The Wage-Level Shift and the Filing Discipline It Reveals.
Analyzes 2.37 million H-1B LCA filings from FY2022–FY2025 through a single lens — the alignment between what employers claim in their filings and what the data shows they actually do. Every metric measures a claim-vs-reality gap.
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Download PDF → Link expires in 15 minutes and is scoped to this session.Every metric in the Index measures a claim-vs-reality gap. Edition 1 reports four.
The wage-weighted lottery was designed to reward higher-paid positions. The data shows the opposite direction — and the rise is entirely driven by new, unknown-tier employers, not by established sponsors changing behavior.
The Certified-Withdrawn rate spiked during FY2023 lottery uncertainty, then declined below baseline once the framework clarified. Adaptive behavior, not compliance failure.
The Index introduces a new public metric — title_top10_share — measuring the percentage of a cohort's filings that use one of the 10 most common job title strings. Templated filing at scale is the behavioral signature USCIS adjudicators are increasingly equipped to challenge.
Continuing denial rates rose materially across every top sector between FY2022 and FY2023. Small-tier sponsors face 2–3x the denial rate of large sponsors in every sector. Mid-market employers who assume scale protects them are wrong.
Full tables, trajectory charts, and the complete methodology are in the 14-page PDF.
The report is published under a single editorial voice. Findings are reported at the cohort level (NAICS 2-digit industry sector × filer size tier); individual employers are not scored or named.
Download the full PDFCitlaliBridge (2026). Sponsorship Integrity Index — Edition 1: The Wage-Level Shift and the Filing Discipline It Reveals. https://www.citlalibridge.com/index
A one-page summary of sources, cohort definitions, and scope. The full methodology with limitations is in the report.
DOL OFLC LCA Disclosure Data FY22–FY25 (2,366,848 H-1B records) joined to USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub FY22–FY23 (85,005 employer-year-state rows).
NAICS 2-digit industry sector × filer size tier. Tiers by annual USCIS H-1B petition volume: Small (1–49), Mid (50–499), Large (500+), Unknown (no USCIS match).
Normalized matching — uppercase, punctuation-to-space, suffix stripping, conservative abbreviation expansion. 83.6% filings-weighted join rate.
FY2022 is the explicit pre-shift reference — Biden-era adjudication regime after pandemic distortions washed out, before the wage-weighted lottery was publicly discussed.
Edition 2 introduces cohort-level drift distributions — measuring how stable individual sponsors' filing behavior is over time within a cohort — and reports Consistency Integrity as a sixth Index dimension. Derived from the same behavioral scoring framework used in CitlaliBridge's employer trust engine.
This report is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, compliance, or immigration advice. CitlaliBridge is not a law firm. Readers should consult qualified immigration counsel before making decisions based on these findings. Data sourced from publicly available federal records; accuracy depends on source data quality.