A Proposed $100,000 Fee for Foreign Graduates Seeking US Work and What It Changes

A fee of $100,000 per international graduate is under discussion for Optional Practical Training, the programme that permits international students to remain employed in the United States after graduation, according to Forbes and reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Around 419,000 international graduates were working under OPT in 2024. At Metaintro we cover changes to work authorisation because they reshape career planning for hundreds of thousands of people, often years before any rule takes effect. The most important thing to understand at this stage is that nothing has been decided, and the second most important is what you can usefully do while that remains true.

What is OPT and who uses it?

Optional Practical Training allows international students to stay and work in the United States for one to three years after completing a degree. It functions as the bridge between finishing a course and either returning home or moving onto a longer-term work visa, and for a great many graduates it is the only period in which they can convert a US education into US work experience.

The scale is substantial. Approximately 419,000 international graduates were working under OPT in 2024. That is a large working population by any measure, concentrated in the sectors that recruit heavily from universities, and it is one of the primary reasons many international students choose American universities over alternatives in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

It also carries real weight in how technology and engineering hiring works. Many companies recruit OPT participants first and sponsor an H-1B visa afterwards, which makes OPT the entry point to a longer pipeline rather than a standalone permission. That sequencing matters, because a change at the OPT stage affects the pool available for every stage that follows.

What exactly is being proposed?

A fee of $100,000 attached to the OPT route. Beyond the figure, remarkably little is settled. The proposal remains under discussion at the Department of Homeland Security, and officials have not determined whether students, universities or employers would ultimately bear the cost. That single unresolved question changes the entire practical meaning of the policy.

If the cost falls on graduates, it is prohibitive for almost everyone. If it falls on employers, it becomes a hiring decision rather than a personal one, and large firms in well-paid sectors would absorb it for candidates they particularly want while smaller employers would stop recruiting from this pool. If it falls on universities, it becomes a tuition and admissions question. Three completely different outcomes sit behind the same headline number, and nobody currently knows which applies.

The context is also worth stating plainly, because it affects how confident you should be that this arrives at all. A comparable $100,000 fee attached to H-1B visas was blocked by a judge in June. Separately, the Department of Homeland Security is preparing broader OPT regulatory revisions expected by autumn 2026, and recently introduced requirements for visa extension applications to participate in OPT, replacing the previous automatic duration of status framework. The department has emphasised that no policy should be considered final until it is formally announced.

How much would this actually change the calculation?

It depends entirely on comparison, and this is where the numbers become useful rather than alarming. Annual tuition and living costs already exceed $100,000 at some private universities and reach tens of thousands at public institutions. A student weighing a US degree is therefore already committing a very large sum, and OPT is a significant part of what that sum buys, because the ability to work afterwards is what converts an expensive qualification into a return.

Adding a fee of that size at the point of employment changes the return rather than the cost of study. A degree that leads to two or three years of US professional experience is a different asset from one that does not, and OPT is precisely what many applicants were paying for. That is why the proposal has attracted attention well beyond the students directly affected.

For employers, the arithmetic is more straightforward and probably more consequential. A $100,000 fee on hiring a graduate is a sum most organisations would only pay for a candidate they consider difficult to replace. In practice that would concentrate international graduate hiring into a smaller number of very well-funded employers in high-paying sectors, and largely remove it from smaller companies, non-profits, universities and public bodies. Our reporting on how employers are increasingly chasing specific rather than general skills covers the direction hiring was already moving, and a fee of this size would sharpen it considerably.

What should international students and graduates do now?

Nothing drastic, and several things that are useful regardless of the outcome. The single most important discipline at this stage is separating a reported proposal from a rule. This is under discussion, the cost allocation is undecided, a comparable fee in an adjacent programme was blocked in court, and the department itself has said nothing is final until formally announced. Making an irreversible decision now, on a policy that may change substantially or not arrive, is the main risk worth avoiding.

What is worth doing is reducing your dependence on any single route. If your plan assumes OPT and only OPT, build a second and third option in parallel. That means looking seriously at employers who sponsor longer-term visas directly, at roles in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and the European Union where post-study work rights are currently more settled, and at multinational employers who can move people between offices. Our guide to how workers weigh international moves and relocation covers how differently these regimes treat post-study work.

Timing also matters more than usual. Regulatory revisions are expected by autumn 2026, which means the window in which current rules apply is finite and known. If you are close to graduating and eligible now, moving promptly under existing rules is more sensible than waiting to see what emerges. Administrative processes rarely get faster during a period of change, and applications submitted early are generally processed under the framework in force when they are filed.

Keep a written record of your own status and dates. Your programme end date, your eligibility window, the date any application was filed and the framework in force at that moment all matter if rules change mid-process. People routinely reconstruct these details later from memory and get them wrong, which complicates otherwise straightforward cases. A single page holding the dates and copies of what was submitted is a small effort that repeatedly turns out to be worth it.

Finally, talk to your university's international office rather than relying on news coverage. They receive guidance directly, they track what has actually been published as opposed to reported, and they will know before you do whether anything has moved from proposal to rule. That is a free, accurate and current source of advice, and it is consistently underused by the students who need it most. Our reporting on what the class of 2026 should expect on starting salaries covers the other half of that planning.

Why does uncertainty cost more than the rule itself?

Because people make decisions during the uncertain period, and those decisions are frequently worse than the ones they would make under a known rule. A graduate who abandons a US application on the strength of a reported proposal has acted on something that may never take effect. An employer who quietly stops considering international candidates has narrowed its pipeline before anything obliged it to. Both responses are understandable and both are premature.

This is a recurring pattern in work authorisation generally. The announcement phase produces more behaviour change than the implementation phase, partly because coverage is loudest at the point of least certainty. By the time a rule is finalised, its actual terms are usually narrower and better defined than the early reporting implied, and the people who waited for detail tend to be better positioned than those who reacted to the headline.

The practical discipline is to distinguish reversible from irreversible choices. Continuing to apply, keeping options open in more than one country and asking employers directly about sponsorship are all reversible. Withdrawing an application, declining an offer or changing your course of study are not. During an uncertain period, weight your effort heavily toward the first category. Our reporting on how skilled workers have navigated previous visa disruption shows how often the people who kept moving ended up ahead of those who paused.

What should employers be thinking about?

That the planning question arrives well before any rule does. If a meaningful share of your graduate intake comes through OPT, the useful exercise now is simply knowing what that share is. Many organisations do not track it, discover the number only when a change lands, and then have to react rather than plan. Establishing the figure costs nothing and turns a future shock into a budget line, in the same way that tracking where hiring is genuinely happening beats reacting to headlines.

The second consideration is what a fee at this level would do to your candidate pool rather than to your costs. Even if you would pay it for a senior hire, you almost certainly would not for an entry-level one, which means the effect concentrates at the graduate end where the pipeline is built. Organisations that rely on converting graduates into experienced staff over several years would feel it slowly and then all at once. Our reporting on how the entry-level pipeline is already under pressure covers a related squeeze from a different direction.

It is also worth being realistic about where the talent goes. OPT is described as one of the primary reasons many international students choose American universities over Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Those three countries are direct competitors for the same people, and they are actively recruiting. A change that makes the US route more expensive does not remove those graduates from the global labour market. It redistributes them, and employers in competing markets are among the beneficiaries.

None of this requires taking a position on whether the policy is desirable. The practical point for anyone planning a career or a workforce is narrower. A large, specific number has been reported, the mechanism is undecided, the timing is roughly known, and the sensible response is to build optionality rather than to react to a headline. Our reporting on how skilled workers plan international moves around shifting visa rules covers how others have handled comparable uncertainty.

What does this mean for the global competition for graduates?

It sharpens something that was already underway. OPT is described as one of the primary reasons many international students choose American universities over Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, which means the route is not merely an immigration mechanism. It is part of the product being sold, and the three named alternatives are selling a comparable product with their own post-study work rights.

For a graduate, that is genuinely useful information rather than a consolation. The skills that make you employable in a US technology or engineering role make you employable in Toronto, London, Sydney, Berlin and Singapore, and several of those markets are actively courting the same people. Treating your degree as qualifying you for a global market rather than a national one is a more robust position regardless of what any single country decides.

There is a second-order effect worth understanding too. If graduate hiring in the US concentrates among a small number of very large, well-funded employers, then the experience available through that route narrows as well. Working at a global technology firm is not the only valuable early career, and for many people a role at a mid-size company in a market with settled work rights delivers more responsibility sooner. Our reporting on where entry-level opportunity is genuinely opening up covers how to assess that trade honestly.

None of this is a reason to abandon a US plan. It is a reason to hold more than one.

People Also Asked

Q: How many people use OPT?

A: Approximately 419,000 international graduates were working under Optional Practical Training in 2024. The programme allows international students to remain employed in the United States for one to three years after completing a degree.

Q: Has the $100,000 fee been approved?

A: No. The proposal remains under discussion at the Department of Homeland Security, which has emphasised that no policy should be considered final until it is formally announced. Officials have not determined whether students, universities or employers would bear the cost.

Q: When would any change take effect?

A: No date has been set for this proposal. Separately, the Department of Homeland Security is preparing broader OPT regulatory revisions expected by autumn 2026, and has already introduced requirements for visa extension applications to participate in OPT.

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Know your rights. Work authorisation rules change slowly and then suddenly, and the graduates who cope best are the ones who already knew which employers and which countries were open to them before anything was announced. Metaintro matches your profile against roles worldwide so you can see your real options rather than a single route, and you can create your free account here to start.