E-Paper
Indian techie builds dashboard comparing Meta's median H-1B salary to Infosys, TCS
A San Francisco-based Indian techie has built a dashboard that uses official data to show which companies hire the most H-1Bs and what salaries they draw.
A San Francisco-based Indian techie has built a dashboard that uses official data from US authorities to show which companies hire the most H-1Bs and what salaries they draw. Harnoor Singh explained that he was rejected from the H-1B lottery twice in five years, so he built the dashboard to understand more about the visa programme.
Singh’s dashboard uses data from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and US Department of Labor to clearly show who is getting H-1B visas, for what jobs, where, and at what salaries over time.
“In the past 5 years I got rejected from the H-1B lottery twice so I read every USCIS report from the last 25 years and built a dashboard to show what's actually happening,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
Meta vs Infosys, TCS
As he marketed the product on X, Singh, an employee of HydraDB, revealed some interesting insights he learnt through his dashboard.
Among them was the realisation that Meta's median H-1B wage is $222,888. With a median wage of over $220,000 for H-1B employees, Meta is among the top-paying employers.
In contrast, Indian multinationals like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) pay less than half the median wage of Meta.
“Infosys pays $93,850 and TCS pays $91,000 for similar roles,” the dashboard revealed.
The figures came after analysing official data from FY2001 to FY2027. An H-1B fiscal year starts on October 1 and is named after the next year, so FY2027 actually begins on October 1, 2026, the dashboard explained.
How much H-1B visa holders earn
The data also revealed another interesting insight — H-1B holders typically earn more than Americans. On average, about $68,000 more per year.
“H-1B median is $120,000 vs ~$52,000 U.S. median household income. The gap has widened from $12k in FY2003 to $68k today,” the data revealed.
The H-1B visa, a non-immigrant programme, allows US companies to hire foreign workers in specialised roles, such as IT, engineering, medicine etc. Since H-1B employees can only work in specialty occupations requiring highly specialized knowledge, it is unsurprising that their average salary is more.
While H-1B is usually associated with tech companies, the data reveals another interesting point – H-1B isn't just Big Tech, consulting and audit firms are massive users. Accounting firm Ernst & Young files for more H-1Bs than Google or Microsoft.
(Also read: H-1B visa stress pushes techie to return to India after 8 years in the US: ‘I don’t have much savings’)
