DHS’s fresh attempt to revive the charge comes with a 24 September deadline for public comment, after two federal courts split on the original $100,000 fee.
The US Department of Homeland Security has proposed a new $103,265 H-1B visa fee 2026 rule, months after courts blocked a similar charge imposed by presidential proclamation.
The rule, published in the Federal Register on 25 August, would apply to every H-1B petition subject to the annual cap, including those filed under the advanced degree exemption. Indian nationals received 283,772 H-1B approvals in the 2025 financial year and have historically taken roughly seven in ten H-1B visas issued each year, so the proposal lands squarely on the group with the most at stake.
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How the H-1B fee court ruling saga unfolded
The $100,000 fee began life as a presidential proclamation signed on 19 September 2025, effective for petitions filed from 21 September that year. It has spent most of 2026 tied up in court. On 8 June, a federal district court in Massachusetts put the fee on hold in State of California v. Mullin. A brief administrative stay revived it four days later while the First Circuit Court of Appeals weighed the government’s request to keep collecting it. The appeals court declined on 24 July, finding that the government had not shown it was likely to win on appeal.
The $100,000 fee has not been in effect since. The original proclamation is due to lapse on 20 September unless the administration acts again. A separate challenge, Chamber of Commerce v. DHS, lost at the district court in December 2025 but is now before the DC Circuit, which is weighing whether the fee amounts to an unconstitutional tax in light of the Supreme Court’s February ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump; a third case, Global Nurse Force v. Trump, is still working its way through the courts.
What the new H-1B visa fee 2026 proposal covers
With the proclamation route stalled, DHS is trying formal rulemaking instead. The H-1B visa fee 2026 proposal, published in the Federal Register, would charge $103,265 for every H-1B petition subject to the 65,000 annual cap, including the 20,000 places set aside for the advanced degree exemption. Petitions filed by universities and nonprofit or government research organisations, which sit outside the cap, would not be affected. DHS says the money would fund adjudication, fraud detection and security vetting across itself and three other agencies.
Public comments are due by 24 September, submitted through the Federal Docket Management System under docket USCIS-2026-0298. The proposal exempts extensions, amendments and transfers for workers already counted against the cap, along with cap-exempt petitions filed by universities and nonprofit research organisations; whether it also reaches first-time cap petitions filed domestically by F-1 students changing status to H-1B, rather than only those processed through US consulates abroad, is left unclear in the proposed text, and immigration lawyers are already flagging it as a question to raise during the comment period. A USCIS spokesperson, Zach Kahler, said the fee is meant to “recover the costs incurred across the federal government to adjudicate, vet, and support lawful immigration programmes that otherwise must be funded by taxpayers.”
Why DHS thinks this fee will stick, and why critics disagree
DHS’s own economic analysis argues the new H-1B visa fee 2026 proposal will not meaningfully shrink demand: the department projects it will recover roughly $8.8 billion a year in immigration-system costs while treating H-1B filing volume as “inelastic”, in other words, assuming employers will keep filing petitions at close to the current rate regardless of price. That assumption is doing a lot of work in DHS’s cost-benefit math, and it is the part outside analysts have attacked hardest.
The Institute for Progress’s review of the rulemaking found five separate independent analyses projecting demand would fall somewhere between 63% and 91%, not hold steady. There is already a real-world data point: consular H-1B receipts for workers applying from outside the country fell 91.2% while the original $100,000 proclamation was briefly in force last year.
If that pattern repeats under the new fee, the same analysis estimates the government could lose roughly $59 billion in tax revenue over a decade, more than the $8.8 billion in fees it is trying to collect in a single year. Average H-1B salaries run about $121,863, and H-1B cases typically make up under 2% of the workload at the agencies the fee is meant to fund, which is the gap critics point to when they call the “inelastic demand” assumption the rule leans on hard to square with recent history.
How the 103265 H-1B fee lands on India’s IT industry
No country is more exposed to this than India. Indian nationals received 283,772 of the H-1B petitions approved in the 2025 financial year, about 71% of the total, and computer-related occupations alone account for roughly two-thirds of all H-1B approvals. Company-level filing data going back to FY19 shows how concentrated that exposure is among a handful of Indian IT services firms: Tata Consultancy Services has filed 65,340 H-1B petitions since FY19, Infosys 59,781, HCL America 23,551 and Wipro 20,485. For context, the median wage for a bachelor’s degree holder on an H-1B is around $99,000, meaning the proposed $103,265 charge alone would exceed a typical recipient’s annual salary.
Moody’s Ratings has estimated the fee could add $100 million to $250 million a year in operating costs for the largest Indian IT exporters, roughly 1% of revenue and about 100 basis points off margins, a hit big firms can absorb more easily than mid-sized and smaller staffing companies running on thinner margins. The likely response mirrors what these companies have already been doing since the original $100,000 proclamation: shifting more delivery work offshore to India, hiring more locally in the US, and leaning harder on automation to reduce new H-1B filings rather than pay the increase.
The programme’s original purpose was enabling access to temporary skills where there is a shortage in the US, and that context matters as this rule is finalised.
Nasscom, in its 25 August statement on the proposed fee
Nasscom, India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies, noted in the same statement that its member companies have already invested more than $1.1 billion in strengthening the US STEM talent pipeline and have been steadily reducing their reliance on H-1B hiring in favour of local recruitment, an argument aimed at the “workers should hire and train Americans” framing that has accompanied both the original proclamation and this proposal.
This is not the only pressure on the visa category this year. Google, Amazon and Microsoft told H-1B staff to be cautious about international travel when the original fee first landed, and the Department of Labor has since opened its first major H-1B fraud investigation, adding to a sense that the visa is under scrutiny from several directions at once.
What the H-1B fee public comment deadline means for you
For Indian professionals waiting on an H-1B petition, or for the employers sponsoring them, a $103,265 charge would land on top of existing filing, legal and premium-processing fees, pricing out smaller employers and mid-level hires even if it survives the same legal challenges that sank the original fee. Many are also watching the September 2026 visa bulletin, where EB-1 priority dates for India have already retrogressed, since a costlier H-1B route makes the downstream Green Card queue matter even more.
With the median H-1B wage for a bachelor’s degree holder near $99,000, the $103,265 charge is not a marginal cost of doing business, it is larger than what many of the workers it applies to earn in a year.
Anyone with a stake in the outcome, applicant, employer or immigration attorney, can file a comment before the 24 September deadline. DHS is required to consider substantive comments before finalising the rule, and past H-1B rulemakings have been narrowed or delayed after a heavy comment load.
Whether this H-1B visa fee 2026 proposal survives a second attempt or ends up back in the same courts that struck down the first one, it leaves H-1B hopefuls planning their year around a number that keeps moving.
