EB1A High Salary Criterion: A FAANG Engineer’s Guide 

EB1A high salary criterion is designed to be highly relevant to FAANG engineers – for instance, the annual compensation of L6 Software Engineer working at Google is above $600,000, whereas the EB-1A applicant from Meta may reach or even surpass $800,000 in their total compensation package.

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However, those who receive such compensation packages face a serious challenge when attempting to prove the “high salary” criterion of the EB-1A Extraordinary Ability green card application. This has nothing to do with the amounts that people earn. Rather, it is about how immigration regulations require them to provide evidence.

At first sight, the EB-1A high salary criterion is perfectly suitable for senior engineers working at Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. In practice, however, it is one of the most challenging things to understand when it comes to the EB-1A green card application process. USCIS very often sends Requests for Evidence regarding how a package of $500,000 or even $800,000 proves extraordinary ability. This is the exact problem LevelUp by EB1A Experts was built to solve, running a structured pre-filing analysis that maps your compensation against the right benchmarks across all ten USCIS criteria before you commit to a filing strategy.

For FAANG engineers, the EB-1A is an attractive path to permanent residence because it does not require employer sponsorship and avoids the lengthy employment-based green card backlogs tied to country of birth. High salary is one of the ten evidentiary criteria under 8 C.F.R. § 204.5(h)(3)(ix). Theoretically, this must be one of the easiest pieces of evidence for a highly paid technological worker to provide. However, quite often it results in RFEs because the reason behind such a high salary is not explained properly.

Read More: Top Use Cases of LevelUp: How AI Helps You Build a Winning EB1A Profile from Scratch

What the EB-1A High Salary Criterion Actually Requires

The EB-1A visa is reserved for individuals who have demonstrably risen to the very top of their field,  a classification USCIS applies with real scrutiny. Within the ten categories of evidence required, one is that “you have a high salary or other significantly high remuneration for services, in relation to others in the field.” This will mean that the salary provided should be measurable and comparable to an accepted standard.

USCIS doesn’t publish a magic threshold. Earnings are to be compared to the 90th percentile of salary level in the particular geographic location and profession using the information contained in data such as the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program, Radford salary surveys, or salary database. The 90th percentile wage for software developer and software engineer in the US is at $168,570 per year according to BLS. FAANG compensation structures make that comparison considerably more complicated. LevelUp automates this benchmarking step, pulling current BLS and Levels.fyi data against your specific SOC code and geography, so the right percentile is calculated before a filing decision is made, not discovered mid-RFE.

“Commanded,” Not Just “Earned”

Eight words in the regulatory text carry most of the interpretive weight: “evidence that the alien has commanded a high salary or other significantly high remuneration for services, in relation to others in the field.”

That verb command is doing real work. USCIS isn’t asking whether a competitive market paid someone generously. It’s asking whether individual-specific demand drove compensation above what direct professional peers earn.

This distinction has real teeth in adjudication. A Senior Engineer making $250,000 base in San Francisco may simply be collecting the going rate for that role in that city, proof of a functioning tech labor market, not proof of extraordinary ability. Compensation that reflects scarcity and individual demand clears the bar. Pay that reflects geographic cost-of-living, accumulated tenure, or general market conditions doesn’t clear it on its own.

How FAANG Pay Is Layered: What to Document

Inside major tech companies, compensation isn’t one number. Base salary, performance bonuses, and Restricted Stock Units vesting over four years (typically with a one-year cliff) form a stack where equity often dwarfs base pay by a factor of two or three at senior levels.

The regulatory language anticipated this structure precisely. “Or other significantly high remuneration” extends the criterion to RSUs, stock options, profit distributions, royalties, and consulting income. The breakdown for a Google L5 may look as follows: $200,000 base, $40,000 bonus, $190,000 of annual RSUs, total annual compensation is $430,000.

The problem is in the documentation required for approval. USCIS requires full exhibits of the calculation: agreement on equity grants, vesting schedule, fair market value as of the grant date, method of annualizing. If submitting just a W-2 for the year where equity constitutes the majority of the compensation, the equity will not be recognized by the adjudicators due to lack of proper supporting documents.

An even higher level of evidence is required for private corporation equity. LevelUp builds this full compensation exhibit as a standard deliverable, annualizing RSUs, mapping vesting schedules, and documenting fair market value,  so nothing is left for USCIS to discount.

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National Benchmarks Beat Local. Almost Every Time.

Engineers from Bay Area always automatically benchmark their compensation to the peers working in the same market. Understandably so, but rarely the better strategy.

USCIS favors nationwide benchmarking data.

An engineer from FAANG at Staff/Principal level with compensation properly annualized falls into the 91-95th percentile nationwide, not because she stands out among the elites of Silicon Valley, but because her salary is benchmarked to the entire nation-wide distribution. LevelUp runs national benchmarking as a default, not an afterthought, ensuring the percentile presented to USCIS reflects the full national distribution, not the compressed range of the Bay Area talent pool.

The Data Source Hierarchy That Shapes Adjudication Outcomes

But not all evidence of salaries should be created equally, and those with experience responding to RFEs will know how these lines have been drawn.

The best evidence is, of course, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics: government generated, SOC code-specific, and well-received. The second-best is the prevailing wage data from DOL Foreign Labor Certification, where a compensation significantly above Level IV is good evidence. In the field of technology, Level.fyi has been accepted as real adjudicator evidence since it provides total compensation: base, bonus, and equity, by company and level, which BLS does not do.

One position USCIS has clearly stated: the DOL prevailing wage data alone cannot demonstrate that the salary offered is significant. Submitting such data without additional evidence will trigger an RFE.

The Kazarian Step 2 Argument Petitions Miss

Under Kazarian v. USCIS, 596 F.3d 1115 (9th Cir. 2010), EB-1A adjudication runs in two distinct phases. Step one verifies whether evidentiary criteria are met; step two, the final merits determination, evaluates whether the complete record establishes sustained national or international acclaim. Most petitions invest heavily in Step 1 and say almost nothing useful at Step 2.

Compensation evidence, deployed intentionally, speaks directly to the Step 2 question. The argument that holds: the petitioner’s total compensation, placing them at the 93rd percentile nationally, reflects the market’s independent determination that their contributions command a premium over peers. A distinguished organization with access to the full national talent pool (compensating this individual at a level it reserves for its most exceptional contributors) is external market validation of extraordinary ability. Consistently high compensation across multiple employers strengthens it further, showing the market has independently arrived at the same conclusion about the same person, more than once.

LevelUp integrates compensation data directly into the Step 2 narrative framework, connecting percentile positioning to the broader extraordinary ability argument so the evidentiary record speaks coherently across both phases of adjudication

The Three RFE Patterns That Appear Constantly

Wrong comparison group is the most common failure. A software engineering manager benchmarked against all software engineers. A neurosurgeon compared himself against all physicians and not the sub-specialty peer group. In one mistake of misclassification, the truly extraordinary salary appears merely satisfactory, and the AAO has made the point by saying that the average salary information for another profession does not suffice.

Geographic disparity comes next. Localizing too narrowly to the California Bay Area when broader national benchmarks generate more compelling percentiles is a strategy not pursued properly. Submitting national averages while location-specific data is required invites an RFE requesting better benchmarking. It is the right choice for most FAANG professionals in the country.

Incomplete supporting documentation completes the set. W-2 only when there is a significant amount of equity and bonus as part of total compensation offers the USCIS a partial picture. The solution is complete documentation: W-2, award letter for bonuses, equity grants and vesting schedule, annualization methodology and total compensation number.

LevelUp flags all three of these failure patterns before filing, auditing comparison group accuracy, confirming the right geographic benchmark, and checking documentation completeness, so none of them surface under a 90-day RFE clock.

Evidence Strategy Before Filing  

Criterion 9 fails most often not because of thin documentation, but because of weak evidence strategy upstream. USCIS has flagged in RFEs that this criterion is sometimes deployed as filler, a way to reach the three-criterion minimum without genuine evidentiary strength. A petition built on three thin pillars rarely survives the Step 2 merits determination.

The practical test: if total compensation, correctly annualized and benchmarked nationally against the right peer group, places the petitioner at or above the 90th percentile for their specific occupation, build this criterion as a genuine pillar. If the percentile falls below 80, a different combination likely produces a stronger petition. 

LevelUp by EB1A Experts conducts this kind of analysis before the petitioning, taking into account your compensation and qualifications from the viewpoint of all 10 USCIS criteria at once, calculating EB-1A Readiness Score, and determining which criteria you have real evidence for, and which require narrative development. Having more than 300 approvals and EB-1A approval rate of 80–85%, EB1A Experts found that about 30% of professionals who believed themselves unqualified turned out to be qualified after conducting a proper analysis.

FAQs

1. Does total compensation count, or only base salary?

Yes. All components count, 8 C.F.R. § 204.5(h)(3)(ix) is explicit on RSUs, bonuses, stock options, and signing packages. The documentation question is where applicants typically stumble. If equity hasn’t vested yet, annualize it using the grant agreement and vesting schedule; don’t wait for it to appear on a W-2. Signing bonuses received in a single year should be amortized over the contract term, not counted as full-year income. Pre-IPO equity presents the highest documentation burden: without a 409A valuation or recent funding-round pricing, expect adjudicators to apply a significant discount regardless of nominal grant value.

2. What percentile satisfies Criterion 9?

The 90th percentile nationally for your SOC-coded occupation is the practical floor; 93rd–95th is the stronger target. One nuance worth adding: if your compensation clears the 90th percentile but narrowly, Step 1 evaluation rarely produces an RFE on the threshold alone, the exposure surfaces in the Step 2 merits determination, where thin margins across multiple criteria compound. If you’re between the 80th and 90th percentile, the strategic question isn’t whether you can argue for the criterion, it’s whether the resource investment produces a stronger petition than redirecting to a different pillar.

3. What triggers an RFE on Criterion 9?

The three documentation patterns are covered in detail above. Two additional triggers worth noting that the body section doesn’t address: submitting salary data from different reference years without explaining the discrepancy, and relying on Glassdoor or LinkedIn Salary as a primary source without corroboration from a government or field-specific survey.

When an RFE does arrive, the language USCIS uses most often is a variant of: “the record does not establish that the beneficiary’s compensation is high in relation to others in the field.” That wording targets the peer group definition, not the dollar figure. The correct response is to redefine the comparison group and rerun the percentile analysis, submitting more documentation of the same salary doesn’t resolve it.

4. What data sources does USCIS accept?

BLS OES, DOL FLC prevailing wage, and Levels.fyi for tech roles are covered in detail above. One practical point the body doesn’t address: always use data current to the filing year, not the year the compensation was earned. If filing in 2025 based on a 2023 salary, use 2024 BLS data and note the comparison methodology explicitly, using 2023 data because it matches the W-2 year is a common and avoidable error. For applicants who worked internationally, USCIS expects U.S. national benchmarks for U.S.-based roles. Country-specific benchmarks for foreign employment periods have less established adjudication precedent and should be corroborated with additional sources.

5. How do I know if Criterion 9 is worth building?

The percentile test is necessary but not sufficient. Criterion 9 performs best when it reinforces other evidence of extraordinary ability, high salary paid by a distinguished organization for a critical role builds a mutually reinforcing narrative. Where it tends to underperform is as the third criterion in a petition anchored on two weak ones. USCIS has explicitly flagged in RFEs that this criterion is sometimes invoked to reach the three-criterion minimum, and that pattern tends to surface in the Step 2 merits determination rather than Step 1. LevelUp maps all ten criteria simultaneously before filing. The analysis changes petition strategy in ways that late-stage drafting rarely can.