice: as it looks raw, and again measured within the same job title. The second number is the one to read.

Gender is here as the control. Our decomposition of the H-1B gender pay gap found that gap is sorting almost entirely — it survives the correction at under a percent. Country of birth and education do not behave that way: part of each gap is job mix, and a real difference is still standing after the correction.

Country of birth

60 other values (39,441 petitions) are not shown, because too few of their petitions sit in a job title big enough to compare within. Only a raw figure exists there — and a raw figure is the thing this table corrects, so ranking it beside these would mislead rather than inform.

Education level

One other value (103 petitions) is not shown, because too few of its petitions sit in a job title big enough to compare within. Only a raw figure exists there — and a raw figure is the thing this table corrects, so ranking it beside these would mislead rather than inform.

Gender

How to read this. The within-occupation figure compares people holding the same job title, weighted by how many petitions sit in each title. Titles encode seniority, so equal pay within a title does not rule out differences in reaching that title — the same limitation that applies to any controlled pay-gap number. Figures are base pay only: the I-129 reports prospective base compensation, with no equity or bonus, so this is not total compensation. Coverage is FY2021–FY2024 cap-subject H-1B lottery petitions that carry both a pay figure and a job title — a one-time FOIA snapshot, not a live feed. Aggregates only, with small counts suppressed. Source: I-129 petition data sourced from USCIS, obtained by Bloomberg.