PlainEmployers publishes a workforce-data profile for employers that appear in the federal record — built entirely from official Department of Labor H-1B wage filings, OSHA workplace-injury data, and state WARN Act layoff notices. This page explains how those pages are produced, what standards they are held to, and how to report a number that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every wage figure, filing count, injury rate, safety grade, and layoff notice on PlainEmployers originates in an official government dataset. We download the raw data files, load them through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline, and render them into employer, industry, metro, and ranking pages using shared templates. No employer page is hand-written, and no wage or safety figure is typed in by an editor — each value is read directly from the official source record at build time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how each measure is defined and labeled, what the methodology says, how derived measures (such as a median wage, an industry benchmark, or a percentile) are computed, which guides and explainers we write, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those decisions uniformly across every employer, so the rule that governs one page governs all of them.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from official government sources, and we name the source on every page. Our data is:

• DOL H-1B disclosure data: Labor Condition Application filings published by the Department of Labor's Office of Foreign Labor Certification — the offered-wage ranges, job titles, work locations, and filing counts behind every wage figure on the site.
• OSHA injury & illness data: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Injury Tracking Application records — total recordable injuries and the DART (Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred) rate behind our workplace-safety grades.
• WARN Act notices: Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings collected by state workforce agencies — the mass-layoff and plant-closing notices behind our layoff history.

We do not scrape third-party sites, we do not republish self-reported employer ratings as our own, and we do not assign subjective "best employer" scores on top of the government data. Where a figure is derived from the official data (for example, a median wage or a percentile), the page links to our methodology, which sets out exactly how it is calculated.

Accuracy, validation, and known limitations

Because the numbers are read straight from DOL, OSHA, and state files, the most common limitation is the underlying data itself, not a transcription error. We are explicit about three in particular:

• H-1B wages are filed offers, not actual pay. An LCA states the wage range an employer offered for a sponsored role; it is not a guarantee of what any employee earns, and it covers only H-1B-sponsored positions, not the whole workforce. Our pipeline computes a median from the disclosed per-position figures and excludes implausible outliers from corrupt upstream rollups.
• Some safety grades are industry-benchmarked. An employer with no establishment-specific OSHA injury record is shown against its industry's average DART rate rather than a verified company-level rate; pages whose only signal is that benchmark are marked for de-emphasis and are not advertised to search engines.
• WARN notices are advance filings. A notice records a planned action under the 60-day WARN requirement; not every layoff triggers a notice, and a filed notice is not always carried out exactly as filed.

When we find that a displayed number is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or labeling rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainEmployers does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any employer or organization in exchange for how it is presented. We do not assign our own endorsements or remove unfavorable public records on request. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertisers have no influence over which employers we cover, how a wage, safety, or layoff figure is reported, or how any page ranks.

Update schedule

The Department of Labor releases new H-1B disclosure files on a quarterly basis, OSHA publishes injury data annually, and state agencies post WARN notices on a rolling basis. We refresh our database from the latest official exports and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the data genuinely changed — never an automatic "updated today" stamp.

Corrections process

If a figure looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

1. Report. Email hello@plainemployers.com with the page URL and the figure you are questioning.
2. Verify. We check the value against the official DOL, OSHA, or state WARN source record for that employer.
3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known limitation — an offered wage rather than actual pay, an industry-benchmarked safety grade, or an advance WARN filing — we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the federal record itself. When that is the case, we will tell you so and, where possible, point you to the official source — the DOL OFLC disclosure data or OSHA's establishment search — so you can verify it directly.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific figure are welcome at hello@plainemployers.com. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology. For how to use this information responsibly when researching an employer, see our disclaimer.