The Trump administration has unveiled a new proposal to impose a $103,265 fee on H-1B visa petitions, reviving and expanding a signature immigration reform effort just months after a federal judge struck down an earlier version of the plan.
The Department of Homeland Security posted the proposed regulation on Monday, opening a thirty-day public comment period before the rule can be finalized. Officials say the fee is designed to recover the costs of running the nation’s immigration system while discouraging companies from relying on foreign labor instead of hiring American workers.
The new proposal marks the administration’s second attempt at overhauling H-1B fee structures. Last September, President Trump signed a proclamation imposing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, a dramatic jump from the previous fee structure, which typically ranged between two thousand and five thousand dollars depending on company size and other factors.
That original fee faced immediate legal challenges. The United States Chamber of Commerce filed suit against the administration within weeks, arguing that the sudden fee increase would force businesses to choose between dramatically higher labor costs or scaling back their hiring of highly skilled foreign workers entirely.
Unions, employers, and religious organizations soon joined the legal fight, filing additional challenges in a California federal court. The coordinated pushback reflected just how disruptive the sudden fee hike was to industries that have relied on the H-1B program for decades, particularly in technology, engineering, and healthcare.
In June, Massachusetts based U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin sided with a coalition of Democratic-led states challenging the fee, ruling that the administration had exceeded its legal authority. Sorokin found that the fee amounted to an unauthorized tax, and that only Congress holds the constitutional power to set immigration policy and taxation of this kind.
Rather than abandon the effort, the administration has now returned with a revised approach designed to survive legal scrutiny. The new $103,265 fee would apply through a formal regulatory rulemaking process rather than a presidential proclamation, a structural change officials believe strengthens its legal standing.
The new rule would apply broadly to all H-1B petitions subject to the annual statutory cap, including those filed on behalf of workers with advanced degrees, marking an expansion beyond the scope of the original proclamation.
Notably, the revised proposal would exempt nonprofit institutions such as universities, hospitals, and research organizations, a carveout absent from the original plan.
Vice President JD Vance publicly championed the new proposal on social media, stating plainly that if an American company needs workers, it should hire and train Americans rather than importing foreign labor through the visa system. The message reflects the administration’s broader argument that the H-1B program has been overused and has crowded out opportunities for domestic workers.
Supporters of the fee hike argue that for too long, large corporations have used the H-1B program to suppress wages and sideline qualified American applicants in favor of cheaper foreign labor. They contend that a substantial fee will force companies to think twice before bypassing the domestic workforce and will encourage greater investment in training American employees for high-skill positions.
The H-1B program currently allows for sixty-five thousand visas annually under the standard cap, with an additional twenty thousand reserved specifically for applicants holding advanced degrees from American universities.
Of the standard cap, a portion is further set aside under separate international trade agreements.
Administration officials have pushed back on critics, maintaining that the steep cost is intentional and appropriate given the scale of the program and its historical impact on wages for American workers in comparable fields. They argue that companies serious about hiring foreign talent for genuinely specialized roles will still find the fee manageable relative to the value those workers provide.
The proposal comes amid a broader push by the administration to tighten immigration policy across multiple visa categories. Officials have separately floated the idea of imposing a similar six-figure fee on Optional Practical Training, a program that allows foreign students on F-1 visas to work in the United States after graduation, though that proposal remains in earlier stages of development.
