Rivian

The Filing Footprint Is Bigger Than One Legal Name

Rivian needs to be read through its public employer-name boundary: Rivian Automotive, LLC and Rivian, LLC plus the Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies joint-venture entities in the DOL records.

Across FY2020 through FY2025, those rows add up to 4,978 Labor Condition Applications. Including the FY2026 partial-year rows, the total reaches 5,082. FY2025 alone accounts for 850 LCA filings.

The USCIS series shown here totals 1,772 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.

The Employer Boundary Drives the Count

Rivian Automotive, LLC 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 1,229 filings. FY2026 currently shows 104 rows and should be read as a partial-year value, not as a final decline.

Workforce Context, Kept in Bounds

Rivian filed more than 2,000 H-1B petitions between 2022 and 2024 and another 180 in early 2025, and local Illinois media criticized the company for mass foreign labor recruitment at its Normal plant while it collected state incentives. Meanwhile the layoff cadence ran: roughly 10% of the workforce cut in February 2024, another 1% that April, and about 140 more in June 2025 ahead of the R2 launch, the third reduction in 18 months per TechCrunch. The sponsored roles are software-heavy, Sr. and Staff Software Engineer in Palo Alto and Irvine, plus the joint-venture entity it now shares with Volkswagen.

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

The Illinois criticism did not produce a lawsuit or enforcement action, and the layoffs were attributed to operations, not visa hiring.

The Labor-Market Signal Is in the Job Mix

The leading occupation is Mechanical Engineers, and the leading job title is Sr. 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 $168,314, compared with an average prevailing-wage benchmark of $132,145. That is a $36,169 spread over the legal wage floor.

Where the Filings Reach the U.S. Labor Market

Palo Alto, Ca leads the mapped worksite list with 1,665 rows for this employer boundary.

Green Cards Add the Long-Term Tie

The PERM layer adds 778 labor-certification cases from FY2020 through FY2025, including 318 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.