H-1B visa: Techies in Cupertino, San Francisco earn the highest wages

The Donald Trump administration has proposed to amend the regulations governing the process by which the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) selects H-1B applications, days after his government imposed a fee of $100,000 on fresh applications from next year.

As part of the new process, a proposal would weight registrations (or petitions) for selection generally based on each beneficiary’s equivalent wage levels. This means that petitions will be assigned to one of the four wage bands (I-IV) designated by Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) and will be entered in the selection pool.

This means that registrations for unique beneficiaries or petitions assigned wage level IV would be entered into the selection pool four times, those assigned wage level III would be entered into the selection pool three times, those assigned wage level II would be entered into the selection pool two times, and those assigned wage level I would be entered into the selection pool one time.

“Through the proposed regulatory revisions, department of homeland security (DHS) aims to implement the numerical cap in a way that incentivizes employers to offer higher wages, or to petition for positions requiring higher skills and higher skilled aliens, that are commensurate with higher wage levels. The proposed process would favour the allocation of H-1B visas to higher skilled and higher paid aliens, while maintaining the opportunity for employers to secure H-1B workers at all wage levels,” according to a federal register notice on Tuesday.

The following tables show the average annual salary of software developers across the four stage levels in some of the key cities or states of North America, the biggest market by revenue for all Indian services companies. Companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCLTech usually have big centres in such cities to be in proximity with their clients. The second column shows the hourly wage.