Morgan Stanley
MSThe Filing Footprint Is Bigger Than One Legal Name
Morgan Stanley needs to be read through its public employer-name boundary: Morgan Stanley Services Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC employer-name variants in the DOL records.
Across FY2020 through FY2025, those rows add up to 6,438 Labor Condition Applications. Including the FY2026 partial-year rows, the total reaches 6,644. FY2025 alone accounts for 1,127 LCA filings.
The USCIS series shown here totals 2,599 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.
25 total denials across all years (0.4% of filings) - too small to display on this chart.
The Employer Boundary Drives the Count
Morgan Stanley Services Group Inc. is the largest filing name, but the full public footprint depends on combining the affiliated employer rows used for this page.
The peak year in the full-year series is FY2021, with 1,186 filings. FY2026 currently shows 206 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.
Workforce Context, Kept in Bounds
In February 2026 the Wall Street Journal reported Morgan Stanley was laying off about 2,500 employees, roughly 3% of its workforce, across every division, sparing financial advisors and hitting support functions. The bank's H-1B profile kept filing through it. Look at the titles on this page: the top three are Vice President, Associate, and Director. Those are rank labels, not occupations. When a filing system meant to certify specialty occupations accepts a corporate ladder rung as a job description, the specialty test has stopped doing its work.
The public workforce story belongs next to the filing volume, but it does not turn every LCA into a replacement claim.
The 2026 layoffs were attributed to strategy and performance, not visa hiring, and no H-1B enforcement action against Morgan Stanley appears in the records used here.
The Labor-Market Signal Is in the Job Mix
The leading occupation is Software Developers, and the leading job title is Vice President; those roles show what part of the labor market the filings reach.
For FY2025, the average H-1B wage in the filtered salary extract is $167,182, compared with an average prevailing-wage benchmark of $124,081. That is a $43,101 spread over the legal wage floor.
Where the Filings Reach the U.S. Labor Market
New York, Ny leads the mapped worksite list with 4,873 rows for this employer boundary.
Green Cards Add the Long-Term Tie
The PERM layer adds 991 labor-certification cases from FY2020 through FY2025, including 211 in FY2025.
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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| Title | Count |
|---|---|
| Vice President | 2,566 |
| Associate | 2,564 |
| Director | 474 |
| Analyst | 374 |
| Executive Director | 358 |
| Assistant Vice President | 123 |
| Managing Director | 41 |
| Manager | 38 |
- 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.
- Wall Street Journal, February 2026: Morgan Stanley lays off 2,500 employees across all divisions; AP and Reuters follow-up coverage.
- 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.