A $4,000 H-1B and $4,500 L-1 Fee Now Applies to Extension Filings, Too, Starting September 9

What Changed, and When

On August 7, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security, through U.S. Customs and Border Protection, filed a final rule on the 9-11 Response and Biometric Entry-Exit Fee for H-1B and L-1 Visas for public inspection. It is scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on August 10, 2026, and states: “This rule is effective on September 9, 2026.”

The rule amends the USCIS fee schedule at 8 CFR 106.2(c)(8) and (9). What it changes, in the agency’s own words, is the range of petitions the fee attaches to:

• Before: DHS “generally collected the fee only for petitions seeking an initial grant of status or a change of employer” — the situations in which the separate Fraud Prevention and Detection Fee also applies.
• After September 9: the rule requires covered employers “to submit the 9-11 Biometric Fee for all extension of status petitions, regardless of whether the related fraud prevention and detection fee applies, which includes extension of status petitions that do not involve a change of employer.”

The dollar amounts are unchanged: $4,000 for a covered H-1B petition and $4,500 for a covered L-1 petition. The rule expands which petitions the fee applies to, not how much it is. DHS also states that the fee “is required to be paid by the employer,” and that an amended petition that does not request an extension of status remains exempt.

Two more facts from the rule itself. It is not retroactive — DHS writes that it “will only be applied to the relevant petitions as of the implementation date of the rule” and that the fees “will not retroactively apply to past or to pending petitions.” And the fee as a whole currently carries a sunset: it “will apply to petitions filed on or before September 30, 2027,” unless Congress extends it again.

This is a final rule, so there is no open comment period. It follows a notice of proposed rulemaking DHS published on June 6, 2024, which drew 146 comments.

Who in Texas This Reaches

The fee has never applied to every employer. By statute it reaches only covered employers, which the rule describes as “those employers that employ 50 or more total employees in the United States with more than 50 percent of the employees in the United States in H-1B or L-1 nonimmigrant status.” The rule adds the words “in the aggregate” to make clear that H-1B, L-1A and L-1B are counted together. A company that does not meet both halves of that test is not a covered employer, and the rule says plainly that such a petitioner “is not required to pay the 9-11 Biometric Fee.”

In practice that profile fits many IT staffing, consulting and outsourcing companies, a number of which run large Texas operations or place workers with Texas clients in the Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston and Austin markets. Two groups feel the change:

• Covered employers with extensions coming due. DHS states that from fiscal year 2018 through fiscal year 2025, 27 percent of H-1B petitions from covered employers were subject to the fee; had this interpretation been in place, the figure would have been 75 percent. The agency projects the change will move roughly $37.9 million in fiscal year 2026 and $40.0 million in fiscal year 2027 from petitioners to the government.
• H-1B, L-1A and L-1B employees of those companies. The fee is the employer’s legal obligation, not the worker’s. But extension budgets and filing schedules are set by employers, and workers are often the last to hear when either one changes.

Smaller businesses are largely outside it. In the rule’s own small-entity analysis, of 264 confirmed small entities sampled that file H-1B or L-1 petitions, 223 had fewer than 50 employees and “would be statutorily exempt from paying the 9-11 Biometric Fee.”

What This Changes Legally

The change is one of interpretation, not of the fee statute. DHS explains that in 2015 it read the new statutory language consistently with its prior interpretation — tying the 9-11 fee to the Fraud Fee — and now concludes that “the best reading of the statute requires that the 9-11 Biometric Fee be paid for all extension of status petitions regardless of whether the Fraud Fee is applicable.” The rule cites the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo in reaching that reading.

DHS also notes that it adopted the same interpretation once before, in a 2020 fee rule that was enjoined in its entirety during litigation unrelated to this fee before it could take effect.

Nothing in the rule changes who is eligible for H-1B or L-1 status, how long an extension can run, or what evidence a petition must contain. It changes what a covered employer must remit with the filing.

What Kind of Option Might Apply

Nothing on this page is a prediction about any particular company or petition. What an immigration lawyer can review includes:

• Whether a specific employer meets both the 50-employee and the more-than-50-percent test, and how the aggregate count is made for a workforce that shifts during the year.
• Which upcoming filings are extension-of-status petitions and which are amended petitions that do not request an extension, since the rule treats those differently.
• How the September 9 effective date and the non-retroactivity language apply to petitions already prepared, already filed, or scheduled for the weeks around it.
• For an employee, what an employer’s decision about timing or budget means for their own status, and what alternatives may exist if an extension is delayed or is not filed.

These are case-specific questions, and the answers turn on documents — payroll counts, petition type, filing receipts — that a lawyer reads directly.

Why Acting Quickly Can Matter

Extension petitions run on their own clock. Status has an expiration date, and the window in which an extension can be filed — and in which a worker may keep working while it is pending — is fixed by regulation, not by preference. A budget question that surfaces late in that window is a harder problem than the same question raised early.

It is best to have a lawyer look at the calendar and the filings before the effective date arrives rather than after a petition has gone out the door. For employees, a conversation now about what an extension timeline looks like is a good deal easier than one after a deadline has passed.

Sources

1. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 9-11 Response and Biometric Entry-Exit Fee for H-1B and L-1 Visas, final rule, 91 FR 51360, Docket No. USCBP-2024-0009, RIN 1651-AB48 (filed for public inspection August 7, 2026; scheduled publication August 10, 2026; effective September 9, 2026).
2. Federal Register, Public Inspection: 9-11 Response and Biometric Entry-Exit Fee for H-1B and L-1 Visas (August 7, 2026).
3. Chugh, LLP, DHS Expands 9-11 Biometric Fee to H-1B and L-1 Extension Petitions (August 7, 2026).
4. Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy LLP, DHS Expands 9-11 Response Fee to H-1B and L-1 Extensions (August 2026).
5. Erickson Immigration Group, DHS Expands 9-11 Biometric Fee to More H-1B and L-1 Extension Petitions (August 2026).