I'm absolutely not a lawyer, so may be mistaken, but the fees for I-129 / DS-160 are not explicitly mentioned anywhere. Instead the fee seems to be an entry fee, which is orthogonal to the actual visa (meaning ; you can have a visa but not be granted entry, or maybe be granted entry under a different program but then with no lawful work permit).
Personal Experience: H1B/Work PERM/Personal PERM/EADs/Naturalization
Zip5 codes are allocated by geography and population. See very large rural tracts of land in AZ or NM that have a large zip5 code area. Zip-9 probably could be associated with one household. Zips are actually a pain in the ass for purposes other than mail delivery because they change from time to time, are not cleanly allocated to geography or logical features on a map. They can be discontinuous and overlapping. Many companies employee proprietary means of assigning geographic identifiers that are not dependent on zip, population size or anything other than geo.
To get a rough idea of how often a ZIP-9 narrows things down to a single street address, I took a look at the sales tax rate and boundary files made available for states that are in the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement [1].
12 of those states, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, and Washington, use address-based tax rates. (The other 12 either just have one rate for the whole state, or just go by ZIP).
For each ZIP-9 in the address files for the 12 address-based states, I found the lowest and the highest street number for that ZIP-9. I then counted how many of the ZIP-9s had the lowest street number the same as the highest street number.
There were a total of 9,311,327 distinct ZIP-9 values.
2,415,305 of them had a low to high range that only included one number.
That's about 26% of the ZIP-9's having a unique street number. Note that this does not necessarily mean a single household, because I'm not looking at the full address. Apartment buildings, for instance, will in many cases show up in that 26%.
Excellent analysis. That’s like 2% or less of households in the US? So even at the Zip9 level not ideal for identifying specific households but problematic if you’re one of those 2M Zip9s.
My wife picked her state job in large because of the retirement options and it being a 9-5 job.
Her degree is at a higher level, she's a civil engineer and with a professional license on top; as a tech person,I make about 50% more.
If she went to a private company, that actually paid women the same as men, we would make almost the same. Her choice was to bet on the state after having been exploited in the private sector and with no recourse.
Personal Experience: H1B/Work PERM/Personal PERM/EADs/Naturalization