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Snap

SNAP
USCIS APPROVAL RATE: 94.4%The Snapchat maker whose early-2025 cut of 16% of staff swept up its own sponsored machine-learning engineers.
LCA Filings (FY2025)
404
Total Approvals (FY2023)
84
Approval Rate
94.4%
Avg H-1B Salary
$169,753
BLS Market Median
$130,160

The Filing Footprint Is Bigger Than One Legal Name

Snap needs to be read through its public employer-name boundary: Snap Inc. employer-name variants in the DOL records.

Across FY2020 through FY2025, those rows add up to 2,633 Labor Condition Applications. Including the FY2026 partial-year rows, the total reaches 2,704. FY2025 alone accounts for 404 LCA filings.

The USCIS series shown here totals 1,025 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
2,633
Full-year LCA filings from FY2020 through FY2025 after combining the employer names used for this page.
LCA Filings by Year

3 total denials across all years (0.1% of filings) - too small to display on this chart.

H-1B Approval Rate Over Time

The Employer Boundary Drives the Count

Snap 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 640 filings. FY2026 currently shows 71 rows and should be read as a partial-year value, not as a final decline.

Entity
Snap Inc.
2,690
Entity
Snap Inc
14
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

Workforce Context, Kept in Bounds

Snap's early-2025 layoff of roughly 16% of its workforce swept up sponsored workers along with everyone else; employee accounts on Blind described H-1B machine-learning engineers with years on the growth team suddenly holding an expiring status instead of a job. Snap's filings are leveled like a ladder, Software Engineer (3), (4), (5), concentrated in Santa Monica, Seattle, Palo Alto, and Mountain View at wages far above market. The Snap case is about the leash, not the wage: even at $170,000 averages, a sponsored worker who loses the badge has 60 days to find a new master or leave the country.

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

The layoff share and H-1B impact are employee-reported; Snap did not publish a visa breakdown. No enforcement action appears in the records used here.

Key finding
404
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, Applications, and the leading job title is Software Engineer (4); 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 $169,753, compared with an average prevailing-wage benchmark of $168,713. That is a $1,040 spread over the legal wage floor.

Top H-1B Occupations

Where the Filings Reach the U.S. Labor Market

Santa Monica, Ca leads the mapped worksite list with 882 rows for this employer boundary.

Santa Monica, Ca
882
Seattle, Wa
484
Palo Alto, Ca
327
Mountain View, Ca
273

Green Cards Add the Long-Term Tie

The PERM layer adds 562 labor-certification cases from FY2020 through FY2025, including 65 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
Software Engineer (4)748
Software Engineer (3)291
Software Engineer (5)248
Machine Learning Engineer (4)168
Machine Learning Engineer (5)72
Data Scientist (4)55
Machine Learning Engineer (3)43
Quality Engineer (4)31
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.
  • Employee accounts via Blind, January-February 2025, on Snap's 16% reduction; MyVisaJobs employer profile for Snap Inc., 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.