I Built a Map to Figure Out Where I Could Work on H1B

H1B lottery results drop in March. If you get selected, you have a few months to figure out your visa situation before October 1st. One of the first questions is: where can I actually work?

The H1B requires your employer to pay you at least the prevailing wage for your role in the specific metro area where you'll be working. This isn't a single number — it varies by city, job category, and wage level. A Software Developer L2 in San Francisco has a different floor than the same role in Austin or Raleigh.

The Department of Labor publishes all of this data. The problem is how they publish it.

The DOL website

Go to the DOL's FLAG wage search tool and you get a searchable table — hundreds of metro areas, a dozen job categories, four wage levels. One row at a time. No way to ask "given my salary and job title, which cities work for me?"

You end up doing this manually:

  • Pick a city you're curious about
  • Look up your SOC code
  • Find the prevailing wage for your level
  • Compare it to your offer
  • Repeat for the next city

If you're trying to evaluate 10+ cities — which anyone considering a job change or relocation should — this takes hours and the results don't stick together anywhere.

The data is public. It just needs a UI.

The DOL publishes the full prevailing wage database as a downloadable file. 530 metro statistical areas (MSAs), every major job category, four wage levels. It's updated twice a year.

The Census Bureau publishes CBSA boundary shapefiles — the geographic outlines of each MSA.

Put these two together and you can build a choropleth map: color each metro area by how much headroom you have above the prevailing wage floor, given your specific salary and job.

That's H1B Compass.

How it works

Enter three things:

  • Your salary (slider, $50k–$300k)
  • Your job category (SOC code — Software Developer, Data Scientist, DevOps, etc.)
  • Your wage level (L1 through L4, roughly mapping to percentile bands)

The map immediately colors every MSA:

  • Green — large surplus (>$40k above prevailing wage)
  • Yellow/Orange — tight but qualifies
  • Red — below the prevailing wage floor for your inputs

There's also a drive-zone filter: pick a city (SF, Seattle, NYC, Austin, and others) and a radius in miles, and the map dims everything outside that circle. This was useful for cases like "I want to be within driving distance of family in the Bay Area — what qualifies nearby?"

The filters live in the URL (?salary=160000&soc=15-1252&level=L2&origin=...), so you can share your exact setup with someone else — which turned out to be more useful than I expected.

Actually using it

I built this during H1B season when my own lottery result came in. I had an offer with a specific salary, I knew my SOC code, and I needed to think through where the role could be based.

Within a few minutes I had a map showing exactly which metro areas worked for me, colored by how comfortable the margin was. Green cities felt safe. Orange ones made me want to double-check. Red ones were ruled out immediately.

I ended up sharing the link with a few friends going through the same process — adjusting the salary slider to their numbers, switching between wage levels, zooming into different regions. A few of them told me it actually helped them decide where to live. I hadn't expected that.

What I'd add

A few things I considered but didn't build:

Actual drive time instead of radius. I started with isochrone maps (real routing) but switched to haversine distance (straight-line) because it's good enough for this use case and doesn't require an external API. For most H1B purposes, "within 300 miles" is close enough to "driveable."

Employer wage data. The LCA disclosure data (what companies actually paid) would be more useful than prevailing wage floors in some cases. The data exists but it's messier to process.

Historical trends. Prevailing wages shift each fiscal year. Seeing how a city's floor has changed over time could be interesting for longer-term planning.

If you're working through H1B planning, the tool is live at h1b.alexshen.dev. The wage data covers July 2025 – June 2026. It's free, no login required.

The source is on GitHub if you want to dig into the data pipeline or run it locally.