---
title: "A $103,265 H-1B Fee and a Proposed OPT Fee Could Double…"
canonical: "https://www.metaintro.com/blog/dhs-103265-h1b-fee-opt-proposal-skilled-workers"
language: "en"
author: "drashtigarach"
published: "2026-09-04T11:30:51.000Z"
modified: "2026-10-02T19:46:53.735Z"
---

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# A $103,265 H-1B Fee and a Proposed OPT Fee Could Double Sponsorship Costs

DHS has proposed a $103,265 fee on every cap-subject H-1B petition, and a separate OPT fee is under review. Here is what both mean for skilled workers.

[![Drashti Garach](https://cdn.metaintro.com/rs:fill:40:40/q:72/plain/images/5719d740-e510-42bc-8017-e040d145f35f_1766029465094.png)Drashti Garach @DrashtiGarach](/blog/author/drashtigarach)

[September 4, 2026](/blog/archive/2026/09)Updated October 2, 202613 min read

![Close view of a chrome queue barrier post and its retracted belt](https://cdn.metaintro.com/rs:fill:1200:675/q:78/plain/images/dhs-103265-h1b-fee-opt-proposal-skilled-workers-hero.png)

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The United States has proposed adding $103,265 to the cost of every capped H-1B petition. [US Citizenship and Immigration Services](https://www.uscis.gov/) [announced the proposal](https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-proposes-additional-h-1b-fee) on 24 August 2026, and it would be paid at the time of filing on top of every existing fee. [Inc.](https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/jpmorgan-and-ibm-took-2-different-paths-to-technical-talent-both-reduce-visa-risk/91399779) reported that a separate proposal covering Optional Practical Training has reached White House review at the same time, meaning graduates and the employers who hire them could face new costs at two stages of the same pipeline. At [Metaintro](https://www.metaintro.com), we track this because sponsorship economics decide which roles stay open to international candidates. Here is what has actually been proposed and what it changes.

## What Exactly Has DHS Proposed?

The [Department of Homeland Security](https://www.dhs.gov/) is proposing a $103,265 fee for all H-1B cap-subject petitions, including those filed under the advanced degree exemption. The fee would be paid when the petition is filed and would sit on top of all other applicable fees and payments. DHS says it would generate roughly $8.8 billion a year, based on a projected annual volume of 85,000 cap-subject petitions. The scope matters as much as the number. The additional fee would not apply to petitions that are not subject to the cap, which includes those filed by institutions of higher education, nonprofit research organisations and governmental research organisations. Under the current structure, cap-subject H-1B visas are limited to 65,000 a year, with an additional 20,000 reserved for people who have earned a master's degree or higher from a US institution. In the announcement, agency spokesperson Zach Kahler said the proposed fee "is intended to recover the costs incurred across the federal government to adjudicate, vet, and support lawful immigration programs that otherwise must be funded by taxpayers." The full structure of the lottery and the wage weighting behind it is set out in [how the wage-based lottery reshapes tech hiring](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/h1b-visa-cap-2027-wage-based-lottery-tech-hiring).

## How Does the OPT Proposal Stack on Top of It?

Optional Practical Training allows many foreign graduates to work in the United States for one year after finishing their studies, extended to up to three years for qualifying graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. Employers routinely use that period as a working trial before deciding whether to sponsor someone for H-1B status.

That is why a second fee at the OPT stage would change the arithmetic so sharply. A company that today can hire a graduate on OPT at ordinary cost, assess them over one to three years and then decide about sponsorship would instead face a charge at the point of hire and another at the point of sponsorship. Inc. reported that some companies are looking at a doubling of the cost of recruiting and sponsoring foreign talent. An OPT charge has been under discussion since the summer, and [the proposed $100,000 fee for foreign graduates seeking US work](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/proposed-100k-fee-international-graduates-us-work) sets out what that half of the pipeline would change on its own. Neither proposal is a final rule, and the OPT proposal has not been published with a confirmed figure attached, so the honest position is that the direction is clear while the detail is not. Anyone planning around it should treat the H-1B number as concrete and the OPT number as unconfirmed. The sequencing is also worth understanding. OPT is granted to the graduate rather than purchased by the employer, so a fee at that stage would land differently, either on the individual or on a company willing to cover it as a hiring cost. Employers that currently treat OPT hiring as low risk because it carries no sponsorship commitment would lose exactly that quality, and the informal trial period that has quietly underpinned graduate hiring in technical fields for two decades would become a priced decision made on day one instead of in year two.

## Which Employers Can Absorb This and Which Cannot?

A flat fee is regressive by design. A fee of $103,265 is a rounding error against the compensation budget of a large technology company sponsoring dozens of engineers, and it is prohibitive for a fifty person firm sponsoring one specialist. Because the proposed fee applies to all cap-subject employers regardless of size, the effect is to concentrate sponsorship among the organisations that can afford it. For candidates, that changes where to look rather than whether to look. Large employers with established immigration functions will keep sponsoring, because the cost is small relative to the value of a scarce engineer. Smaller companies and startups are the ones most likely to quietly stop offering sponsorship, which removes exactly the segment that has historically been most willing to hire on potential. Universities, nonprofit research organisations and government research organisations sit outside the cap entirely and would not pay the additional fee at all, which makes them structurally more attractive to international candidates than they were a month ago. That is a genuine shift in relative advantage. Academic and research salaries have long trailed private technology pay, and the trade off was usually framed as money against stability. If sponsorship at a startup becomes uncertain while a research institute can still file without the additional charge, the calculation changes for anyone who needs a visa to keep working. The pattern is not new, and [Walmart halting H-1B hiring during an earlier fee surge](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/walmart-halts-h1b-hiring-visa-fee-surge-100000) showed how quickly large employers reprice sponsorship when the rules move.

## Is This the Same As the Fee a Court Struck Down?

No, and the distinction matters if you are trying to work out what is actually in force. An earlier $100,000 H-1B fee was challenged and [a federal judge struck it down](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/federal-judge-strikes-down-100000-h1b-fee-skilled-workers-2026), which changed what skilled workers were facing at the time. The current $103,265 charge is a separate proposal advanced through notice and comment rulemaking rather than through the mechanism used before. That procedural difference cuts both ways. A rule that goes through proper rulemaking is harder to overturn on procedural grounds than one that does not, so this proposal has a more durable footing. It is also slower, because the agency must accept and respond to public comments before finalising anything. Public comments on the H-1B proposal are due on or before 24 September 2026. Between now and a final rule there is a real window, and nobody should be making irreversible career decisions on the assumption that the fee is already law. Equally, nobody should assume it will disappear. Denials have been climbing regardless of fees, and [what high-skilled workers should do as H-1B denials rise](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/h1b-denials-rising-2026-high-skilled-workers-action-plan) covers the practical response.

## What Does This Mean If You Are on OPT or Waiting for a Lottery?

If you are currently on OPT, the most useful thing you can do is find out where your employer stands before the rules settle. Ask directly whether the company has sponsored H-1B petitions in the last two cycles, how many, and whether the immigration budget sits with your business unit or centrally. Those three answers tell you more about your odds than any policy analysis. If the honest answer is that sponsorship is handled case by case with no budget line, treat that as a signal rather than a rejection. If you are waiting on a lottery outcome, build a parallel track. Cap-exempt employers are the obvious one, since universities, teaching hospitals, nonprofit research institutes and government research organisations can file outside the annual cap and would not owe the proposed additional fee. Multinational employers with offices in other countries are another, because an internal transfer after a period abroad is a different route with different rules. The pressure on the visa route is real, and [H-1B visa delays have already created genuine job security problems for Indian workers](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/h1b-visa-delays-job-risks-2025) caught between filings. Knowing which category your employer falls into is the single most valuable piece of information you can gather right now. Write it down alongside your status dates and revisit it every quarter, because employer policy on sponsorship changes faster than immigration law does and it rarely gets announced. Get the answer in writing where you can, because a verbal assurance about sponsorship budget rarely survives a change of manager or a mid year reforecast, and the people who remember making it are often not the people who approve it.

## How Should Employers Rethink Their Talent Pipeline?

The practical response is to stop treating international sponsorship as one undifferentiated channel. Map which roles genuinely require a specific scarce skill and which have been filled internationally out of habit or convenience. A fee of this size forces that distinction whether or not the rule is finalised, because finance teams will ask the question as soon as the proposal is public.

Two structural responses are available and neither depends on the outcome of the rulemaking. The first is to build a second source of the same skills domestically, which means real apprenticeship and training pipelines not job postings with impossible requirements. The second is to move work to where the talent already is, by hiring into an existing overseas office instead of relocating a person into the United States. Both take longer than sponsorship and both are cheaper at the margin. Employers who have already moved this way tend to find that hiring slows but retention improves. A domestic apprenticeship pipeline takes eighteen months to produce its first useful cohort, which is slower than any visa process, but the people it produces do not carry a renewal risk and do not need a filing fee every few years. The broader hiring caution is not limited to visas either, and [employers adopting cautious hiring strategies amid AI uncertainty](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/cautious-hiring-2026-ai-uncertainty) are making the same calculation from a different direction.

## Does the Underlying Demand for These Skills Still Exist?

It does, and that is what makes the fee proposals consequential not merely expensive. The [Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm) published in August put computer and mathematical occupations among the five fastest growing major occupational groups through 2035, at 7.3 percent against an all occupation average of 3.5 percent. Data scientists are projected to grow 34.6 percent and computer and information research scientists 21.8 percent, both inside the ten fastest growing detailed occupations in the economy. So the demand curve is not moving. What is moving is the cost of one particular way of meeting it. That gap is where the practical opportunity sits for domestic candidates and for international candidates already inside the country on other statuses. If sponsorship becomes materially more expensive while demand for data and research skills keeps climbing, employers have to fill those roles from somewhere, and the somewhere is a mix of domestic training, internal mobility and overseas hiring. The [BLS projections programme](https://www.bls.gov/emp/) publishes the occupation level detail behind those figures, and it is worth reading directly not through headlines if you are choosing what to specialise in. Set that against the current market, where the [August payroll report](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm) showed information employment falling by 23,000 in a single month, and the picture is a labour market that wants specific advanced skills while shedding generalist technical roles. Fee policy changes who can be hired from abroad. It does not change which skills are scarce.

## What Should You Do in the Next Month?

Take three concrete steps while the comment period is open. First, confirm your own status dates in writing, including the exact expiry of any OPT or STEM extension, because every decision downstream depends on that date and memory is unreliable under stress. Second, ask your employer the sponsorship questions above and write down the answers. Third, identify at least three cap-exempt employers in your field, since they are unaffected by the proposed additional fee and most candidates never think to look at them. Beyond that, the strongest position is one that does not depend on any single visa route. Document outcomes not duties, because a record of measurable results transfers across employers and across borders in a way that a job title does not. Keep your network active in your home country as well as in the United States, since a multinational transfer is easier to arrange when someone already knows your work. If your field has a domestic shortage, that shortage is your leverage, and it does not disappear because a fee changed. At [Metaintro](https://www.metaintro.com), we track openings across cap-exempt institutions, large sponsors and overseas offices, because those are three genuinely different routes to the same career.

## Related Articles

- [Anthropic Cuts Off Foreign Nationals, What It Means for International AI Talent](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/anthropic-blocks-foreign-nationals-ai-talent-2026)
- [How Overseas Remote Nurses Are Quietly Reshaping US Healthcare Jobs](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/how-overseas-remote-nurses-are-reshaping-us-healthcare-jobs)
- [Slovenia Unveils New Digital Nomad Visa for Remote Workers](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/slovenia-digital-nomad-visa)
- [Philippines Launches New Digital Nomad Visa to Attract Remote Workers](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/philippines-digital-nomad-visa)
- [New Zealand Eases Visa Rules for Digital Nomads](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/new-zealand-digital-nomads-visa)
- [Samsung Opens Doors to Global Talent](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/samsung-global-talent)
- [Indian Firms Boost AI Innovation by Hiring Global Talent](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/indian-ai-global-talent)
- [SpaceX's Starbase Grows Into Company Town as Engineers Face Relocation Pressure](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/spacex-starbase-texas-engineers-relocation)
- [How to Show AI Skills on Your Resume and in Interviews](https://www.metaintro.com/blog/how-to-show-ai-skills-on-your-resume-and-in-interviews)

## People Also Asked

### Q: How much is the proposed new H-1B fee?

A: The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a fee of $103,265 for all cap-subject H-1B petitions, including those filed under the advanced degree exemption. It would be paid at the time of filing and would be charged in addition to all other applicable fees. DHS estimates it would raise about $8.8 billion a year across a projected 85,000 cap-subject petitions.

### Q: Does the proposed fee apply to every H-1B petition?

A: No. The additional fee would apply only to cap-subject petitions. Petitions filed by institutions of higher education, nonprofit research organisations and governmental research organisations are cap-exempt and would not owe it. Cap-subject visas are limited to 65,000 a year, plus 20,000 for people holding a master's degree or higher from a US institution.

### Q: Is the fee already in force?

A: Not yet. It is a proposal published for public comment, with comments due on or before 24 September 2026, and it must be finalised before it takes effect. A separate proposal covering Optional Practical Training has reached White House review but has not been published as a final rule either. Both should be treated as likely direction rather than current law.

Know your rights and your routes before the rules settle. [Metaintro](https://www.metaintro.com) tracks openings across cap-exempt universities and research institutes, established corporate sponsors and multinational employers with overseas offices, and matches them to your background in a single chat based thread. [Create your free profile](https://www.metaintro.com/signup) and see which route fits your situation.

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