The wage on a PERM filing is the wage an employer committed to in a federal filing, under penalty of the case. That makes PERM disclosure data the hardest salary data that exists for sponsored roles: no self-reporting, no survey sampling, no anonymous levels. Below are the medians by occupation for the current disclosure window - 259,489 decided cases from the Department of Labor's own files. The live, searchable version of all sixty occupations is on our wages page.
The biggest occupations, and their median offered wage
Hourly, weekly and monthly wage units are annualized before the median is taken, so a $12.50/hour poultry line wage and a $170,000 salary sit on one scale.
PERM is two labor markets wearing one process
The table's shape is the finding. Sponsorship is bimodal: a six-figure knowledge-work market (Software Developers at $139,464, Computer and Information Systems Managers at $191,755, Data Scientists at $136,246) and a hard-to-fill hourly market (meat cutters at $26,000, fast food workers at $25,480, landscapers at $34,100), with surprisingly little in between. Both halves run through the identical regulatory machine - the same prevailing wage determination, the same recruitment, the same national queue.
The median of the sixty occupation medians in the current window. Half the top occupations pay more than this at the median, half pay less - the centre of what a sponsored role commits to on paper.
What this means for your own offer
A PERM wage is a floor, not a market rate: the employer must offer at least the prevailing wage DOL determines for that occupation, level and county. So compare your offer against your occupation's median here, then remember the median mixes every experience level and metro. The state map shows how the same occupation's medians move by worksite state - California's overall median offered wage is $141,958 against Georgia's $30,202, and that gap is industry mix, not geography pay adjustment.
What it means for wage strategy
For attorneys, the useful comparison runs the other way: an offered wage that sits far below the occupation's national median invites a harder look at the prevailing wage level selection, and one far above it costs the client nothing at audit. The figures here are decided cases - what actually certified - which makes them a better benchmark than any survey. The methodology sets out exactly how each median is computed, and the deadline calculator carries the dates side of the same filings.
