Physicians on H-1B: The Highest-Paid Visa Workers in America

When people picture an H-1B worker, they usually picture a software engineer. But the highest offered wages in the Labor Condition Application (LCA) data don't belong to programmers — they belong to doctors. Psychiatrists, pediatricians, and internal medicine physicians file for six-figure salaries that clear what almost every tech role commands.

This piece looks specifically at medical occupations in the H-1B program: which roles pay the most, why one physician category shows a $66K entry wage next to a $185K median, and how to read these numbers without being misled. It's the medical companion to our cross-occupation look at how the highest-paying H-1B jobs aren't in tech — this time zooming all the way into the exam room.

The medical roles that top the wage table

Among health occupations that sponsors file for, psychiatrists lead with a median offered wage of about $210,000 across roughly 6,541 filings. The catch-all Physicians, All Other category is far larger — nearly 98,627 filings — at a $185,000 median. Pediatricians and family medicine physicians both sit around $180,000, and internal medicine physicians near $175,000.

Two other clinical roles round out the high end without reaching physician territory. Dentists file at roughly a $143,000 median, and pharmacists around $114,600. Both are well above the national median wage for a typical technology filing, which is one reason a purely tech-centric view of the H-1B program misses so much.

To see how these compare against every other occupation the data covers, this live ranking pulls the real figures across the whole dataset:

The pattern is consistent: when you sort strictly by the wage an employer promised on the form, the ceiling is medical, not technical. The very largest sponsors — Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and the other IT-services firms — file enormous volumes at far lower medians. Volume and pay are two different stories.

Why one physician category spans $66K to $185K

The most important nuance in this data hides inside a single line. The Physicians, All Other category has a $185,000 median — but its 25th-percentile wage is just $66,238. That is not a data error, and it is not employers lowballing attending physicians. It is the training pipeline showing up in the numbers.

Medical roles filed under this SOC code include both residents and fellows — physicians still in supervised training, paid on standardized graduate-medical-education stipends — and fully credentialed attending physicians who have finished training and practice independently. A first-year resident and a tenured hospitalist can be coded to the same occupation, and their pay is worlds apart. So the low quartile largely reflects trainees, while the median and upper quartile reflect practicing physicians.

This is why a single "median" for physicians can be misleading in either direction. If you're a resident weighing an offer, the sub-$70K figure may be the relevant benchmark. If you're an attending, the $185K median is closer to your world. The wage-level ladder that the Department of Labor uses — entry-level (Level I) through fully competent senior (Level IV) — captures some of this progression, and reading which level an offer was filed at tells you more than the headline median ever will.

Reading these numbers without getting fooled

The LCA data is genuinely useful, but only if you respect what it is and isn't. A few guardrails matter especially for medical filings:

• An LCA is not a visa. The Labor Condition Application is the wage-and-working-conditions attestation an employer files with the Department of Labor before petitioning USCIS. A certified LCA means the paperwork cleared Labor — not that anyone received an H-1B.
• Certification rate is not approval rate. A high certification percentage tells you Labor accepted the filing. USCIS adjudicates the actual petition separately, on different criteria.
• Withdrawn is not denied. Employers withdraw filings for routine reasons — a candidate took another job, a start date slipped, a duplicate was corrected. A withdrawal is not a rejection.
• Offered wage is not take-home pay. The figure on the form is the offered prevailing/actual wage. It's gross, before taxes, and before the malpractice, licensing, and relocation realities that shape a physician's real economics.
• FY2026 is partial. The current fiscal year reflects only about two quarters of reported filings, so any single-year total for 2026 is incomplete by design. Treat recent-year counts as running tallies, not final numbers.

None of this undercuts the core finding. Even after every caveat, the offered wages for psychiatrists and physicians sit at the top of the table by a wide margin.

Why medicine sits so high

The reason is structural. Prevailing wages for physicians are anchored to a labor market where domestic salaries are already very high, board certification is mandatory, and the supply of qualified practitioners is constrained by the length and cost of training. An employer filing for a psychiatrist cannot attest to a $90,000 wage the way a staffing firm might for an entry-level analyst — the prevailing wage for the occupation simply won't support it.

There's also a geographic dimension worth noting. Physician sponsorship isn't concentrated in the coastal tech hubs the way software filings are. Hospitals and health systems across the Midwest and South file heavily, which is part of why H-1B geography looks different for medicine than it does for engineering. If you're exploring where sponsorship actually happens, our piece on where H-1B jobs actually are maps that spread across states.

What this means if you're a physician weighing an offer

A few practical takeaways:

1. Know your career stage. If you're a resident or fellow, benchmark against the lower quartile of the physician category, not the median. If you're an attending, the median and upper quartile are your reference points.
2. Look at the specialty, not just "physician." Psychiatry, pediatrics, family medicine, and internal medicine all show distinct medians. The specialty on the filing matters as much as the visa category.
3. Separate the wage attestation from the immigration outcome. A strong offered wage strengthens the LCA, but the H-1B petition is a separate adjudication. Don't read one as a guarantee of the other.
4. Compare sponsors. Health systems differ enormously in how they file and pay. Browsing an occupation page or a specific physician category lets you see the actual range of filers rather than a single average.

The takeaway

The H-1B program's public image is a tech story, but its wage ceiling is a medicine story. Psychiatrists top out around a $210K median; the broad physician category clears $185K even while its lower quartile — the residents — sits near $66K. That spread is the single most important thing to understand before quoting any physician "average," because it's really two populations wearing one occupation code. Read the specialty, read the career stage, and remember that every figure here is an offered wage on a Labor filing — not a visa, not an approval, and not a paycheck.