Enforcement
For every $100 of underpayment the Department of Labor adjudicated, it denied $1.3B and certified the rest — $101.2B of harm it approved anyway.
$1.3B
blocked (denied)
$101.2B
certified anyway
223.6K
workers protected
Stated another way: DOL approves 98.7¢ of every dollar of wage theft it sees.
DOL's Wage and Hour Division — the unit that enforces traditional wage theft (unpaid overtime, minimum-wage violations, FMLA) across all industries — recovered roughly $275M in back wages in FY2024 across every law it enforces and every worker it protects. The H-1B program alone certifies $14.5B per year of underpayment that DOL itself authorizes — about 53× the WHD's annual traditional-recovery total. (H-1B realized harm is averaged over 7 years of disclosures; WHD figure is one fiscal year.)
Every H-1B wage filing ends in one of three buckets. Only one counts as enforcement.
Certified
$101.2B
13.7M workers · 7.3M filings
DOL approved the underpayment. The harm happened.
Denied
$1.3B
223.6K workers · 118.8K filings
DOL caught it. The only bucket that counts as enforcement.
Withdrawn
$2.2B
253.2K workers · 175.7K filings
The employer pulled the filing before DOL ruled on it.
Withdrawals are fast: the median withdrawn filing was pulled 1 day after submission (90th percentile: 6 days). For comparison, DOL takes a median of 6 days to certify a filing and 4 days to deny one. The data says withdrawals are almost always employer-initiated — duplicate filings, changed plans, procedural errors — not a sign of DOL applying pressure behind the scenes. Neither enforcement nor realized harm.
The denial rate is plotted against a 0–100% scale. It has hovered near the floor for seven straight years — enforcement is not scaling with the program. The denial rate has never reached 5%.
2018
1.36%
8,543 denied
2019
0.78%
5,168 denied
2020
0.69%
3,725 denied
2021
0.47%
2,650 denied
2022
0.52%
3,029 denied
2023
0.60%
3,139 denied
2024
0.73%
3,989 denied
2025
0.70%
3,868 denied
2026
0.53%
593 denied
Toggle between the employers whose underpayment DOL certified and the ones whose attempted abuse it denied.
Employers whose below-market H-1B filings DOL certified — the realized harm. The top 15 account for $32.3B of the $101.2B total.
Two views: where the certified-underpayment harm concentrates, and which DOL regions deny more filings (min 5,000 filings for a stable rate).
These filings requested more than 10,000 H-1B workers each. All denied. They're excluded from the stats above (counting them would invent millions of phantom workers), but they show the scale of what gets filed.
“Wage theft” per filing = (BLS OES national median wage for the SOC − the employer’s offered annual wage) × workers requested. Only filings where the offered wage is below the BLS median contribute.
Certified = DOL approved the LCA (the worker was placed and underpaid — realized harm). Denied = DOL rejected it (the attempt was blocked). Withdrawn = the employer pulled the filing.
The enforcement ratio is denied ÷ (certified + denied) wage-theft dollars — the share of adjudicated underpayment that DOL stopped.
Per-filing total_workers is capped at 10,000: only 6 of 8.5M filings exceed that (they claim up to 2,031,308 workers each) and are obvious corrupt/test filings. They're excluded from the aggregates but shown in the hall of shame above. Source rows are never deleted.
Source: DOL OFLC LCA disclosures + BLS OES. Computed in the wage_gap_status_breakdown materialized view.