In the nine months ending June 30, employers certified 1,023 H-1B filings for construction occupations at New York worksites — 363 for civil engineers, 165 for cost estimators, 127 for construction managers, and 368 for architects and surveyors. More than three-quarters of the worksites are in the five boroughs and the immediate metro. That is the paper trail of an industry hiring engineers it cannot find domestically, one federal filing at a time.
Every one of those filings carries two numbers: the wage the employer offers, and the government-calculated prevailing wage for that job in that place — the legal minimum a sponsored worker can be paid. Not one filing came in below the floor. The law works. The story is in how close to the floor the market sits.
Thirty-five percent of the filings offer the floor exactly — within one percent of the prevailing wage. A full quarter of all filings offer no premium at all. The median premium across every filing is 4.9 percent. For a large share of New York's sponsored engineering workforce, the government's minimum is not a floor under the market — it is the market.
The split is structural, not uniform. At some firms, nearly every filing sits at the floor: one engineering employer filed 21 times in nine months and offered the exact minimum on 15 of them; another's eight filings never left the floor once. At other firms the floor is nowhere in sight — one large design firm filed 25 times and never once offered the minimum, with a median premium near 16 percent. Same visa, same city, same occupations — two different labor markets.
Why this lands on a bid sheet: an engineer's cost is in every estimate, and the firms pricing sponsored labor at the floor carry a structurally lower overhead than the ones paying market premiums — until the rules change. Which they may be about to: a federal rule proposed this week would attach a $103,265 fee to new cap-subject H-1B petitions. If it takes effect, the economics of sponsorship shift hardest at exactly the firms whose wage structure depends on the floor.
The context on the demand side is on our own board: 164 open engineering and estimating listings this week, agencies and GCs competing for the same resumes. The sponsorship pipeline is not a side door — at over a hundred filings a month, it is one of the main ways this market staffs itself.
What these numbers are and are not: a filing is a certified wage offer, not proof of a hire, and one filing can cover more than one position. Offering the prevailing wage is full legal compliance, not a violation — and some clustering at the floor can reflect how a firm classifies job levels rather than a wage strategy. What the records establish is the pattern: a third of this market is priced at the legal minimum, and which side of that line a firm sits on is a matter of public record.
What to do with it: if you are hiring engineers against sponsored competition, the floor-priced share of the market is the wage pressure you are actually bidding against. If you are pricing 2027 staffing plans around sponsorship, this week's proposed fee — and the comment window that closes in late September — is the variable that moves first.