Since 2015, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has charged a security fee, $4,000 on H-1B petitions and $4,500 on L-1 petitions, on top of the standard filing fee. That dollar amount is not changing. What changed on August 10 is which petitions have to pay it. For a decade, the fee applied to new H-1B and L-1 petitions and to petitions where a worker changed employers, but not when an employee simply extended their status with the same company, even though the law authorizing the fee already says it covers "an application for an extension of such status." DHS's final rule now applies the fee to those same-employer extensions too, starting September 9.

The fee traces to the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, which doubled an earlier charge to fund a biometric system tracking when foreign nationals enter and exit the country. DHS's rule quotes its own prior position: the fee applied "only when the Fraud Fee also applies (namely, petitions seeking initial grants of H-1B or L-1 status, or petitions involving a change of employer... including a change of employer petition that requests an extension of such status)." A same-employer renewal, no new job, no new company, fell outside that description and paid nothing. DHS does not explain why it read the statute that way for a decade; it simply says that reading no longer applies.

The fee only falls on "covered employers," a term Congress itself defined in the 2015 law: a company with 50 or more employees in the United States, more than half of whom hold H-1B or L-1 status. That threshold is not new and this rule does not change it. A company that sponsors one or two specialists, the typical case, does not come close to it and owes nothing under this fee, before or after August 10.

Within that narrower group, the change is bigger than the topline revenue numbers suggest. DHS's own analysis found that from fiscal years 2018 through 2025, 27 percent of H-1B petitions filed by covered employers were already subject to the fee, the initial-petition and employer-change categories described above. Adding same-employer extensions brings that to an estimated 75 percent of those employers' H-1B petitions, since a stable employer files far more renewals than new hires in most years. DHS separately estimates the rule affects at most 16 percent of small entities that file H-1B or L-1 petitions. Public comments on the proposed rule pointed to IT outsourcing and staffing firms, built heavily around visa labor, as the employers most likely to clear the 50-percent threshold. Large technology companies, where H-1B and L-1 staff are typically a small share of a much bigger U.S. workforce, file more H-1B petitions in absolute numbers but are less likely to qualify as covered employers. DHS did not dispute that distinction, though it did not quantify it.

The three visa categories cover different workers. H-1B is for "specialty occupations" requiring at least a bachelor's degree in a specific field, common in software engineering, medicine, and research. L-1A covers executives and managers a multinational company transfers to a U.S. office. L-1B covers employees with specialized knowledge of that company's products or operations, and both L-1 categories require the worker to have spent at least a year with the company's overseas operation first. Federal law separately requires H-1B employers to pay at least the prevailing wage for the job and region, addressed further below.

The fee falls on the employer, not the worker. DHS's rule states that H-1B employers "are generally prohibited from reducing an H-1B worker's wages or compensation package to recoup business expenses, such as any required petition-related filing fees." A company cannot pass this specific cost to the employee through a pay cut. Because it is charged again at each extension, it is a recurring cost tied to keeping a given worker in H-1B or L-1 status.

This is not the H-1B fee that has drawn the most attention in 2026. That is the $100,000 charge President Trump imposed by proclamation on new H-1B petitions, which a federal judge vacated in June (details below). Congress wrote the $4,000/$4,500 fee into a statute in 2015, and DHS's August 10 rule reinterprets that statute's existing text through standard rulemaking. The $100,000 fee was never written into a statute by Congress at all; the President imposed it using his general authority over who may enter the country.

The rule finalized August 10 also has a paper trail spanning two administrations. DHS proposed the change on June 6, 2024, under the Biden administration, and finalized it under Trump after reviewing 146 public comments.

It also lands alongside two other changes to the same visa programs. A DHS rule effective February 27, 2026 reweighted the annual H-1B lottery so registrations tied to higher wage levels are entered multiple times, a change DHS's preamble notes commenters praised for building "a more merit-based H-1B visa system." A Labor Department proposal from March 26, 2026 would raise the wage floor employers must pay H-1B, H-1B1, E-3, and PERM workers (PERM is the certification process for permanent, green-card-track sponsorship, a separate track from the temporary H-1B and L-1 visas this fee affects), with DOL saying the change would curb "the incentive to displace American workers with low-wage foreign visa holders." The August 10 fee rule does not use "merit-based" language itself; its own stated justification, addressed next, is a funding shortfall. But it reaches the same two visa categories at the same time those other rules are explicitly reweighting the program toward higher-wage, higher-skilled hires. Because the covered-employer threshold concentrates this fee on the same visa-dependent employers described above, any hiring-decision effect it has is concentrated there too, not spread across employers generally.

DHS's stated reason for the change is money, and that figure is specific to this fee, not a broader pool spanning other visa categories. Citing a December 2015 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate, DHS's rule says Congress expected the 9-11 Biometric Fee itself to raise about $420 million a year. Actual collections came to $25.6 million in fiscal year 2025, about 6 percent of that estimate. DHS attributes most of the shortfall to the narrow reading it is now abandoning.

The agency's own revenue estimate for the broadened fee is $37.9 million in fiscal year 2026 and $40 million in fiscal year 2027, still far short of the original $420 million figure. The rule does not reconcile that gap. Either CBO's decade-old projection assumed a volume of extension petitions DHS's new estimate does not expect to materialize, or DHS's new estimate is conservative. The document does not say which.

The change came through notice-and-comment rulemaking, not a presidential proclamation. DHS published a proposed rule in 2024, took public comments for a set window, and has now issued a final rule with a fixed effective date. That process moves slower than a proclamation, and it stands on different legal footing: an act of Congress supplies the fee amount and the categories of petitions it can reach, and DHS is interpreting that existing text rather than claiming new authority of its own.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) opposed the change in a July 2024 comment letter on the proposed rule, arguing it is "contrary both to the governing statute as well as the agency's long-standing interpretation of that statute" and that it "fails to consider important aspects of the costs impacting U.S. employers and foreign national employees." AILA's underlying argument is that ten years of consistent agency practice is itself evidence of what Congress meant by the statute, and that DHS cannot rewrite that understanding without asking Congress to amend the law. AILA has not commented on the final rule itself.

DHS's argument, laid out in its own rule, is textual: the extension language has been in the statute since 2015, and the agency says it spent a decade underenforcing that text, not now overenforcing it. DHS also points to the funding shortfall documented above as justification for closing the gap.

The rule takes effect September 9. No lawsuit challenging it directly had been filed as of this writing, but AILA's opposition to the proposed version signals immigration attorneys are watching for one.

If a challenge comes, it will look different from the fight over the $100,000 fee. In State of California v. Noem, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled on June 8 that the $100,000 fee was an unlawful tax, since the President's entry-restriction authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act "does not delegate taxing power" and Congress never wrote that specific charge into law. The First Circuit Court of Appeals declined to pause that ruling on July 24, finding the government had not shown it was likely to win on appeal. That case turned on the President creating a brand-new charge without congressional authorization. A challenge to the extension fee would raise a narrower question instead: whether DHS's new reading of the statute Congress did write is a reasonable one under the Administrative Procedure Act, not whether the President can tax.

The H-1B and L-1 programs already contain one piece of middle ground: federal law requires H-1B employers to pay at least the prevailing wage for the occupation and region, the same wage floor the Labor Department's March proposal would recalculate upward. That requirement exists so a company cannot underprice American workers by hiring a visa holder instead, and it means a U.S. citizen can compete for the same job at the same pay, since the employer gains no wage advantage from choosing a visa worker over a citizen for a covered position.

The broader premise, that the immigration system should be selective and weigh relevant skills, is not itself where the disagreement lies. A 2018 Pew Research survey, the most recent of its kind, found 78 percent of Americans support encouraging highly skilled people to immigrate and work in the country, and H-1B has operated as an employer-sponsored, skills-based category since Congress created it in the Immigration Act of 1990. What is contested is where the specific lines fall: how many visas the program should issue each year, which wage level should count as skilled enough to qualify for priority, and how much it should cost an employer to keep renewing a visa worker rather than hire someone already here. Those parameters are currently being set through agency rulemaking, in this rule and the two others described above, rather than through new legislation. Congress could set them by statute instead if it chose to; it has not done so this year.