The US Wants to Charge $103,265 Per H-1B Visa. What That Means for Tech Workers.
The Department of Homeland Security announced it would charge $103,265 for each H-1B visa it issues, restarting a legal fight over high-skill immigration costs that a federal judge had paused just months earlier. The Trump administration proposed the specific fee on August 25, 2026, weeks after a federal court struck down a previous attempt to raise H-1B fees in June. The Verge
An H-1B visa lets a US employer hire a foreign worker for a specialized job, typically in technology or science. Before the June court ruling, over 70 employers had already paid a $100,000 fee per visa under the earlier increase. The three largest employers of H-1B workers are Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. The Verge
DHS also indicated that the Optional Practical Training program, known as OPT, may soon carry a $100,000 fee. OPT lets foreign students stay and work in the US for up to one year after graduating, with extensions available for STEM fields that can extend the total to three years. Many of these workers later move into H-1B roles at major technology companies, making OPT a key stepping stone. The Verge
Separately, the State Department plans to revoke the visas of up to 200,000 asylum seekers. The agency will cancel business and travel visas issued between 2016 and 2026 to people who applied for asylum after arriving in the US. The Associated Press reports this would be the largest mass visa revocation in US history. The Verge
Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, called the H-1B fee increase "clearly unlawful." FWD.us is an immigration reform group founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives in 2013. The Verge
For technology companies, these changes target the two main channels they use to bring in foreign talent. H-1B sponsorship is how companies retain specialized workers, and OPT is the bridge that connects international graduates of US universities to full-time jobs. A six-figure fee on either program does more than raise the cost of a single hire. It reshapes the economics of recruiting, given that a single visa can already cost between $10,000 and $25,000 in legal and filing expenses before any new increase.
The timing also complicates workforce planning. Companies file H-1B applications in March, and the government selects winners through a random lottery. Employers plan their hiring around these results months ahead of time. A fee that changes by tens of thousands of dollars from one year to the next, only to be overturned in court, makes long-term planning difficult. Companies cannot easily replace specialized foreign workers with domestic hires on short notice.
The visa revocation creates a different kind of uncertainty. Canceling 200,000 business and travel visas retroactively means that a person's legal status, held for years, can be wiped out by an administrative decision. For technology employers whose staff includes people who arrived on visas and later applied for asylum, the revocation raises immediate questions about whether those employees are still authorized to work and whether the company can keep them.
The broader context is that combining a six-figure H-1B fee with the largest mass visa revocation in US history points to a clear policy direction, even if neither action is final yet. The administration is raising the financial cost of employer-sponsored visas while also narrowing the paths through which people can maintain legal status. Whether courts will allow either measure to stand is the open question. A federal judge already struck down one version of the H-1B fee increase in June, and FWD.us has indicated that another lawsuit is likely.
The technology industry has navigated immigration restrictions before. Visa caps, processing delays, and policy changes between administrations are not new. But the size of these proposed fees and the scale of the visa revocations go beyond the usual back-and-forth of regulation. A $103,265 fee per H-1B worker is not a minor cost adjustment. It is a fundamental change to how companies budget for talent, arriving at a moment when demand for AI and machine learning engineers, many of them foreign-born graduates of US programs, is growing fast.
