The H-1B visa fee of $100,000 has been extended by another year, but two of the three major Indian reports left the decisive detail out of their headlines: the government is not currently allowed to charge it. A federal judge vacated the requirement in June, an appeals court declined to pause that ruling in July, and the immigration service’s own website now says the payment is not in effect.
That is not a technicality, and it is also not the same as saying the policy is dead. The Department of Homeland Security has stated that if the order is lifted it still plans to collect. What has happened is that a large, contested financial obligation has been suspended rather than cancelled, and on Friday the President extended its life by a further year while it sits in that suspended state.
$100,000: The H-1B payment Trump extended on 18 September 2026, to 21 September 2027. A federal judge vacated it as an unlawful tax on 8 June, and USCIS says it is not currently in effect. DHS says it will collect it if the order is lifted.
Untangling that is worth doing properly, because the difference between “the fee is in force”, “the fee is dead” and “the fee is suspended but may be collected later” is the difference between three completely different decisions for an Indian engineer holding a US job offer.
What was signed on Friday
The September 2026 extension
- Instrument: A presidential proclamation, signed Friday 18 September 2026, extending Proclamation 10973 of September 2025.
- Payment: $100,000, a one-off supplemental payment per covered petition.
- New end date: 21 September 2027, 368 days after signing, matching the original proclamation’s 21 September start.
- Status when signed: Vacated by court order and not being collected.
The White House justification, as reported, is that “the restrictions enacted by the 2025 proclamation have proven to be highly effective but the underlying conditions necessitating the restrictions persist.”
It is worth being fair to that claim rather than scoring a cheap point off it. The requirement was collected for most of its first year; the litigation only stopped collection in June 2026. Whatever effect it had on employer behaviour had nearly nine months to produce it. The awkwardness in the sentence is not that the policy never operated. It is that the administration is describing as “highly effective” a measure a federal court has since held the executive had no power to impose.
How long has it actually been in force?
Our count from the litigation dates below, measured to 19 September 2026: enforceable for 302 of 363 days, roughly 83% of its existence.
The 42-day window matters. For six weeks between the vacatur and the First Circuit ruling, an administrative stay put the payment back in force and USCIS could require it. Petitions filed then sit in an odd position: money paid under a requirement a district court had already called unlawful, during a pause an appeals court then refused to extend. No refund mechanism has been described for any payment made at any point.
Who it applies to, and who it never did
A great deal of the alarm around the H-1B visa fee comes from a scope error. It has never been a $100,000 charge on every H-1B. Per USCIS, the requirement was intended to apply to new H-1B petitions submitted after 12:01 a.m. EDT on 21 September 2025, for beneficiaries outside the United States, consular cases, with limited national-interest exceptions.
Who the payment applies to, per the USCIS H-1B FAQ
Covered
- A new petition for a beneficiary outside the US, filed after 21 September 2025.
Never covered
- H-1B visas issued before the proclamation.
- Petitions submitted before 21 September 2025.
- Renewals and extensions.
- A change of employer from inside the US (not a covered consular entry).
- Anyone granted a national-interest exception.
Exceptions are discretionary and their criteria have not been published, so that is the line that can move.
The practical effect of that scope is that the burden falls almost entirely on people who are not yet in the United States. A graduate in Hyderabad with a fresh offer and a consular appointment is exposed. A software engineer already in Seattle on an H-1B, extending status or changing employer without leaving the country, is not. Coverage that merges the two into “Indian tech workers face a $100,000 bill” overstates the reach by a wide margin.
The litigation, in order
Most reporting compresses a year of court history over the H-1B visa feeinto “legal challenges continue”. The sequence is what determines today’s position, so here it is in full.
How the payment reached its current status
- Sunday 21 September 2025: Proclamation 10973 takes effect. At 12:01 a.m. EDT.
- Friday 3 October 2025: Global Nurse Force v. Trump filed. N.D. California (3:25-cv-08454).
- Thursday 16 October 2025: The US Chamber of Commerce and the Association of American Universities sue. In D.D.C.
- Friday 12 December 2025: Twenty state attorneys general sue. D. Massachusetts (25-13829-LTS).
- Tuesday 23 December 2025: Judge Beryl Howell upholds the proclamation. In the Chamber case.
- Monday 8 June 2026: Judge Leo Sorokin vacates the payment requirement
- Friday 12 June 2026: An administrative stay briefly reinstates it
- Friday 24 July 2026: The First Circuit denies a stay pending appeal. The vacatur applies nationwide again.
- Friday 18 September 2026: Trump extends the requirement to 21 September 2027
Every weekday was checked against a calendar. The government's merits appeal is still pending before the First Circuit.
Two judges, two answers
The disagreement between the courts is not procedural fencing. It goes to whether a president can impose what amounts to a six-figure charge on entry by proclamation, and the two judges answered in opposite directions.
Judge Howell, upholding it in December 2025, located the power in the entry statutes and declined to second-guess the policy. “The parties’ vigorous debate over the ultimate wisdom of this political judgment is not within the province of the courts,” she wrote. “So long as the actions dictated by the policy decision and articulated in the Proclamation fit within the confines of the law, the Proclamation must be upheld.”
Judge Sorokin, vacating it six months later, reached the payment through a different door. He granted summary judgment for the twenty states on the basis that the requirement was an unconstitutional tax imposed without congressional authorisation, and that the implementing agencies had also breached the Administrative Procedure Act.
Why the word ‘tax’ is the whole case
A president has wide statutory power to restrict or condition entry. A president has no power to levy taxes; that belongs to Congress. So the dispute comes down to which of the two a mandatory $100,000 payment attached to entry really is. Howell read it as a condition on entry. Sorokin read it as a revenue measure dressed as a condition. The First Circuit, declining to stay his ruling, wrote that “the substance and application of the $100,000 payment reveal that it is a tax”, and that the Immigration and Nationality Act does not expressly give the agencies the fee-imposing power the administration relied on.
What a denied stay does and does not mean
The First Circuit has not yet decided the appeal. What it decided on 24 July was narrower: that the government had not made a strong showing it is likely to win, and therefore could not have the district court’s order paused while the appeal runs. That is a meaningful signal about how one appellate panel reads the merits, but it is a preliminary judgment on a preliminary question. The substantive appeal continues, and the government retains the option of asking the Supreme Court for an emergency stay, which would revive collection immediately if granted.
If this order is later lifted, DHS still plans to collect the payment.
USCIS H-1B FAQ
Almost nobody has quoted that sentence from the agency’s own FAQ. On the ruling itself, DHS says it “strongly disagrees with the First Circuit’s order denying the stay request but will comply with the court’s order while DHS considers next steps.” Read together, the advice is simple: nobody should be paying $100,000 today, and nobody should assume the liability has gone.
The plunge in filings, and what caused it
The administration points to falling H-1B demand as evidence the policy works. Demand has indeed fallen sharply. The causal story behind that fall is considerably messier than the claim built on top of it.
A fall of roughly 126,000 registrations, or 26.8%. Amazon's certified applications fell 34.2%, from 4,647 to 3,057, and Meta's and Google's filings are reported as roughly halved. What caused the fall is disputed.
The decline is widely credited to beneficiary-centric selection, which stopped one applicant being registered many times over by several employers. That removes duplicate registrations mechanically, without anyone deciding not to apply: it changes how applicants are counted at least as much as how many there are. Four other things arrived in the same window: the $100,000 payment, expanded social media vetting, tougher adjudication and a shift toward weighting selection by wage. No published analysis separates their effects, so citing the whole decline as proof the payment works credits one policy with what five changes did together.
The corporate numbers are a cleaner signal than the registration total, because a company filing fewer petitions is making a decision rather than being counted differently. Even there, the confound is unmissable: Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have all been cutting jobs through this period, and fewer hires produce fewer visa petitions regardless of what a petition costs. How far that retrenchment is driven by capital spending rather than headcount philosophy is unsettled, and the same pressure is visible across the sector.
A 34 per cent fall in Amazon’s certified applications is real and it is large. What it is not is a clean measurement of deterrence, because the denominator, how many people Amazon wanted to hire at all, was moving at the same time.
Why this lands hardest on India
Shares computed from the reported approvals; the last row is by subtraction. India received 5.8 times China's total.
Roughly seven in ten H-1B approvals go to Indian nationals. That single ratio is why a proclamation signed in Washington on a Friday evening moves IT services stocks in Mumbai on Monday morning, and why three Indian newspapers led with the same story within hours of one another.
The 69.8 per cent figure deserves the same care as everything else here, though. It measures approvals, and approvals include renewals and extensions for people already working in the United States. The payment requirement does not touch those. So the share of Indian H-1B activity genuinely exposed to the H-1B visa fee is smaller than 69.8 per cent of the total, and no published breakdown separates new consular entries from the rest by country of birth. What can be said is that India is overwhelmingly the most affected country, and that the number of individuals actually exposed is not knowable from the approvals data alone.
What this means if you are planning around it
Stripped of the litigation vocabulary, the H-1B visa fee question comes down to which of a handful of situations you are in. The answer is different for each, and for most people reading this in India it is less dramatic than the headlines suggest.
| If you are | Position today |
|---|---|
| Already in the US on an H-1B | Unaffected by the payment requirement in any of its versions |
| Renewing or extending | Explicitly excluded from the proclamation |
| Holding a new offer, currently outside the US | Covered in principle, but the requirement is vacated and is not being collected |
| An employer budgeting for FY2027 hiring | Liability suspended, not extinguished: DHS says it plans to collect if the order is lifted |
| Someone who paid while it was in force | No public refund mechanism has been described |
This is a description of the litigation position, not legal advice. Anyone with a live petition should take advice on their own facts, because the position can change on a single appellate order.
The one thing the current state of play genuinely rules out is certainty in either direction. An employer telling candidates the charge is gone is ahead of the law. An employer pricing $100,000 into every overseas hire today is behind it.
What we could not verify
Four gaps, stated rather than filled
- The proclamation text: We worked from press reporting of the signing, not the Federal Register text, which was not available at the time of writing. Exemptions and definitions may differ from the summaries.
- Money collected: The payment was enforceable for about 302 days. No official figure for total revenue was found, and we will not estimate one.
- Which policy did what: No published analysis isolates the payment’s effect on filings from vetting, scrutiny, wage weighting and beneficiary-centric counting.
- Refunds: DHS has said what it will do if it wins on appeal. It has published nothing about refunds if it loses.
What affected workers should do now
In one line: the H-1B visa fee extension means a president has prolonged by a further year a requirement a federal court has held he had no power to impose, and which his own immigration agency currently says is not in effect. An account that reports only the extension is describing about a third of the situation.
For anyone actually affected, the consequences pull in different directions. The payment is not collectable today, which is materially different from being in force. The extension is an unambiguous statement of intent to keep it alive to September 2027 and to litigate for it. And the case is genuinely open: one district judge has already upheld the proclamation in a reasoned opinion, the merits appeal has not been decided, and a Supreme Court emergency application could restore collection without warning. Planning on the assumption that it is permanently dead is as unwise as paying it today.
On the effectiveness claim, a caution that cuts against whichever side you find sympathetic. Filings have fallen sharply and that is not in dispute. But the largest measured decline comes from a rule change that stopped people being counted several times each, and four policies arrived in the same window with nobody separating them. The defensible statement is that H-1B demand has dropped and that no one has yet shown how much of the drop the payment caused, which is a weaker claim than either side is currently making, and the only one the evidence actually supports.
Frequently asked
- Is the $100,000 H-1B fee being charged right now?
- No. USCIS states that the payment requirement is not currently in effect. Judge Leo Sorokin vacated it on 8 June 2026 and the First Circuit declined to stay that ruling on 24 July 2026. DHS has said it will comply with the order while it considers next steps.
- If it has been struck down, why did Trump extend it?
- The vacatur is under appeal. Extending the proclamation to 21 September 2027 keeps the requirement alive so that it can take effect again if the government wins. DHS has stated that if the order is later lifted, it still plans to collect the payment.
- Who does the $100,000 payment actually apply to?
- New H-1B petitions filed after 12:01 a.m. EDT on 21 September 2025 for beneficiaries outside the United States, with limited national-interest exceptions. It does not apply to H-1B renewals or extensions, to visas already issued, or to petitions filed before that date.
- How many Indians does this affect?
- Indians received 283,772 of 406,348 H-1B approvals in FY2025, or 69.8 per cent: 5.8 times China’s 49,161. That figure counts approvals including renewals, though, so the number of Indians actually exposed to the payment is smaller and is not published separately.
- Did the fee cause H-1B filings to fall?
- Filings fell sharply: eligible registrations dropped about 26.8 per cent to roughly 344,000, and Amazon’s certified applications fell 34.2 per cent. But the registration decline is largely attributed to beneficiary-centric selection, which removed duplicate registrations, and four separate policies arrived in the same window. No published analysis separates their effects.
- Can I get a refund if I already paid the $100,000?
- No refund mechanism has been publicly described. The payment was enforceable for roughly 302 of the 363 days since it took effect, including a six-week window in June and July 2026 when an administrative stay briefly restored it.
