What the quantitative roles actually clear: the H-1B filings

The most honest pay data in clinical research is not on a salary aggregator. It is in the visa filings employers submit to the US government, where they must state, under penalty, the wage they will pay. We processed the full Labor Condition Application disclosure file for fiscal 2026 through its second quarter, over a million filings, and pulled the certified records for the quantitative clinical research roles. Here is what the government record shows.

The numbers

Median annual wages from certified H-1B filings, by role, for fiscal 2026 through Q2:

• Statistician: about $133,800 (top 10 percent above $179,000)
• Statistical programmer: about $131,671 (top 10 percent about $165,000)
• Clinical data manager: about $125,000 (top 10 percent about $178,000)
• Biostatistician: about $112,965 (top 10 percent about $167,600)

These are medians across hundreds of filings for biostatisticians and over a hundred each for the others, so they are real distributions, not single data points. And unlike a crowdsourced average, each is a number an employer committed to in a federal document. The statistical and programming functions clear well into six figures at the median, and the top of each distribution runs far higher.

How to read a filed wage

One honest caveat. The figure employers file is the wage floor they commit to pay, drawn from the "from" field of the wage range. In practice it is at or near the actual offer, because underpaying against a filing is a violation, but treat it as a firm floor rather than a ceiling. The real offer can be a little higher, rarely lower. That makes these numbers a conservative, verified baseline, which is exactly the kind of number worth negotiating against.

Why this data leans quantitative

These roles dominate the clinical research H-1B record for a reason: they are specialized, globally recruited, and hard to fill domestically, so employers sponsor visas for them. That is why the filing data is rich for biostatisticians and programmers and thin for field roles like monitoring. The visa record is a clear window into exactly the functions that get sponsored, which happen to be the best-paid non-management seats in a trial.

What the filings cannot capture

The H-1B record captures base wage well, and almost nothing else. It does not show bonus, equity, benefits, or how the number varies by employer and city beyond the worksite. It also covers only visa-sponsored roles, so it is a window, not the whole room. The complete picture, base plus everything else, across citizens and visa holders alike, only exists if the people doing these jobs report it. If you work in biostatistics, programming, or data management, add your datapoint. The government has your filed floor. Only you have the whole number.