US court rejects Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee: What it means for Indians
3 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Jul 25, 2026 06:39 PM IST
US President Donald Trump’s administration received a jolt from a federal appeals court after the judge struck down the bid to revive a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers.
The Trump administration announced a hike in the H-1B visa fee to prevent foreign workers from taking American jobs. The Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to put on hold a lower court judge’s June 8 verdict, filed by 20 Democratic states, because it constituted an unlawful tax Congress never authorised.
US District Court Judge Leo Sorokin concluded that the executive branch exceeded its authority and violated the Administrative Procedure Act. “The Court finds that the Policy imposes a tax on H-1B petitions without the requisite delegation by Congress,” Judge Sorokin wrote.
H-1B visas, which are meant for high-skilled jobs that are tough for American workers to find, offer 65,000 visas annually, and another 20,000 visas for workers with advanced degrees and are approved for three to six years by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
Employers seeking H-1B visa workers usually paid around $2,000 to $5,000 in fees that typically depended on several factors before Trump’s move to hike the visa fee. While hiking the H-1B visa fee, the US President had said the program “has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labour.”
However, the $100,000 fee doesn’t apply to visas issued to foreign citizens already in the United States on student visas, who generally make up a large share of new H-1B recipients, Reuters reported.
The hiked visa fee was announced by Trump in September 2025 and it has sharply reduced the demand for the H-1B visas, court filings showed, Bloomberg reported. It added that by mid of February, USCIS had received few payments of the new fee.
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Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, in a statement said, “Today’s victory protects the integrity of the H-1B visa program as a tool to address severe labor shortages in vital industries like education, healthcare, and medical research.”
Campbell added, “In Massachusetts, this win will ensure we can fill critical vacancies and hire world-class faculty and researchers at colleges and universities across the Commonwealth.”
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