On September 19, 2025, President Trump issued a Presidential Proclamation declaring a new $100,000 fee requirement on H-1B visas.
The H-1B visa program provides temporary, non-immigrant U.S. work visas for college-educated workers and fashion models from abroad. There are close to 600,000 total H-1B workers in the United States, and roughly two-thirds of H-1B workers fill jobs in computer-related and information technology occupations. The initial language of the proclamation was vague as to exactly which H-1B petitions and applicants the fee would apply. Comments from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested the fee would apply to all H-1B workers and payment would be required annually.
The language and comments caused confusion, prompting many immigration attorneys and major corporations that employ H-1B workers to advise their employees to return to the United States immediately before the proclamation took effect, and to refrain from travel plans until further notice, in case the fee applied to H-1B holders who were currently outside of the United States. Official guidance put out by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as statements from the White House Press Secretary, and a White House x.com account, stated that the $100,000 fee would be a one-time fee, and only apply to new H-1B petitions “that have not yet been filed” and that were filed “after 12:01 AM ET on September 21, 2025.” The fee will also only apply to H-1B applicants who are not already residing within in the United States. The proclamation states that the fee is time-limited, and set to “expire, absent extension, 12 months after the effective date of this proclamation, which shall be 12:01 a.m. eastern daylight time on September 21, 2025.”
Section 4 of the proclamation also directs the Secretary of Labor to initiate a rulemaking process to revise the H-1B prevailing wage levels, and directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to prioritize the admission of “high-skilled and high-paid” migrants in the H-1B program. Neither the proclamation itself nor the accompanying fact sheet offer many other details.
Impact: Given the parameters of the new $100,000 fee (applying only to new H-1B petitions and to persons not already residing in the United States), it is likely to cost employers of H-1B workers approximately $6.5 billion annually. This is based on the number of new approved H-1B petitions in 2024: there were 141,205 new petitions approved and 46.2% of them were for persons residing outside of the United States, the remainder were already within the United States and would have been exempt from the fee. However, it is important to note that according to numerous reports and analysts, the legality of the $100,000 fee is likely to be quickly challenged in the courts.
Larger companies, including the biggest users of the program – like Amazon and Microsoft, and large offshore outsourcing companies like Tata and Infosys – will be easily able to pay the $100,000 fee. These companies are worth billions of dollars and get the lion’s share of H-1Bs visas. However, smaller companies will have a harder time paying the fees, depending on their profitability.
Another issue is that the fee will test how “profitable” an individual worker is to a particular company, rather than setting how much they are paid. This fee also does not require companies to pay their H-1B workers a fair wage. For example, a firm that profits $200,000 from the work of an underpaid H-1B worker making only $60,000 per year doing entry-level information technology work, will likely find that it makes sense to pay the fee. On the other hand, a firm that makes $100,000 from hiring an H-1B worker who is an A.I. expert and who they pay above-market wages of $300,000, might not apply for the visa in the first place since the fee could drastically impact (or even zero out) their profitability.
We can also make some reasonable assumptions about the substance of the forthcoming regulations that this proclamation directs the U.S. Departments of Labor (DOL) and Homeland Security (DHS) to issue. The DOL rule is likely to propose changing the methodology for setting the minimum “prevailing” wage rates that employers must pay their H-1B employees. The current rule sets H-1B wages based on DOL survey data by occupation and local area, setting them at specified percentile levels in the distribution of surveyed wages. The current wage levels are set at arbitrarily low levels, leading to the majority of H-1B workers being paid at wage rates that are below the local average wage for the occupations they fill. The first Trump administration proposed and finalized a DOL rule to amend the H-1B prevailing wage levels, but it was blocked in federal court on procedural grounds.
The DHS regulation is likely to propose an alternative methodology for the current H-1B visa “lottery.” Since every year there are more applications for H-1B visas than the number that are available, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) conducts a random lottery to allocate the visas. Numerous reports over the years have shown how the lottery has been hijacked by outsourcing and offshoring companies that subcontract their H-1B workers to other employers and pay the lowest allowable wages by law. This also leads to the vast majority of selected H-1B petitions being approved at the lowest wage levels. The first Trump administration proposed and finalized a DHS rule to modify the lottery to give priority to the H-1B positions that would be paid at the highest wage levels, but that rule was also blocked in federal court on procedural grounds. Before issuance of the proclamation, the DHS regulatory agenda already listed a forthcoming H-1B regulation to amend the lottery – this is likely to be the one referenced by the September 19 proclamation.