Alphabet's Visa Footprint Is Larger Than Google LLC
A plain Google LLC lookup misses the Alphabet shape of this profile. This page includes Google LLC plus Alphabet affiliates including Waymo, YouTube, Verily, DeepMind, Wing, X Development, and Intrinsic where those names appear in DOL records.
Across FY2020 through FY2025, those rows add up to 70,836 Labor Condition Applications. Including the FY2026 partial-year rows, the total reaches 71,687. FY2025 alone accounts for 9,305 LCA filings.
The USCIS series shown here totals 24,104 approvals across the available approval rows. Where FY2025 rows are initial approvals only, the page labels them that way. LCA filings are not headcount, hired workers, or proof that a specific American worker was replaced.
104 total denials across all years (0.1% of filings) - too small to display on this chart.
The Alphabet Boundary Changes the Count
Google LLC carries most of the filings, but Waymo, Verily, Wing, and other affiliated names are part of the public employer footprint rather than noise.
The peak year in the full-year series is FY2021, with 16,921 filings. FY2026 currently shows 851 rows and should be read as a partial-year value, not as a final decline.
This site no longer charts H-1B filings as a share of workforce. The ratio can blur U.S. employees, global employees, contractors, and offshore delivery headcount into one denominator.
Rows with a disclosed U.S.-employee denominator available here: 0. The analysis now uses filings, approvals, wage, worksite, and title concentration instead.
Layoff Context Without a Replacement Claim
Reuters reported that Alphabet cut about 12,000 jobs in January 2023, roughly 6% of its workforce. That workforce-reduction context makes the LCA volume politically salient, but it does not prove one-for-one replacement.
Alphabet's 2023 layoff reporting is relevant because the visa pipeline stayed large while the company was telling workers and investors a cost-cutting story.
Alphabet contractor and layoff stories support public labor context, not a claim that every visa filing displaced a specific U.S. worker.
Search, Cloud, and AI Point to Software Labor
The leading occupation is Software Developers, Applications, and the leading title is Software Engineer; this is the core technical labor market, not an abstract immigration bucket.
For FY2025, the average H-1B wage in the filtered salary extract is $185,772, compared with an average prevailing-wage benchmark of $158,017. That is a $27,755 spread over the legal wage floor.
The Footprint Starts in Mountain View
Mountain View, Ca leads the worksite list with 26,305 rows, followed by the other engineering hubs that define Alphabet's U.S. footprint.
Alphabet's Green-Card Pipeline Is Its Own Power Center
The PERM layer adds 14,196 labor-certification cases from FY2020 through FY2025, a long-term retention channel on top of the H-1B filing stream.
PERM records are a different process from H-1B petitions, but they matter because the sponsorship timeline can tie a worker to an employer for years.
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I publish the data, charts, and company-by-company breakdowns as they come out.
| Title | Count |
|---|---|
| Software Engineer | 23,728 |
| Program Manager | 808 |
| Product Manager | 794 |
| Technical Program Manager | 750 |
| Research Scientist | 566 |
| Data Scientist | 515 |
| Solutions Consultant | 444 |
| Technical Solutions Consultant | 291 |
| Customer Engineer | 285 |
| Hardware Engineer | 260 |
- LCA filings and salary data: DOL OFLC disclosure rows mapped by the employer-name boundary used for this investigation.
- H-1B approvals: USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub CSV rows for FY2020-FY2023, plus FY2025 hub initial approvals where available.
- PERM data: DOL OFLC PERM disclosure rows mapped with the same employer-name boundary.
- Reuters, Jan. 20, 2023, Alphabet layoffs context.
- BLS wage comparison: OEWS May 2023 national median for software developers.
Caveat: LCA filings are not H-1B petitions or hired workers. FY2025 USCIS hub rows are initial approvals only, so denial rates are not computed for those rows.