Life & fun · February 23, 2015
A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry
Since 2012 the US tech industry has sponsored 176,075 H1B work visas. With an average individual salary up to $39,465 above median household income.
A histogram of salaries given to H1B workers in the software industry launched on February 23, 2015 with 322 votes, #31 of 1,772 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 11 years on.
In plain words
This tool presents a histogram of salaries for H1B visa holders in the U.S. software industry from 2012 onwards, covering 176,075 sponsored workers. It shows salary distributions by role—programmers, developers, and engineers—with most earning between $60,660 and $111,668 annually. The tool highlights geographic variations, identifying cities where tech workers earn the most relative to local cost of living, such as Kirkland and Seattle, Washington. It helps visa holders and employers understand compensation patterns across the tech sector.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Since 2012 the US tech industry has sponsored 176,075 H1B work visas. Most of them paid $60,660 to $111,668 per year (1 standard deviation). The best city for an H1B is Kirkland, WA with an average individual salary $39,465 above local household median . Median household salary is a good proxy for cost of living in an area. Average salaries in 2016: Programmer: $65,796 Developer: $73,293 Engineer: $90,049 Be an engineer. ➡️ https://t.co/ziQ74fGFzh The best city to be a techie is Seattle, WA with an average individual salary $36,121 above household median. ➡️from swizec.github.io
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- C1Comparing 176,077 tech salaries to median household income2016 · swizec.github.io · ▲11
Since 2012 the US tech industry has sponsored 176,075 H1B work visas. With an average individual salary up to $39,465 above median household income.
- UHUS H1B Worker Salaries Visualized for Easy Exploration2016 · h1bsalary.info · ▲36
H1B Visa Salary Database2017 · h1bdata.info · ▲5More than 3 million H1B salaries from 2012 through 2017
- VEVisa Explorer – Salaries, lawyers, companies of all H-1B in the USA2015 · data.jobsintech.io · ▲582
- H1H-1B Salary Data ExplorerJan 2026 · ▲28
Excited to share my New Year’s project. For a long time, I’ve wanted to build H-1B data directly into Levels.fyi. Every time I went looking for this data elsewhere, it was a frustrating experience to use. Most H-1B sites felt antiquated, unintuitive, cluttered with ads, or just overwhelming to use. The data was there, but it wasn’t usable, and definitely not pleasant to explore. So out of that frustration, I decided to build the H-1B data experience I personally wanted to use. Right into Levels.fyi. https://levels.fyi/h1b/ Some other pages I'm excited about: Wage Heatmap:…
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