H-1B $103,265 Fee Proposal: Comment Period Closed. Will It Hit Next Year's Lottery?

If you plan to enter the H-1B lottery next spring, you've probably seen claims like these in your group chats over the past few days: "Every H-1B petition will cost an extra $100,000" and "Filings will drop to 30,000 next year."

The short answer first: this is still only a proposal. It has not taken effect, and no effective date has been set. What ended on September 24 was the public comment period. In other words, the government has finished collecting comments but hasn't decided on the final version.

As of September 28, the proposal had received 11,706 public comments.

01 First, be clear about which fee we're talking about

There are two recent "$100,000" items tied to H-1B, and many articles mix them up:

How this proposal is calculated and who does or doesn't pay was covered in our August 25 breakdown of the rule text. This article covers only what happens now that the comment period has closed.

02 The comment period is over. What happens next?

In short, there are four more steps:

1. DHS reviews the comments. More than ten thousand comments have to be sorted and responded to, and the final rule has to explain why each point was or wasn't adopted. There is no deadline for this step.
2. Review at the White House. The final rule first goes to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). On the day it's submitted, a record appears on the government website reginfo.gov. That is the earliest signal you can see.
3. Publication in the Federal Register. The final rule will state the date from which the fee is charged.
4. Taking effect.

Anything can happen at each step: the rule may pass as written, pass with changes, or sit on the shelf indefinitely. No official document gives a timeline right now, and claims online that "they'll start charging next year" are all guesswork.

So what does this have to do with next year's lottery? The key is that the fee is paid when you file the petition after being selected, not at lottery registration. On the usual schedule, registration is in March, and people who are selected can start filing on April 1. If the final rule takes effect before you file, your petition will owe the fee; if it hasn't taken effect by then, it won't. Right now nobody can say which way it will go.

03 Where does "30,000 next year" come from?

That number comes from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), a nonprofit that studies immigration policy. On the last day of the comment period, it filed a 17-page comment opposing the rule (original), which Chinese-language WeChat accounts have been sharing widely over the past few days.

To be clear up front: this is an estimate by one of the commenters, not a government conclusion.

Here is how they got there:

• In its revenue estimate, DHS assumes that 85,000 selected petitions a year will still be filed and still pay the fee.
• NFAP went through the technical appendix DHS attached to the rule. It contains a table showing that after the $100,000 fee started being charged, new H-1B petitions processed through consulates fell from 13,823 in the same period a year earlier to 1,212, a drop of 91.2%. We checked the original table, and the numbers are correct.
• NFAP applied that 91.2% to the 343,981 eligible lottery registrations for fiscal year 2026 and got "about 30,270."

It also quoted a line from the White House's September 18 extension proclamation: in the year since the fee was put in place, the $100,000 payment "has been made for over 700 petitions." We confirmed this line in the full text of the proclamation as published in the Federal Register.

That 30,000 figure deserves a question mark, though, for two reasons.

First, the 91.2% doesn't measure lottery petitions. That table counts new petitions processed through consulates, and in the appendix DHS attributes the change to cap-exempt employers (such as universities). Using it to project lottery petitions is itself an assumption. The real number could be higher or lower.

Second, the two fees can be "avoided" in different ways. The $100,000 fee applies only to people outside the US; changing status inside the US avoids it, so many people went around it. The $103,265 fee is charged based on whether a petition is subject to the cap, whether the person is inside or outside the US, so there's no such way out. Data from the first fee can only serve as a rough reference for the second.

DHS itself notes in the appendix that these are all short-term responses and that a full year of data isn't available yet.

NFAP's comment makes a few other arguments. Briefly:

• DHS says fee increases don't much affect filing volume, citing studies of increases of a few hundred dollars. NFAP argues that can't be stretched to a $100,000 fee.
• The study the rule cites, finding that H-1B workers are paid 16% less than Americans, is disputed. Another economist who redid the analysis concluded that H-1B workers are paid 6% more on average.
• If $100,000 can be charged to "cover costs," then in theory any visa could carry any fee, which NFAP argues means there's no limit at all.

04 If you're outside the US, do you still have to pay $100,000 now?

Some articles say "H-1B applications from abroad still carry the extra $100,000 charge." We can't find any official document that supports this.

The USCIS H-1B page, updated on September 21, still says: a court has vacated the guidance for collecting the fee, the appeals court did not agree to stay that ruling, and DHS "will comply with the court's order," but still intends to collect the fee if the order is lifted in the future.

The White House did sign a new proclamation on September 18 extending the restriction by a year, but USCIS still hasn't said it will resume collecting the fee. See our article on the extension proclamation for details.

05 Does this affect me?

• You're in school or on OPT and plan to enter the lottery next spring: this matters most to you. If the final rule takes effect before you are selected and file, your employer will have to pay an extra $103,265. What you can do now is find a chance to ask your employer whether they're keeping an eye on it.
• You're already on H-1B and need to extend or change jobs: you're outside the scope of this proposal.
• You work at a university, a nonprofit affiliated with a university, or a nonprofit research organization: you're cap-exempt, and the proposal excludes you as well.
• You're outside the US waiting on a new H-1B: what mainly affects you is the $100,000 fee; see section 04 above.

No new requirement is in effect right now, and neither you nor your employer needs to do anything about this rule immediately.

06 What we're watching next

• A record on reginfo.gov showing the final rule submitted for review
• The rule appearing on the Federal Register's public inspection list
• New rulings in the $100,000 fee litigation

When there's news, we'll update both this article and our breakdown of the rule text. We also have separate tracking pages for several recent H-1B developments: the H-1B reform rule, eliminating the 60-day grace period, and the executive order on layoff reviews.

Sources

Rule number RIN 1615-AD20, docket number USCIS-2026-0298, Federal Register document number 2026-17324. A correction was issued on September 10 (C1-2026-17324); it changed only the historical receipt counts in Table 13, not the fee amount or scope.