In July, a H-1B software engineers' median salary at Google, Microsoft, and Apple was at least $142K, a substantial increase from at least $120K in October 2019
Nick Kolakowski / Dice Insights :
Context & Ripple Effects
This Dice data point sits early in a decade-long pay escalation arc for visa-sponsored engineers: back in TechCrunch's 2015 look at how Google and Facebook paid their H-1B employees, the debate was about whether visa workers were underpaid relative to peers. By mid-2020 the median at Google, Microsoft, and Apple had climbed from roughly $120K in October 2019 to at least $142K.
What followed confirms the direction rather than reversing it — Apple later paid select engineers $100K–$200K in stock-based retention bonuses during the 2022 talent crunch, and CompTIA counted 1.1M US tech job postings in Q1 2022, up 43% year over year. The July 2020 figure is best read as the moment Big Tech's sponsored-hire median decisively broke above its pre-pandemic level.
First-order effects
- Engineers hired on H-1B visas at Google, Microsoft, and Apple now anchor at a $142K-plus median, narrowing the gap between sponsored and domestic hires that earlier reporting scrutinized.
- Competing large employers filing their own H-1B petitions face a higher prevailing-wage benchmark set by these three, since petition filings disclose the same salary data.
Second-order effects
- Retention economics shift: once base medians rise this sharply, cash alone stops being a differentiator — which is consistent with Apple resorting to six-figure stock bonuses to hold engineers two years later.
- The broader hiring market reprices around Big Tech's disclosed numbers; the posting surge and Mondo's measured salary gains for cloud architects and engineers show demand-side pressure spreading beyond the top three.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, base salary itself becomes the escalator across the industry — Levels.fyi's later finding that startup median base offers hit $200K while total compensation grew more slowly suggests the fixed component of engineer pay structurally ratchets upward everywhere.
- Sustained disclosure-driven wage visibility makes H-1B compensation a recurring regulatory and political flashpoint, since each filing cycle publishes fresh evidence of where Big Tech sets the market floor.
The trend: Software engineer compensation is ratcheting structurally upward, with H-1B disclosures at Big Tech firms serving as public benchmarks that pull the entire hiring market's pay floor higher.