H-1B Salary by Industry: How Sectors Compare

If you want to understand H-1B pay by industry, the first thing to unlearn is the idea that one sector "pays more" than another as a single number. The disclosure data does not support a clean per-industry salary. What it does show clearly is two separate things: which sectors file the most applications, and what the flagship jobs inside each sector pay. Line those up and a counterintuitive pattern appears — the industry that files the fewest H-1B applications tends to carry the highest-paid roles.

This article walks through that contrast using Labor Condition Application (LCA) disclosure data for fiscal year 2026. You'll learn how filings concentrate in a handful of sectors, why the signature occupation of each sector is a fairer pay yardstick than any blended average, and how to read these numbers without falling for common traps.

One sector files nearly half of everything

H-1B filings are not spread evenly across the economy. In FY2026, the Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services sector accounted for 44.2% of all filings — almost half the entire program by itself. This is the home of IT consulting firms, software shops, engineering practices, and management consultancies, so its dominance reflects how central technical contract and staffing work is to the visa.

The rest of the field is far more modest:

• Manufacturing — 9.9%
• Information — 9.7%
• Finance and Insurance — 9.0%
• Educational Services — 8.8%
• Health Care and Social Assistance — 4.8%

Two things stand out. First, no single sector outside professional services breaks 10%. Second, health care — the sector we're about to see carries the highest-paid roles — is the smallest of the major players here, under 5% of filings.

You can explore any of these on their sector pages: Professional, Scientific and Technical Services, Information, Finance and Insurance, and Health Care and Social Assistance.

Why "median wage per sector" is a trap

It would be tidy to report one median salary per industry and rank them. It would also be misleading. Sectors are bundles of very different jobs. A hospital system sponsors physicians, but also researchers, IT staff, and administrators. A bank sponsors financial analysts, but also software developers and data scientists. Averaging across that mix produces a number that describes no actual worker.

The honest comparison is to pick each sector's signature occupation — the role that defines its H-1B footprint — and compare the offered wage medians for those roles. That keeps like next to like: an entry-tier software job in tech versus an entry-tier analyst job in finance versus a physician role in health care.

The signature-occupation contrast

Here is where volume and pay pull in opposite directions.

• Software Developers — the defining role of tech and professional services — post a median offered wage around $102,000. This is the single most common H-1B occupation, so it anchors that 44.2% filing share.
• Financial and Investment Analysts, the signature finance role, come in lower at a median around $85,000.
• Health care, the smallest major sector by volume, carries the highest-paid roles: Physicians, All Other post a median near $185,000, and psychiatrists reach roughly $210,000.

Read that sequence again. The sector that files the most (professional services, via software developers) sits in the middle of the pay range. The sector that files the least among the majors (health care, via physicians) tops it. Filing volume and offered wage are close to inversely related at the extremes.

The chart above shows the highest-paid H-1B occupations across the whole dataset. Notice how medical and specialized roles cluster at the top while the highest-volume tech roles do not appear — exactly the split this article is about. We covered that phenomenon in depth in The Highest-Paying H-1B Jobs Aren't in Tech; the sector view here is the mirror image of that occupation view.

Why the pattern exists

The inverse relationship isn't an accident of the data. A few structural forces drive it:

Scale versus scarcity. Professional services runs on a high-volume model — large IT services and consulting firms file thousands of applications for mid-level technical roles. The economics reward volume at a moderate wage, not scarcity at a premium. Health care is the opposite: physician roles are few, credential-gated, and command salaries set by a national labor market that has nothing to do with visa sponsorship.

Occupation mix inside the sector. Software developer pay is broad and deep, spanning junior to principal, which pulls the median toward the middle. Physician roles have almost no low-wage tier — you can't be a junior licensed physician — so the whole distribution sits high.

What the wage figure actually is. Every number here is an offered wage from an LCA, not take-home pay and not a guaranteed salary. It's the wage the employer attested it would pay for the role and location. That makes it useful for comparing roles, but it isn't a paycheck.

How to read these numbers without getting fooled

Sector-level H-1B data is genuinely useful, but only if you respect what it is and isn't. Keep these guardrails in mind:

• An LCA is not a visa. The Labor Condition Application is a wage-and-working-conditions attestation filed with the Department of Labor. It's a step that comes before a petition to USCIS — a filing is not a granted visa or a hired worker.
• Certification rate is not approval rate. The DOL certifying an LCA says the paperwork met wage and notice requirements. It says nothing about whether USCIS later approved the underlying petition.
• Withdrawn is not denied. Employers withdraw applications for many routine reasons — a role fills, a plan changes, a duplicate is filed. A withdrawal is not a rejection.
• Offered wage is not take-home. The figures above are gross offered wages before tax, benefits, or bonus, tied to a specific job and location.
• FY2026 is partial. These shares reflect roughly two quarters of reported data. Treat them as a strong signal of the mix, not a final annual tally.

What this means if you're weighing an offer

If you're comparing job offers or researching where to target a search, the sector-plus-signature-role framing is the practical takeaway. Don't ask "which industry pays H-1B workers the most?" — that question has no clean answer. Ask instead: what does the specific role I'd fill pay, in the sector and location I'm considering?

A software developer offer in professional services and a financial analyst offer in finance are not competing for the same "industry average"; they sit on different occupation ladders. And a health-care sponsor, though rare in the filing data, may attach to one of the best-paid roles in the entire program. Start from the occupation, then layer on the sector and state.

The takeaway

H-1B salary by industry is really two questions wearing one coat. Filing volume is heavily concentrated — professional services alone is 44.2% of FY2026 filings, while health care is under 5%. Pay runs the other way at the extremes: the low-volume health-care sector carries the highest-paid signature roles (physicians near $185K, psychiatrists near $210K), while the high-volume tech and finance sectors sit lower (software developers ~$102K, financial analysts ~$85K).

The lesson for anyone using this data: compare signature occupations, not blended sector averages, and treat every wage as an offered figure from an attestation — not a paycheck, and not a visa. From there, the industry picture stops being a single ranking and becomes what it actually is: a map of where the jobs are versus where the money is.