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For Indians in the US, two new $100,000 walls may be coming up: What H-1B visa and OPT fees could mean
The Trump administration's proposed H-1B visa rule and OPT fees stack across the pipeline that carries Indian talent into American jobs.
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The Trump administration on Monday published a proposed regulation that would charge American employers $103,265 for every new H-1B petition subject to the annual visa cap, reviving in a different form a fee that a US court had struck down in June.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) placed the notice in the Federal Register on August 24, opening a 30-day public comment window. The rule could be finalised by the end of the year, Reuters reported.
The proposal is in addition to other measures already in motion or being planned by the US government.
From September 9, the DHS will begin charging a $4,000 surcharge on every H-1B visa extension and $4,500 on every L-1 visa extension filed by large employers where more than half the US workforce is on either visa. The charge, called the 9/11 Response and Biometric Entry-Exit Fee, has existed since 2015 to fund a US Customs and Border Protection air-and-sea biometric entry-exit system, but until now applied only to fresh hires or job switches, not renewals. Extending it to renewals brings Indian IT services firms squarely into its net as their business model rotates thousands of engineers through multi-year US assignments, each of which typically needs a visa extension.
And DHS is separately weighing a $100,000 charge – a third in the US of this scale – on Optional Practical Training (OPT), the post-graduation work programme that has long been the bridge between an American degree and an H-1B or other work visas for foreign students, The Wall Street Journal initially reported.
If implemented, the measures – together – could amount to the most significant reworking of the legal-immigration cost structure in the US in decades.
For India, which supplied 70% of all H-1B workers in fiscal year 2025 and remains the single largest source of international students in the US, the stakes cut across two constituencies that had until recently been treated as separate policy questions.
‘Another route’ for $100,000 fee
The proposal is the Donald Trump administration's second attempt at the $100,000-a-visa figure.
The first, issued in September 2025 as a presidential proclamation, invoked the president's authority to restrict the entry of foreign nationals deemed detrimental to US interests. That's why it applied only to H-1B workers being hired from outside the US and left in-country candidates – among them university graduates and cap-exempt employers – untouched.
A federal judge in Boston vacated that proclamation in June, finding that the fee was in effect a tax and that only the US Congress could impose one. The First Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently denied the administration's emergency application to block the ruling last month.
The proclamation is also scheduled to expire in September, one year after issuance, unless extended.
The new proposal is a DHS rule rather than a proclamation, and it is framed as a cost-recovery measure.
According to the document, the $103,265 charge is meant to cover the government's cost of running the legal-immigration system – across DHS and the US departments of Labor, State and Justice. About two-thirds of the money would go to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that processes visa applications, and to the country's immigration courts.
DHS projects that the collection of this fee would generate about $8.8 billion a year.
The scope of this fee is wider than the proclamation. It would apply to every cap-subject petition (a filing for one of the 85,000 H-1B visas awarded each year through a lottery, of which 20,000 are reserved for workers holding a US master's degree or higher), whether the worker is being brought in from abroad or hired within the US. It would cover advanced-degree holders under the Master's cap. And it would remain alongside, rather than replace, the earlier proclamation's fee if that one survives the challenges in courts.
The DHS notice said that the new charge would be "in addition to any other applicable fees or payments", including the September 2025 proclamation fee if it is extended past next month, AFP reported.
Universities, hospitals and some non-profits, which are exempt from the annual H-1B cap, would be spared. These employers are classified as 'cap-exempt', which means they can sponsor H-1B workers year-round without entering the annual 85,000-visa lottery. Because the new fee is being pegged only to cap-subject petitions, those employers would not have to pay it – a carve-out that also applied under the earlier proclamation.
Also read: 'Am I weak for moving back?': H-1B worker's $170,000 US job dilemma strikes a chord with NRIs
Why it may still go to courts
Legal challenges are expected.
The US Chamber of Commerce, a coalition of 20 Democratic-led states, and a group of unions and employers are already challenging the $100,000 proclamation in American courts.
Analysts say those suits can be amended once the new rule is finalised. The core argument in the challenges could be that DHS lacks the authority to levy a charge of this size without Congressional approval, and that relabelling the proclamation fee as cost recovery does not alter what it really is.
Monday's proposal contains an admission that could hand challengers this argument. The DHS notice acknowledged that the fee would produce an "indirect" benefit of discouraging employers from hiring an H-1B worker over a qualified American.
Analysts say a genuine cost-recovery charge would not need to be defended as a hiring deterrent. The DHS concession, they said, suggests the fee is designed to do more than pay for adjudication, which is also the argument on which the proclamation charge had been stayed by a Boston court.
Emily Neumann, a US-based immigration attorney, said the rule was a familiar exercise: "Same number. New wrapper. Same playbook. Throw enough things at the wall to restrict legal immigration and eventually something might stick (this won't)," she was quoted as saying by PTI.
Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based attorney and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Bloomberg the intent behind the proposed rule was clear. "They want to stop US employers from using H-1B. It's really simple," Kuck said, adding: "India's gonna love this. China's gonna love this. Europe is gonna love this."
The gap between the fee's rationale that it is to cover immigration cost and its size – $103,265 – is likely to feature prominently in litigation. H-1B fees under the previous Joe Biden administration were raised to $780 per application in its final year, a 70% increase that DHS at the time had said was needed to cover adjudication costs. The latest proposal is more than a hundred times that figure.
Costs for Indian IT services firms
The September expansion of the 9/11 Response fee is the immediate operational concern for Indian companies. Until now, the $4,000 H-1B and $4,500 L-1 charges applied only to initial applications or job changes. From next month, they will attach to every visa extension filed by an employer with 50 or more US staff, more than half of whom are on H-1B or L-1 status.
DHS estimates the closure of what it calls an administrative gap will yield about $157.3 million a year.
The design of this rule will particularly affect Indian IT services business. Firms that rotate several thousand engineers through multi-year onshore assignments will now face a recurring annual liability where they previously faced a one-off cost per hire.
Layered on top, the proposed cap-subject fee of $103,265 turns hiring at scale into a substantial line item. Bo Cooper, a partner at the immigration law firm Fragomen, told Bloomberg that a company sponsoring 100 H-1B workers would owe roughly $10.3 million in filing fees if the new proposal is implemented, and that too before any onboarding costs.
The Trump administration's measures to deter H-1B immigration are already being felt.
H-1B registrations fell from about 794,000 in 2023 to roughly 344,000 last year – less than half – with a year-on-year decline of more than 25% from 2024, according to USCIS data cited by Reuters.
Bloomberg reported that Walmart, America's largest private employer, had paused corporate H-1B sponsorship late last year, and that other employers followed.
A survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council found that only 29% of US firms said they were open to hiring foreign business school graduates in 2026, down from 33% a year earlier and 55% in 2022.
Also read: US visa rules change from September 15: What H-1B holders, students need to know
OPT question for Indian students
For Indian students at American universities, the OPT proposal is another piece to watch.
Optional Practical Training allows F-1 visa holders to work in the US for one to three years after graduation in fields related to their education degrees. Roughly 419,000 foreign nationals were on OPT in 2024, the most recent year for which data are available.
It is the standard on-ramp to an H-1B, and for many students also the economic justification for the tuition bill in the first place.
A $100,000 fee on OPT, if implemented, would close that on-ramp for most students. A DHS spokesperson said in a late-July statement, quoted by PTI, that "no policies should be considered final until formally announced", adding that the department was "always having conversations about how to use all tools in our arsenal to protect the integrity of our legal immigration system".
The study-to-work pipeline that has for decades drawn Indian students to American universities and campuses is already narrowing.
Common App, the shared undergraduate admissions platform used by more than 1,100 US institutes, said in its end-of-season report published on August 20 that international applicants for the 2026-27 admissions cycle fell 10% year-on-year, the sharpest decline on record.
Applicants from India dropped 15%, the biggest fall among the top source countries. Elsewhere, applicants from Ghana were down 34%, Nigeria 21% and Ethiopia 29%.
More than 363,000 Indian students enrolled in US institutions in the 2024-25 academic year, according to a PTI report citing US government data.
NAFSA – the non-profit Association of International Educators – and JB International, a research firm, have projected that stricter visa rules and policy uncertainty could cost US colleges up to 110,000 international registrations in Fall 2026.
In a separate analysis published on August 11, NAFSA and JB International also projected that international students' contributions to the US economy could fall by up to $3.4 billion in Fall 2026 compared with the previous year, putting up to 40,000 US jobs at risk.
What to watch next
The 30-day comment period on the DHS proposal closes in late September. Litigation is likely to follow finalisation, drawing on the same tax-versus-fee arguments that succeeded in Boston. The original September 2025 proclamation lapses next month unless the administration extends it.
Anne Walsh, an immigration attorney at Corporate Immigration Partners, told Bloomberg that her clients in financial services, professional services and technology still needed foreign-born talent and were finding the new restrictions "enormously frustrating".
A survey by Envoy Global, an immigration services provider affiliated with her firm, found that 68% of respondents were considering nearshoring or offshoring their foreign-born recruits. Most of that work, Walsh said, is heading to Latin America or India.
(With inputs from agencies)
