How to look up what any employer actually filed to pay

Before your next salary negotiation, there is a free, public record you can check that most people in clinical research have never opened: the wages your target employer actually filed with the US government. For any visa-sponsored role, the employer had to state the wage in a federal document, and those documents are public. Here is how to use them.

What the record is

Employers who sponsor an H-1B must file a Labor Condition Application that names the employer, the job title, the worksite, and the wage they commit to pay. The Department of Labor publishes the full set of these filings every quarter, and several free sites index them so you can search by employer and title. Unlike a salary aggregator, these are not crowdsourced guesses. They are numbers a company committed to in a federal filing, which makes them the most verifiable pay data you can get for free.

How to actually search it

Two paths. The quick one: search a free H-1B data site for your target employer's name plus your job title, for example "IQVIA senior statistical programmer," and you will get the filed wages, worksites, and dates. The thorough one: download the Labor Department's quarterly disclosure file directly and filter it yourself, which is what we do for the analyses on this site. The quick path is enough for a negotiation; the thorough path is for when you want the whole distribution.

Either way, look for three things: the wage the employer filed for your title, the worksite city (pay varies by location), and the wage level, the tier from I to IV that signals how the employer classified the role's seniority.

How to use it in a negotiation

The filed wage is a floor the employer committed to, so it is a conservative anchor, which is exactly what makes it powerful. If a recruiter offers you less than what the same company filed for your title, you have a government-record comparison to point to. If the offer is at the filed number, you know you are at the floor and there may be room above it. And if the filings cluster higher than your current pay for the same title, you are looking at concrete evidence that you are underpaid, from a source no employer can wave away as unreliable.

One honest limit: the filings cover only visa-sponsored roles, so they are rich for the quantitative functions and thin for field roles like monitoring. If your role barely appears, that absence is itself information, and it is where self-reported data has to fill the gap.

Where the public record runs out

The filed wage is a real number, but it is base pay only, it is a floor rather than the full offer, and it exists only for the roles employers sponsor. It cannot tell you the bonus, the equity, the benefits, or what the same title pays for the citizens working beside the visa holders. That is the part the government does not collect and only workers can. Look up the filed floor before you negotiate, then add your own datapoint to the survey, so the next person gets the whole number instead of just the floor.