H-1B Watchdog is assembled entirely from public government records. Nothing here is an accusation or an estimate of intent; every figure traces to a Department of Labor filing you can pull yourself. This page documents the sources, the exact method, the honest limits — and lets you download the underlying data.
The data at a glance
U.S. Department of Labor, certified H-1B Labor Condition Applications, full fiscal year 2025 (Oct 2024–Sep 2025).
Applications
567,908
Worker positions
913,751
Est. annual wages
$123.1B
New hires
32.6%
Primary sources
H-1B filings — DOL Office of Foreign Labor Certification, LCA Disclosure Data, FY2025 Q1–Q4. The authoritative public record of every certified H-1B application: employer, worksite, wage, positions, petition type.
Layoffs — 2026 U.S. job cuts compiled by layoffhedge.com from SEC filings, WARN notices and press reports (each layoff carries a source link). Used only for the layoff-vs-H-1B comparison.
Worksite locations — geocoded from filing ZIP codes (U.S. Census–derived centroids).
Congress — current members and contact details from the public unitedstates/congress-legislators dataset.
News feed — headlines aggregated from Google News across H-1B, layoff, audit, legal, and policy topics.
Method
1. De-duplication by CASE_NUMBER — the step that matters most
DOL releases its LCA data as cumulative fiscal-year-to-date files: the Q3 file already contains Q1 and Q2. Naively summing the four quarterly files double-counts the same applications by roughly 40%. We de-duplicate globally on the unique CASE_NUMBER, so every application is counted once. This is why our full-year figure is 567,908 applications, not the ~902,000 a raw sum produces.
If you are checking our numbers against a raw file: confirm you are de-duplicating by CASE_NUMBER across quarters, or your totals will run ~40% high.
2. What we count
Only records with CASE_STATUS beginning "Certified" and VISA_CLASS = H-1B.
Worker positions = the sum of TOTAL_WORKER_POSITIONS. The largest single FY2025 application lists 150 positions — there are no extreme outliers to cap.
New hires vs. renewals from the petition-type columns (NEW_EMPLOYMENT vs. continuation, amendment, and change-of-employer).
State and employer totals are keyed to the worksite (where the job is), and employer names are merged case-insensitively.
3. Wages
The offered annual wage floor (WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM), annualized by pay unit (hourly × 2,080, weekly × 52, etc.). A valid wage is present on 99.9% of positions, so the total is a near-complete sum rather than an extrapolation.
4. The layoff offset
Company layoff counts are matched to H-1B employers by brand token sequence (an employer's leading name tokens must equal the layoff brand), which avoids false matches like pulling "Intellectt" into "Intel." For each matched company we report layoffs beside certified H-1B positions filed.
Departments are not matched. The public layoff data is company-wide headcount — it does not say which roles or departments were cut. So the offset shows scale (a company reduced U.S. staff while filing for visa workers), not that specific laid-off workers were replaced by specific H-1B hires in the same role. Where the data is specific — the H-1B side — we show each company's top certified occupation (from DOL SOC_TITLE), so you can see what the visas were actually for.
Honest limits
"Positions" are not headcount. They are worker slots on certified applications — they include renewals and can exceed the number of people actually hired. We label them as positions throughout.
The H-1B window (FY2025) precedes the 2026 layoffs. These firms filed for the visa workers first and cut U.S. staff after — but the two datasets cover different periods and are not a controlled before/after. Layoff figures are per layoffhedge.com; we credit the source.
A certified LCA is a filing, not proof of hiring or of wrongdoing. It records that DOL certified an application. We present the records; we do not allege intent.
Download the data
Free to use with attribution. Derived from public DOL records.
H-1B Watchdog, analysis of U.S. Department of Labor certified H-1B LCA disclosure data, FY2025. h1bwatchdog.org · retrieved .
For journalists
We're happy to walk through the method, verify a figure, or pull a specific company, state, or district on request. The full pipeline that produces these numbers is open for inspection. Press contact: coming shortly.