Labor Condition Application (LCA)

Before an employer can sponsor an H-1B worker, it files a Labor Condition Application with the Department of Labor attesting to wages and working conditions. The filing is public, and its content is what makes it valuable: employer name, job title, salary, and worksite for every position.

Because every H-1B petition rests on an LCA, the disclosure corpus doubles as a census of skilled-visa hiring. Aggregators repackage it for search - H1BData.info describes its short_description as 'Department of Labor Labor Condition Application disclosures', tagged 'labor-condition-application' and 'dol-disclosure', with coverage granularity of 'one row per LCA disclosure record'.

That one-row-per-record grain is what analysts rely on: each filing becomes a queryable row with its own salary and location fields, rather than a PDF narrative. Salary benchmarks, employer rankings and city-level demand curves all derive from summing and grouping those rows.

Compensation data is usually proprietary and self-reported; LCA disclosures are legally required filings, so salary figures arrive with an accountability trail no survey panel can offer. For anyone benchmarking pay in IT consulting or staffing, that distinction is the reason to build on DOL disclosure records rather than scraped postings.

Grain matters just as much. A source promising 'one row per LCA disclosure record' lets you reproduce any aggregate - by employer, title or worksite - from raw rows. Vendors selling pre-aggregated H-1B statistics hide the underlying distribution and make your benchmarks unverifiable. There is also a coverage caveat buyers should internalize: LCAs cover positions filed under the H-1B program, not a company's entire workforce, so totals describe visa-sponsored hiring only. Treating LCA salaries as firm-wide pay scales is the classic misread of this data.

1. Confirm the grain is one row per disclosure. H1BData.info states exactly that; row-level access means you can rebuild any aggregate yourself.

1. Check the four core fields. Employer, job title, salary and worksite are the payload of each LCA - missing any one cripples benchmarking.

1. Verify provenance tagging. Records tagged 'labor-condition-application' and 'dol-disclosure' trace to the Department of Labor program rather than a scraped job board.

1. Mind the population. LCA rows describe H-1B positions only; compare like with like when benchmarking against broader payroll data.

1. License-check redistribution. The disclosures flow from federal reporting under US government public-domain norms, but confirm the repackager's own terms before embedding rows in a commercial product.

Entries related to Labor Condition Applications:

• h1b-disclosure-records - the broader disclosure family LCAs belong to.
• salary-benchmarks - the main analytical use of LCA salary fields.
• us-government-public-domain - the licensing regime covering federal filings.