Why H-1B specialty occupation RFEs are rising again

H-1B RFE incidence fell through the early 2020s and has since ticked back up into the twelve to sixteen percent band. Reading a sample of recent requests, the increase is not a return to the blanket specialty-occupation challenges of the 2017 to 2019 period. It is narrower and more technical, concentrated in two areas.

The first is wage level coherence. The second is the relationship between the beneficiary's degree field and the actual duties — the 'directly related' question that the 2025 rulemaking sharpened.

A Level 1 prevailing wage signals an entry-level position: closely supervised, limited judgement, routine tasks. A support letter describing the beneficiary as leading architecture decisions, mentoring engineers and owning delivery describes a Level 3 or 4 role. When those two documents sit in the same packet, the adjudicator has an internal contradiction to resolve and an obvious RFE to write.

This is not an argument for inflating wage levels, which creates its own problems. It is an argument for coherence: the duty description, the wage level, the SOC code and the beneficiary's experience should describe one job. Firms that check this systematically before filing see materially fewer requests than firms that treat the LCA as a separate workstream owned by a different person.

Support letters have long said the position requires a bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field. Under current guidance, adjudicators increasingly ask what makes the beneficiary's particular degree related, and a generic list does not answer it.

The fix is specific rather than lengthy. Identify the coursework and competencies the role actually requires, map the beneficiary's transcript to them, and state the relation in a sentence an adjudicator can verify against a transcript exhibit. Two paragraphs and a transcript cross-reference resolves what a list of adjacent disciplines does not.

• Verify SOC code, wage level, worksite and dates match across LCA and I-129.
• Describe duties with percentage time allocation rather than a bulleted list.
• Map the degree to the duties explicitly, with a transcript exhibit citation.
• For third-party placement, include the full contractual chain to the end client.