The H-1B program now runs through a $100,000 gate whose legality is still undecided

The H-1B visa is how American employers sponsor foreign professionals — mostly in computer occupations — for jobs requiring a specialty degree.▸ It has run on the same mechanics for decades: a 65,000-visa annual cap, a 20,000-visa carve-out for U.S. master's degree holders, and a fixed set of filing fees. On September 19, 2025, a presidential proclamation added a new charge on top of all of it: $100,000, due at filing, for new petitions covering workers currently outside the United States. Nine months later, a federal judge ruled that charge unlawful — and it is still being collected anyway, while the ruling is appealed.

Before the proclamation, sponsoring an H-1B worker already meant paying into a stack of USCIS fees, each with its own purpose: a base filing fee for adjudication, an asylum-system fee added in 2024, a training fee that funds grants for U.S. workers, and a fee that funds visa-fraud investigations.▸ Combined, per USCIS's own fee schedule, those totaled $3,380 for a standard employer. The new charge is roughly 30 times that entire stack, by itself.

"Dependent" employers — those with 50 or more U.S. staff, more than half of them already in H-1B or L-1 status, a category that captures most IT-outsourcing and staffing firms — owe a further $4,000 under a 2015 law, on top of everything shown here.▸ The $100,000 charge does not replace any of these fees; it stacks on top of them.

The proclamation's $100,000 charge is narrower than the sponsorship system it sits inside.▸ It applies only to new petitions for workers who are currently abroad and need a visa stamped at a U.S. consulate — not to renewals, not to extensions, and not to the majority of workers changing from a student visa to H-1B status while already inside the country.

Of the roughly 399,403 H-1B petitions USCIS approved in fiscal 2024, 258,196 — 65% — were continuing employment: people already working on an H-1B, renewing or extending it, permanently outside the new fee's reach.▸ Of the 141,205 approved for initial employment, USCIS's own FY2024 characteristics report says 54% requested a change of status for a beneficiary already in the U.S. — also exempt. That leaves about 46%, roughly 65,000 workers a year, as the population a $100,000-per-petition charge is actually built to touch. The statutory annual cap sits at 85,000 new hires — 65,000 under the regular cap plus 20,000 reserved for U.S. master's degree holders — and for the fiscal 2026 lottery, 336,153 unique workers registered to compete for those slots, a 35.3% selection rate.

The fee's legal footing is unresolved.▸ Twenty states sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (State of California, et al. v. Noem, et al., No. 1:25-cv-13829), arguing the proclamation amounted to an unauthorized tax that only Congress can impose. On June 8, 2026, Judge Leo T. Sorokin agreed and vacated the fee, finding it exceeded the administration's authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The government immediately moved to keep collecting it while it appealed; on June 12, 2026, the court granted a temporary administrative stay of its own ruling, conditioned on the government filing for a stay at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit by June 18, 2026 — which it did, opening case No. 26-1699. As of this writing, USCIS is still requiring the $100,000 payment on covered petitions while the First Circuit decides whether that continues.

Every figure here reflects the standard-employer fee stack and FY2024 program totals as published by USCIS and the Federal Register; individual employer costs vary by company size and dependent-employer status, and the $100,000 fee's legal status could change before or after publication.