Visa application filings show Meta has offered “ultra-high base salaries” by job category to secure artificial intelligence talent and senior technical staff.

Business Insider analysed about 5,800 Meta filings for H-1B and other work visas and found a case listing an annual base salary of up to $450,000 for a software engineer. The data covered not only Meta’s headquarters but also roles tied to its WhatsApp unit and payments operations.

Some roles stood out for top-end pay. Meta set a base salary of $450,000 for a software engineer, while a research engineer received $400,000. A product manager’s base salary was listed at $348,101. This is seen as Meta continuing to pay a high premium for specialised AI staff and highly experienced technical roles.

The “ultra-high” pay was concentrated among some workers. Across the full distribution, most new hires clustered in the $150,000 to $250,000 range. Even so, AI and higher-level positions formed a separate band. For example, the base salary for a VP of Engineering, AI was listed at $650,000. There were also many cases in which product designers and UX researchers had base salaries above $200,000.

The make-up of roles also showed a clear direction. About half of hiring through the U.S. H-1B program was for software engineering roles. Machine learning-related jobs had wide ranges, including AI research scientist at $163,800 to $328,000, machine learning engineer at $165,000 to $250,602, and software engineer (machine learning) at $144,096 to $293,118.

In production, role-by-role differences were large. Production engineer ranged from $108,098 to $317,242, while data scientist ranged from $122,760 to $295,703.

It is also important that these figures are not “total compensation.” Visa filings include only annual base salary and exclude stock options, signing bonuses and performance pay. When these elements are added, total compensation often becomes 2 to 3 times higher. Some reports also said there were offers for senior researchers exceeding $100 million in total compensation.

Meta’s H-1B visa applications in the fourth quarter of 2025 fell to roughly half the year-earlier level. A change in rules by the Trump administration in September 2025 is cited as raising costs and tightening reviews. Meta has maintained its hiring stance, while some organisations such as Reality Labs have also recently carried out layoffs, it was reported. Meta’s headcount stood at 78,865 as of end-2025, according to its 10-K filing.