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Employer attribution methodology

Every filing count on this site answers one question: which filings belong to which company? The government does not answer it for us. DOL publishes an employer name as free text, exactly as the filer typed it, and a single company files under dozens of legal entities across years. This document states the rules we use, why each one exists, and what we deliberately exclude.

The rules are maintained as a single machine-readable ruleset that every part of the build consumes. Nothing attributes a filing by any other means.

An employer is attributed to a company when its name matches that company's include pattern and does not match its exclude pattern.

Both patterns are applied to the employer name after normalization: uppercased, with every run of non-alphanumeric characters collapsed to a single space and the result trimmed. Wal-Mart Associates, Inc. becomes WAL MART ASSOCIATES INC. The SQL and Python implementations compute this identically, so a rule that matches in one matches in the other.

Patterns are anchored to the start of the name

Almost every include begins with ^. A company's filings lead with its name; an unrelated business that merely contains the word does not.

This is the single most important rule, and it exists because the earlier unanchored version was wrong in ways that mattered:

Subsidiaries are listed explicitly

A company gets credit for a subsidiary's filings when the subsidiary is wholly owned and its work is the parent's work. These are named one by one rather than inferred, so each is auditable:

Exclusions are recorded, not silent

Where a company shares its prefix with an unrelated business, the exclusion is written down in the rule's exclude field with the reason in notes:

• BlackRock excludes BlackRock Microsystems (neurotechnology), BlackRock IT Solutions, BlackRock Construction Services, BlackRock Resources, BlackRock Automation and BlackRock Energy.
• Micron excludes Micron Products (medical devices), Micron Systems and Micron Solutions.
• General Motors excludes GM Financial and Cruise, which are tracked as separate businesses.
• HCL America excludes HCL Global Systems, an unrelated staffing firm with 2,956 filings that a bare HCL prefix would have absorbed.
• Ernst & Young excludes Ernst Metal Technologies.
• Intel excludes names beginning INTELLI.

Judgment calls we made

Three cases had no obviously correct answer. Our choices:

1. Apple is restricted to Apple Inc. and Apple Payments Services. Entities such as Apple American Group (an Applebee's franchisee) and Apple Processing LLC are excluded despite leading with the word, because they are not Apple Inc.
2. AMD is matched only as Advanced Micro Devices. The bare initialism is too common to be safe, so a small number of genuine AMD entities filing under an AMD prefix are given up in exchange for excluding seven unrelated firms.
3. Adobe is restricted to Adobe Inc. and Adobe Systems, excluding businesses named after the Spanish loanword.

In each case we chose to undercount rather than over-attribute. A number that is slightly low is defensible; a number that credits a company with someone else's filings is not.

DOL publishes some quarterly files as cumulative year-to-date rather than quarter-only. FY2021 Q2 and Q3 both begin at 2020-10-01; FY2023 Q2 begins at 2022-10-01. Loading them naively counts the same case up to four times.

We keep one row per case number per fiscal year, preferring the record with the latest decision date so a case that was certified and later withdrawn reports its final status rather than a stale certification.

Deduplication is scoped within a fiscal year. 102,084 case numbers legitimately appear in two fiscal years, typically certified in one and withdrawn in the next. Those count once in each year rather than being reassigned, because each year's file reflects a real decision in that year.

State these before anyone else finds them:

1. USCIS attribution uses a separate pattern list. USCIS publishes employer strings in a different format from DOL, so its pattern list is maintained independently and is not yet held to the anchoring rule above. Unifying the two is outstanding work.
2. Coverage is 87 companies. The underlying dataset holds every H-1B filing from 193,788 employers; the site reports on a curated subset.
3. We attribute by filer name, not by corporate ownership. A subsidiary we have not identified files under its own name and is not credited to its parent. New subsidiaries appear as companies restructure.
4. Employer names contain typos. 1 Tata Consultancy Services Limited and similar malformed entries are not attributed. The effect is single-digit.

Every published figure can be reproduced from the government files without trusting our database: download the DOL disclosure workbooks, apply the normalization, anchoring and deduplication rules stated above, and compare the result to what the site shows.

We do exactly that on every quarterly refresh. An independent verification pass reparses the raw workbooks from scratch — separate from the production build — and the refresh fails if any published number does not reproduce. Structural checks run alongside it, asserting that deduplication holds, that every complete fiscal year has all four quarterly files, that no company drops to zero mid-history, that no two companies claim the same employer, and that published wages are plausible.