On March 27, 2026, the Department of Labor’s Office of Foreign Labor Certification (OFLC) published a proposed rule, titled Improving Wage Protections for the Temporary and Permanent Employment of Certain Foreign Nationals in the United States, that would change how prevailing wages are calculated for H-1B, H-1B1, E-3, and PERM-based green card applications. These changes would generally increase the wages required for those petitions.
The University of Michigan recently submitted a comment letter opposing the proposed calculation method, noting that the proposal is unreasonable, unnecessary and would have a significant, negative impact on institutions of higher education in general and U-M in particular.
The proposed rule also requested feedback on alternatives OFLC considered but did not adopt, including whether to eliminate the use of private wage surveys. OFLC ultimately chose not to remove that option. In our comment letter, U-M strongly supported the decision to retain external wage surveys as an acceptable source for prevailing wage determinations because they often provide more detailed, job-specific, and accurate information than the OFLC-provided data.