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Optum (UnitedHealth Group)

UNH
USCIS APPROVAL RATE: 99.4%UnitedHealth's technology arm, running rolling layoff waves through 2024 and 2025 while sponsoring thousands of engineers in Minnesota.
LCA Filings (FY2025)
724
Total Approvals (FY2023)
319
Approval Rate
99.4%
Avg H-1B Salary
$127,943
BLS Market Median
$130,160

The Filing Footprint Is Bigger Than One Legal Name

Optum (UnitedHealth Group) needs to be read through its public employer-name boundary: Optum Services, Inc. plus United Healthcare Services and Optum Care employer-name variants in the DOL records.

Across FY2020 through FY2025, those rows add up to 4,138 Labor Condition Applications. Including the FY2026 partial-year rows, the total reaches 4,350. FY2025 alone accounts for 724 LCA filings.

The USCIS series shown here totals 2,088 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.

Key finding
4,138
Full-year LCA filings from FY2020 through FY2025 after combining the employer names used for this page.
LCA Filings by Year

* FY2026 is partial, through Mar 31, 2026.

14 total denials across all years (0.3% of filings) - too small to display on this chart.

H-1B Approval Rate Over Time

The Employer Boundary Drives the Count

Optum Services, 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 FY2022, with 930 filings. FY2026 currently shows 212 rows and should be read as a partial-year value, not as a final decline.

Entity
Optum Services, Inc.
3,941
Entity
United Healthcare Services, Inc.
293
Entity
Optum Care, Inc.
51
Entity
United Healthcare Services, Inc
34
Entity
Optum Services (Puerto Rico) LLC
5
Entity
Optum Care Management, LLC
4
Workforce Share Not Used
Metric intentionally suppressed

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.

Avg H-1B Salary vs BLS Market Rate

* FY2026 is partial, through Mar 31, 2026.

Workforce Context, Kept in Bounds

Optum ran layoffs in waves: 524 California workers across eight waves from September 2024 through January 2025 per WARN notices obtained by Modern Healthcare, another 129 in Toledo, and what Fierce Healthcare could only describe as mass layoffs of unclear scale, while the company promised redeployment resources. The sponsorship side never paused: Optum Services has filed 3,608 H-1B applications at an average of $117,117, mostly Senior and Lead Software Engineer roles in Eden Prairie and Minnetonka, Minnesota. UnitedHealth Group, its parent, is simultaneously the subject of a standing abuse tracker maintained by the American Economic Liberties Project.

The public workforce story belongs next to the filing volume, but it does not turn every LCA into a replacement claim.

Optum attributed the cuts to department closures and service discontinuations, and no H-1B enforcement action against it appears in the records used here.

Key finding
724
FY2025 LCA filings after applying the employer-name boundary used for this page.

The Labor-Market Signal Is in the Job Mix

The leading occupation is Software Developers, and the leading job title is Senior Software Engineer; 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 $127,943, compared with an average prevailing-wage benchmark of $122,101. That is a $5,842 spread over the legal wage floor.

Top H-1B Occupations

Where the Filings Reach the U.S. Labor Market

Eden Prairie, Mn leads the mapped worksite list with 802 rows for this employer boundary.

Eden Prairie, Mn
802
Minnetonka, Mn
143
Basking Ridge, Nj
123
Austin, Tx
100

Green Cards Add the Long-Term Tie

The PERM layer adds 903 labor-certification cases from FY2020 through FY2025, including 187 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.

Want the full investigation?

I publish the data, charts, and company-by-company breakdowns as they come out.

Top Job Titles
TitleCount
Senior Software Engineer710
Lead Software Engineer264
Software Engineer218
Senior Data Engineer120
Senior Quality Engineer73
Principal Engineer, Tlcp62
Senior Manager, Software Engineering61
Senior Data Analyst57
Data Sources
  • 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.
  • Modern Healthcare and Healthcare Dive, 2024-2025 Optum WARN layoff waves; Fierce Healthcare: Optum undergoes mass layoffs, scale unclear; MyVisaJobs employer profile, retrieved July 2026.
  • 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.