H-1B's $100,000 Fee Gets Another Year on the Clock

The White House said on Friday that President Donald Trump has extended by another year an executive order imposing a US$100,000 fee on H-1B non-immigrant visas.

The six-figure price tag on a US$100,000 H-1B visa fee is staying put. The White House said on Friday that President Donald Trump has extended his executive order imposing that fee on H-1B non-immigrant visas by another year, carrying a policy that was initially treated as a shock measure into a second annual cycle of corporate hiring plans.

The H-1B is the main U.S. work visa for specialty occupations — software engineers, data scientists, physicians, accountants, university researchers — and it is allocated in an annual registration process that employers must plan for many months in advance. Attaching a US$100,000 charge to that process does not simply raise a cost line. It changes which roles are worth sponsoring at all, and that is the part the extension makes durable.

A one-year order becomes a two-year planning assumption

The distinction between a temporary measure and an extended one matters more than the arithmetic suggests. A single-year fee can be absorbed, deferred, or waited out; companies can pause sponsorship for one cycle and assume the cost lapses. A second year removes that option. Staffing models, offshore-onshore ratios and graduate recruiting pipelines that were frozen in place now have to be rebuilt around the assumption that the fee is a standing feature of hiring in the United States rather than an aberration.

The extension was confirmed by the White House on Friday and reported by BNN Bloomberg. What the announcement does not do is settle the litigation and lobbying that have surrounded the order since it first appeared — employer groups, universities and health systems have all argued that a flat per-visa charge falls hardest on institutions that cannot pass the cost anywhere.

Who actually writes the cheque

H-1B sponsorship is concentrated, not spread evenly across the economy. The heaviest filers historically fall into a few buckets: IT services and consulting firms that place engineers at client sites, the large U.S. technology platforms that hire directly, and a long tail of hospitals, research universities and regional health systems that use the visa to staff clinical and academic roles.

Those three groups face the fee very differently.

IT services and staffing firms. These are the highest-volume filers and the thinnest-margin employers in the group. Their business model depends on billing a client more than the loaded cost of the worker. A six-figure charge on top of salary, benefits and compliance either gets passed to the client, absorbed against margin, or avoided by moving the work offshore. The third option is the cheapest and the fastest.
Large technology employers. For a company paying senior engineering salaries, a US$100,000 one-time charge is a real but survivable premium on a high-value hire. These firms are best positioned to keep sponsoring — which is precisely why the policy tends to shift the composition of H-1B usage toward the biggest balance sheets rather than shrink it evenly.
Hospitals, universities and non-profits. Academic and medical employers operate on grant cycles and fixed reimbursement. They have no client to bill and no pricing power. For a rural hospital recruiting a specialist or a university filling a postdoctoral position, the fee can simply exceed what the role can bear.

The Canadian and offshore release valve

Every restriction on U.S. skilled-worker entry has a mirror image somewhere else. Canada has spent years marketing itself explicitly to workers and employers caught in U.S. immigration bottlenecks, and Canadian technology hubs have built recruiting pitches around exactly this kind of friction. A second year of the fee strengthens the case for opening or expanding a Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal engineering site rather than fighting for U.S. visas — the work still gets done, it just gets done north of the border, and the payroll taxes follow it.

Canada has spent years marketing itself explicitly to workers and employers caught in U.

The other release valve is offshore delivery. For IT services firms in particular, the alternative to sponsoring a worker in the United States is not hiring an American; it is running the same engagement from India, Poland or the Philippines. That substitution is well established, and a standing six-figure per-visa cost accelerates it. The policy's stated goal is to push employers toward domestic hiring. Whether it does that, or simply relocates the job, is the empirical question the next year will answer.

Markets ended the week without a verdict

The announcement landed on a Friday session that closed mixed and without drama. The S&P 500, via the SPY exchange-traded fund, finished at $761.69, down 0.12% from its prior close of $762.60, inside a day range of $757.97 to $762.00, as of 20:00 GMT on Friday, 18 September 2026. The Nasdaq 100 tracker QQQ was the day's outlier on the upside at $721.45, up 0.63% from $716.92 and closing near the top of its $715.08 to $721.73 range. The Dow 30 proxy DIA was the weakest of the three, closing at $515.88, down 0.48% from $518.35.

That the technology-heavy index outperformed on the day is not evidence that equity investors read the visa extension as good news for tech — the order affects a cost line that is small relative to revenue at the largest platforms, and broad index moves of this size carry no single explanation. The more meaningful market signal, if one emerges, will show up in the results and commentary of the labour-intensive IT services names, where sponsorship volume is a genuine input to gross margin, rather than in a one-day index print.

What to watch over the next twelve months

Three things will determine whether the extension changes behaviour or merely prices it.

Registration volumes. The annual H-1B registration window is the clearest read on employer intent. A sharp drop in filings would confirm that the fee is doing what a cap could not; flat filings would suggest the largest employers are simply paying and continuing.

Exemptions and carve-outs. Pressure from health systems and universities is the most likely route to a narrowing of the order. Any exemption for non-profit or academic petitioners would sharply change who bears the cost.

Where the headcount lands. Watch announcements of new engineering and delivery centres outside the United States, particularly in Canada. Site selection decisions taken in the next two quarters will reflect a policy assumption with a two-year horizon rather than a one-year one, and those decisions are expensive to reverse.

For employers, the practical takeaway from Friday is narrow and firm: the fee is not lapsing on schedule, and hiring plans built on the hope that it would need to be redrawn.

Key facts

Fee: US$100,000 per H-1B non-immigrant visa
Action: Executive order extended by another year, White House said Friday
S&P 500 (SPY): $761.69, -0.12%, as of 20:00 GMT Fri 18 Sep 2026
Nasdaq 100 (QQQ): $721.45, +0.63%, as of 20:00 GMT Fri 18 Sep 2026

Frequently asked questions

What did Trump actually extend?

The White House said on Friday that President Donald Trump extended by another year an executive order imposing a fee of US$100,000 on H-1B non-immigrant visas. The order was already in force; the action prolongs it rather than creating a new charge, meaning employers face the cost across a second annual hiring cycle.

What is an H-1B visa?

The H-1B is the principal U.S. non-immigrant work visa for specialty occupations that typically require a bachelor's degree or higher. It is used for software engineers, data scientists, physicians, researchers and accountants, among others, and is allocated through an annual employer registration process that requires planning many months ahead.

Which employers are most exposed to the fee?

Sponsorship is concentrated in IT services and consulting firms that place engineers at client sites, large technology platforms that hire directly, and hospitals, universities and research institutions. Thin-margin staffing firms and non-profit academic and medical employers have the least ability to absorb or pass on a six-figure per-visa charge.

Could the fee push jobs to Canada?

It is a plausible outcome. Canada has actively courted skilled workers and employers constrained by U.S. immigration rules, and Canadian technology hubs market themselves on that basis. A second year of the fee strengthens the case for expanding engineering sites outside the United States rather than competing for costly U.S. visas.

How did markets react on Friday?

Major U.S. index trackers closed mixed. As of 20:00 GMT on 18 September 2026, SPY finished at $761.69, down 0.12%; QQQ closed at $721.45, up 0.63%; and DIA ended at $515.88, down 0.48%. No single-day index move of that size can be attributed to the visa announcement alone.

What should employers watch next?

Three indicators matter: annual H-1B registration volumes, which reveal whether filings are falling or employers are simply paying; any exemptions carved out for non-profit, academic or healthcare petitioners under lobbying pressure; and announcements of new engineering or delivery centres located outside the United States over the coming quarters.

Sources

Trump extends push for US$100,000 H-1B visas by another year — BNN Bloomberg