The Trump administration has proposed a permanent $103,265 fee on new H-1B petitions, opening another front in its effort to make it more expensive for US employers to recruit skilled foreign workers.

The additional fee would apply to every petition subject to the annual H-1B cap, including those filed under the advanced-degree exemption. It would be payable when the petition is filed and charged on top of all other applicable fees, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposal published on Tuesday, 25 August.

The proposal is not final. Comments may be submitted until 24 September, after which DHS can revise or finalize the rule. The regulation could be completed by the end of the year, Reuters reported.

The administration is seeking through formal rulemaking to accomplish what President Donald Trump attempted temporarily through a proclamation in September 2025. That measure required a $100,000 payment for certain petitions involving workers outside the US and was scheduled to expire on 21 September.

The proposed regulation relies on a different legal foundation, principally DHS’s authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to set fees that recover the government’s immigration and naturalization costs.

It does not formally replace the proclamation fee. DHS said the two payments were legally separate and that an employer subject to both would have to pay both. In practice, the department expects the proclamation to expire before the proposed regulation takes effect.

Trump’s first $100,000 fee remains blocked

US District Judge Leo Sorokin in Massachusetts ruled on 8 June that the proclamation’s $100,000 payment was an unauthorized tax that could not be imposed without congressional approval.

The administration appealed.

Although Sorokin briefly paused his order, the First US Circuit Court of Appeals refused on 24 July to keep the charge in force during the appeal. The proclamation fee therefore remains blocked while the court considers the case.

A federal judge in Washington reached the opposite conclusion in a separate lawsuit brought by the US Chamber of Commerce and the Association of American Universities, upholding the proclamation in December. The Chamber has appealed that decision.

The differing district-court rulings do not mean that the dispute will necessarily reach the US Supreme Court. The appeals are proceeding separately in the First and District of Columbia circuits.

One visa fee would fund six agencies

DHS calculated the proposed fee by dividing $8.78 billion in costs by an assumed 85,000 fee-paying petitions. That produced a charge of $103,264.57, which the department rounded to the nearest $5.

The 85,000 annual allocation comprises 65,000 places under the general H-1B cap and another 20,000 for workers with qualifying advanced degrees from US institutions.

At that filing volume, the fee would generate about $8.78 billion a year. The revenue would support work by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Justice Department’s immigration courts, the State Department and the Labor Department.

The charge is therefore not based simply on the cost of processing an individual H-1B petition. It would make one class of employers responsible for a much wider set of immigration-system costs.

DHS acknowledged that it had not previously used a fee on a particular immigration population to finance general USCIS expenses, costs borne by other DHS components and programs administered by other federal departments. That novel approach is likely to become a central issue in any legal challenge.

US-based applicants could also pay

The fee would not apply to petitions outside the annual cap, including ordinary extensions, job changes involving workers who have already been counted against the cap and qualifying filings by universities, affiliated nonprofit bodies and nonprofit or government research organizations.

The proposed text, however, contains no exemption for cap-subject petitions seeking to move someone already in the US from F-1 student status to initial H-1B status. On its face, the requirement covers all cap-subject petitions, making it broader than the 2025 proclamation, which was directed primarily at workers entering the country from abroad.

There would also be no discount or exemption based on an employer’s size or nonprofit status.

DHS found that 14,541, or 51%, of the 28,649 employers that filed initial cap-subject petitions in fiscal 2025 qualified as small entities. It estimated that the fee would impose a significant economic cost, defined as more than 1% of annual revenue, on 11,051 of those businesses.

The department rejected a lower fee or exemption for small employers, arguing that either approach would reduce projected revenue and encourage companies to restructure their hiring arrangements to avoid the charge.

DHS said H-1B employers generally had the resources to pay because they were already required to meet minimum wage obligations. It also cited a February 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by economist George Borjas that modeled employers’ willingness to pay for an H-1B worker at between $100,000 and $200,000. That range was an economic estimate, not a survey of what employers said they would pay.

Visa demand falls as restrictions mount

The administration has also introduced a wage-weighted selection system that increases the chances of higher-paid applicants, expanded screening and applied additional charges to certain H-1B and L-1 petitions.

Properly submitted registrations for the fiscal 2027 H-1B cap fell 38.5% to about 211,600 from 343,981 a year earlier, according to USCIS figures reported by immigration law firms. Demand nevertheless remained well above the 85,000 annual allocation.

The comparison should be treated cautiously because fiscal 2027 was the first selection cycle under the new wage-weighted system, meaning the decline may reflect policy changes as well as weaker employer demand.

Business groups argue that H-1B visas help companies recruit workers for positions that cannot readily be filled domestically. Trump and other critics say parts of the program allow employers to replace US workers with lower-paid foreign labor.

The proposed regulation is likely to draw fresh litigation. The US Chamber of Commerce, Democratic-led states, unions and employers that challenged the earlier proclamation could expand their lawsuits once the regulation is finalized, Reuters reported.