Does This Company Sponsor Green Cards? The PERM-to-LCA Ratio Test, and the Ability-to-Pay Check

A company can file hundreds of H-1B petitions and almost no green cards. That gap is visible in public DOL records — and so is whether the employer can prove it can pay you.

The offer is in front of you and the salary question is settled. What is not settled is the one underneath it: will this company actually start a green card for you, and can it finish one?

You have already done the easy check. You searched the company on a sponsorship database, saw a number of H-1B petitions, and felt reassured for about four minutes. Then it occurred to you that the number told you nothing about green cards, and you were right. H-1B volume and green card volume are different behaviours, and the second is not implied by the first. A company can file hundreds of H-1B petitions a year and almost no permanent labor certifications.

Both behaviours are visible in public records. The Department of Labor's Office of Foreign Labor Certification publishes disclosure data covering both programmes — the Labor Condition Applications behind H-1B petitions and the PERM applications behind green cards. The same files are what the consumer sponsorship databases repackage. You can read them directly, and the comparison is where the real signal is.

That is test one, and it is behavioural. Test two is financial, and almost nobody runs it. To approve an I-140 in a category that requires a job offer, USCIS has to be satisfied that the employer has had the continuing ability to pay your offered wage from the priority date until you become a permanent resident. That is a regulatory standard with specific evidence requirements at 8 CFR 204.5(g)(2), and an employer can run a flawless PERM and still fail it.

The output of both tests is not a verdict. It is four or five questions to put to the hiring manager before you sign.

⚠️ Read this before you run either test. Public disclosure data is lagged by a quarter or more, employer names in DOL files rarely match the brand on the careers page, and no ratio predicts an individual case. Ability to pay is assessed on a financial record the employer submits and you will never see. These are screening tools that surface better questions. They are not predictions, and this page is research guidance, not legal advice.

Why H-1B volume tells you almost nothing about green cards

The two filings answer different business problems, sit at different points in a company's internal approval chain, and cost wildly different amounts.

An H-1B is a solution to a three-year staffing problem. Before filing the petition with USCIS, the employer certifies a Labor Condition Application — Form ETA-9035 — with DOL, attesting to wage and working-condition obligations. It is a fast, largely attestation-based step, and hiring managers treat it as a line item.

PERM is a commitment to a multi-year process with a very different cost structure. Under the permanent labor certification programme, the employer must first request and receive a prevailing wage determination from the National Prevailing Wage Center, then run a real recruitment campaign — placing ads, posting the notice of filing, reviewing US applicants against the stated minimum requirements — and only then file Form ETA-9089. A certified ETA-9089 is a precondition to the I-140. Because it involves genuinely testing the labour market for your role, it is a decision an employer makes deliberately rather than reflexively.

That gap in cost and deliberation is why volume falls off between the two programmes, and why an LCA count tells you a company hires foreign workers while its PERM count tells you whether it keeps them. If you have not run the H-1B side of the check at all, start with our five-method H-1B sponsor lookup. For the mechanics of the permanent process itself, how PERM actually works, start to finish is the companion piece.

Test one: the PERM-to-LCA ratio

Where the data lives

OFLC publishes public disclosure files for both programmes on a quarterly cycle, on the Department of Labor's foreign labor certification performance data page. The files are large CSVs of final determinations, one per programme per period, carrying employer name, case status, job title, worksite, and offered wage.

As of late July 2026, the most recent release covered final determinations issued through the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 — the reporting period running October 1, 2025 through March 31, 2026. Check the page for the current release before you rely on any date range; OFLC posts on its own schedule and the cutoff moves.

Two more DOL pages are worth having open. OFLC processing times tells you how far behind the queues are, which converts "they'll start your PERM in year two" into a real calendar. As of the figures published on that page on July 17, 2026, PERM analyst review was working through applications from July 2025 and audit review from December 2025; prevailing wage determinations, as of June 30, 2026, were at April 2026 for OEWS-based H-1B requests and March 2026 for non-OEWS. Those numbers move monthly — read the live page rather than this sentence. Separately, the USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub gives you approved petition counts as a cross-check on the LCA side.

Using a sponsorship database instead is a legitimate shortcut. Understand only that you are reading DOL's files either way, with the database's entity-matching guesses layered on top.

How to run it

1. Fix a window. Two or three fiscal years is usually enough to smooth out a lumpy year and short enough to describe current behaviour.
2. Pull certified LCA counts for the employer over that window.
3. Pull certified PERM counts for the same employer over the same window.
4. Align on the legal entity name, not the brand. This is where most amateur lookups fail. DOL files carry the filing entity, which is frequently a holding company, a regional subsidiary, or a name that predates a rebrand. Search variants. If the company has acquired others, search the acquired names too.
5. Read the LCA count as an upper bound, not a headcount. A single certified LCA can cover more than one worker position — the ETA-9035 asks the employer for the total number of worker positions being requested — and a certified LCA does not prove any H-1B petition was ever filed on it. If you treat the LCA count as a count of people, your denominator is wrong before you start.

Reading the number

There is no threshold that separates good sponsors from bad ones, and anyone who gives you one is inventing it. What the ratio produces is a shape.

Take a purely hypothetical mature employer: 800 certified LCAs over three years and 11 certified PERMs in the same window — roughly one green card started for every 70-odd H-1B positions certified. At a company operating for a decade with a large, long-tenured foreign workforce, that shape is worth asking about directly, and a ratio near zero is a stronger signal still. Those figures are illustrative; there is no employer behind them. Pull your own from the live files.

The direction of the read matters more than the arithmetic. You are not computing a score. You are working out whether "we sponsor green cards" describes a process the company runs, or a sentence the recruiter says.

Four reasons a low ratio can be innocent

Before you conclude anything, rule these out:

• Company age. Most employers with a written policy start PERM somewhere around the two- or three-year mark. A company founded four years ago may simply not have a cohort at that mark yet.
• Acquisitions and name changes. If the company grew by acquisition, its foreign workforce may carry filings under predecessor entity names, splitting the record across identities that no single search will catch.
• A workforce in categories that never generate an LCA. O-1, TN, L-1 and cap-exempt arrangements do not produce Labor Condition Applications. A company with a lot of these has a distorted denominator, and the ratio will read worse than reality.
• A seniority-gated policy. Some employers genuinely do sponsor, but only at a level or tenure you have not reached. That is a real policy and it is answerable in one question.

Each of these converts the ratio from a verdict into a question you can ask out loud without accusing anyone of anything.

Three things the ratio does tell you reliably

Strip away the interpretation and three findings survive:

1. Whether the company has ever completed a PERM at all. A zero is a zero. If there is no certified permanent labor certification in the record under any entity name you can find, "we sponsor green cards" is at best a plan.
2. Whether it has done so recently. Filings clustered five years ago and nothing since usually means the people who ran that process have left and the institutional memory went with them.
3. At what job titles and wage levels it sponsors. This is the most useful thing on this page and no database sells it to you. The disclosure files carry job title and offered wage on each PERM record. Sort them. If every certified PERM at the company is for roles two levels above the one you are being offered, you have learned the actual policy — not the stated one — and you have learned it before signing.

Test two: can this employer prove it can pay you?

What the standard actually is

To approve an I-140 in an employment-based category that requires a job offer, the petitioning employer must establish its continuing ability to pay the proffered wage from the priority date until the beneficiary obtains lawful permanent residence. The requirement lives at 8 CFR 204.5(g)(2), and USCIS sets out how officers apply it in Policy Manual Volume 6, Part E, Chapter 4. The burden is the employer's, not yours.

Note both ends of that sentence. The obligation starts at the priority date — for a PERM-based case, the date DOL accepted the labor certification — not at the date the I-140 is filed. And it runs forward until you actually get the green card, not until the petition is approved.

The evidence the employer must produce

Annual reports, federal tax returns, or audited financial statements, for each available year from the priority date.

"Audited" means audited. USCIS distinguishes audited financial statements — examined by an accountant authorised to perform the audit, accompanied by an auditor's report — from compiled or reviewed statements, which are less rigorous engagements an employer may use only alongside the other required forms of evidence. Among auditor's reports, USCIS treats an unqualified opinion as the most credible and probative; qualified, adverse and disclaimer opinions get weighed against the rest of the record.

A large public company clears this without breathing hard, because its published annual report already exists. A twelve-person company that has never had an audit is not disqualified, but it is relying on tax returns and on the arithmetic below.

The 100-employee shortcut

An employer with 100 or more workers may submit a statement from a financial officer attesting to its ability to pay, instead of annual reports, tax returns or audited statements.

This is a permission, not an exemption, and USCIS retains discretion to find the statement insufficient. Its own examples include: the employer has filed petitions for so many beneficiaries that its total salary obligations are in question; evidence in the record suggests it has fewer than 100 employees; the letter is a copy dated several years before the filing and has been recycled across earlier petitions; the letter conflicts with other evidence or with publicly available information, such as large reported losses or bankruptcy proceedings; or the petition comes from a successor-in-interest whose only evidence is a letter from a financial officer of the predecessor company.

If someone tells you a big employer "doesn't have to prove" ability to pay, that is the misreading this paragraph exists to prevent.

How USCIS does the arithmetic

Three routes, and the order matters.

Wages already paid. If the employer paid you at or above the proffered wage for the relevant years, that can establish ability to pay for those years — evidenced by W-2s, 1099s, or state wage and withholding reports. This is the cleanest route and it is the reason a candidate already on the payroll at or above the PERM wage is in a structurally better position than a new hire.

Net income. Revenues less all expenses, as reported on the federal tax return. USCIS does not add depreciation back. An employer that shows a loss cannot recover it by arguing the loss is non-cash.

Net current assets. Current assets minus current liabilities.

Two rules get misstated constantly in third-party content, so hold onto them:

• USCIS does not combine net income with net current assets. Adding them double-counts income under either cash or accrual accounting. The employer has to clear the bar on one of them, not on the sum.
• Where the employer already paid you something below the proffered wage, it only has to cover the shortfall. USCIS's own worked shape: proffered wage $50,000, W-2s showing $40,000 actually paid, so the employer must show net income or net current assets of at least $10,000 for each relevant year — not $50,000.

That second rule is the one that quietly saves a lot of small-employer cases, and the one candidates most often do not know exists.

What does not count

⚠️ This section is for readers at startups and small companies. If your prospective employer has raised a large round and the recruiter has waved at it as proof they can sponsor, the rest of this section is the one thing on the page you need. Investor money is not the employer's money until it is on the employer's books.

USCIS generally does not consider the financial resources of persons or entities with no explicit legal obligation to pay the proffered wage. That exclusion covers:

• shareholders and officers of a corporation
• members and managers of a limited liability company
• a parent company, where the petitioning subsidiary's own financial position is not established
• limited partners

An undrawn line of credit is not cash. It cannot be added to net income or net current assets. Credit the company has actually drawn will already be sitting on the balance sheet, where it belongs.

The practical translation: a $40 million Series B helps only insofar as it shows up in the petitioning entity's financial statements as assets. The round existing does not help. The term sheet does not help. The parent's balance sheet does not help unless the petitioner's own position is established.

Two structures do reach through. Sole proprietors and individual employers have no separate legal entity, so USCIS looks at the employer's adjusted gross income minus personal expenses, and at personal liquid assets. And in a general partnership where partners are personally liable for the partnership's obligations, evidence about the general partners — including personal tax returns — can be relevant.

If you are weighing a small company specifically, run this alongside our checklist on whether a startup can sponsor at all, which covers the H-1B-stage version of the same problem.

The totality factors that can rescue a bad year

A single unprofitable year does not automatically sink a petition. USCIS weighs the totality of the circumstances, and its stated factors include: gross sales and revenues; total wages paid to current employees in recent fiscal years; the number of years the employer has been in business; established historical growth; recent disruptions such as reorganisation, merger or bankruptcy; the overall number of employees; uncharacteristic expenditures or losses since recovered; the employer's reputation within its industry; and whether the beneficiary is replacing a former employee or an outsourced service.

The classic shape USCIS describes is a company with a long profitable history that had one bad year for identifiable, non-recurring reasons and demonstrably recovered. An officer forgoing compensation so the wage can be paid can also be considered.

You cannot verify any of this from outside. It matters because it tells you the standard is not a single hard number — which means a small employer with a thin year is worth a conversation rather than an automatic no.

Translating both tests into questions you can actually ask

You now have data and a standard. Here is what to do with them, in a tone that does not read as an interrogation.

1. "When does the company typically start the PERM process, measured from start date?" A good answer is a number with a reason attached — "after the first full performance cycle, usually 12 to 18 months." A bad answer is "when the time is right."

2. "Is that policy written down anywhere I can see?" A written policy survives a manager change. A verbal one does not.

3. "Who signs off — my manager, HR, or a committee?" You are trying to learn how many people can quietly say no later.

4. "Roughly how many PERMs did the company file last year?" You already know the answer. The value is entirely in whether theirs matches, and in what happens to the conversation when it does not.

5. "What happens if I'm promoted, change teams, or relocate mid-process?" Material changes to the job can affect a PERM that was certified for a specific role at a specific worksite. You want to hear that someone at the company has thought about this before.

6. "Who bears the cost, and is any of it clawed back if I leave?" Under 20 CFR 656.12, an employer must not seek or receive payment of any kind for any activity related to obtaining a permanent labor certification, including the employer's own attorneys' fees — and "payment" expressly includes wage concessions, deductions and in-kind arrangements. A candidate may pay their own separate costs, including fees for their own attorney, except that where the same attorney represents both the candidate and the employer, those costs are the employer's. Any suggestion that a PERM clawback will come out of your wages is a serious flag.

Our guides to verifying a sponsor's track record after an offer and negotiating green card sponsorship into the offer cover the negotiation itself. And name this plainly to yourself: the employer's immigration counsel represents the employer, not you. Their advice is competent and it is not independent. If the immigration terms of an offer are material to your decision, retain your own attorney.

What neither test can tell you

Disclosure data lags by a quarter or more. Entity names in DOL files rarely match brands, so a clean-looking zero may be a search failure rather than a finding. A certified PERM is not an approved I-140, and an approved I-140 is not a green card — three different events at three different stages. Ability to pay is decided on a record the employer submits and you will never see. And a company with a strong record can change policy the month after you join.

The wait itself is not an employer attribute at all. Priority-date backlogs are set by your country of birth and your preference category, not by how good your sponsor is; a company with a perfect PERM record cannot shorten the queue for you. If you are weighing employer size against process speed, small company versus Fortune 500 timelines has that comparison.

This page is research methodology. The moment your question becomes whether this specific employer's financials will satisfy USCIS, whether a particular job description supports EB-2 or EB-3, whether a role change mid-PERM requires a restart, or what to do about an I-140 denial or a notice of intent to revoke — that is an immigration attorney's question, not an article's. If you are on F-1 or OPT, anything touching your status maintenance goes to your DSO first.

Frequently asked questions

What is the PERM-to-LCA ratio, and what does it tell me?

It is the number of permanent labor certifications an employer has filed compared with the number of certified Labor Condition Applications behind its H-1B petitions, over the same period. Both are published by the Department of Labor's Office of Foreign Labor Certification. A company with a large LCA volume and almost no PERM filings is telling you something a sponsorship database will never say out loud — it hires foreign workers routinely and starts green cards rarely.

Is a low PERM count always a bad sign?

No, and this is where the ratio needs judgement. A young company may simply not have anyone at the two- or three-year mark where its policy starts green cards. A company that acquired most of its workforce may have filings under a predecessor's name. And a company whose foreign workforce is largely cap-exempt, on O-1, or on TN will show a distorted denominator. Treat the ratio as a question to ask in the offer conversation, not as a verdict.

What is "ability to pay" and why should a candidate care?

To approve an I-140 in a category requiring a job offer, USCIS must be satisfied the employer has had the continuing ability to pay the offered wage from the priority date onward until you become a permanent resident. The employer proves it with annual reports, federal tax returns or audited financial statements for each available year from the priority date. An employer that cannot clear that bar can run a full PERM and still have the I-140 denied — after two years of your time.

How does USCIS actually measure ability to pay?

Three ways, in effect. If the employer already paid you at or above the offered wage for the relevant years, that can establish it. Otherwise USCIS looks at net income, or at net current assets — current assets minus current liabilities. If the employer paid you something less than the offered wage, it only has to cover the difference. USCIS does not add depreciation back to net income, and does not combine net income with net current assets.

Can a small startup satisfy ability to pay?

It can, but not by pointing at its investors. USCIS generally does not consider the financial resources of parties with no explicit legal obligation to pay the offered wage — that includes shareholders and officers of a corporation, members and managers of an LLC, and a parent company. Money from a funding round counts when it appears in the petitioning company's own financial statements. A term sheet, a cap table, or an undrawn line of credit does not.

Do employers with 100 or more workers have an easier time?

Somewhat. An employer with 100 or more workers may submit a statement from a financial officer instead of annual reports, tax returns or audited financial statements. USCIS still has discretion to find that statement insufficient — for instance where the employer has filed for many beneficiaries at once, where the record suggests it has fewer than 100 employees, where the letter is years old and recycled from earlier petitions, or where it conflicts with public information about the company's finances.

What should I actually ask in the offer conversation?

Ask when the company starts PERM measured from the start date, who signs off, whether the policy is written down, what happens if you are promoted or relocate mid-process, and who pays. Under 20 CFR 656.12 an employer must not seek or receive payment for any activity related to obtaining a permanent labor certification, including its own attorneys' fees. Ask how many PERMs the company filed last year — you will already know the answer from the public data, which is the point.

Two tests, twenty minutes, and a conversation that goes differently because you ran them. F1Jobs works with international students and workers through the sponsorship side of the job search, from the first employer lookup to the offer that has to hold for a decade. This article is general information, not legal advice.