The Trump administration has quietly taken its first concrete regulatory step toward charging international students a fee for Optional Practical Training. On Aug. 20, 2026, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) logged receipt of a proposed rule from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement titled simply Optional Practical Training Fees, assigned regulatory identification number 1653-AB01. The rule is now listed as Pending Review.
Two details in the OIRA docket entry stand out. First, ICE has flagged the rule as economically significant — the designation reserved for rules with an annual economic impact of $100 million or more, or that raise novel policy questions. Second, reginfo.gov reports that this RIN has not been published in any Unified Agenda. The Unified Agenda is the semiannual roadmap agencies use to telegraph planned rulemakings, so its absence means the OPT fee proposal reached the White House without the usual advance public notice. The docket also records the rule as carrying international impacts and no statutory legal deadline.
The text of the rule is not public while it sits at OIRA, so the fee amount, who would pay it, and whether it would apply to initial OPT, the 24-month STEM extension, or both are all unknown. What is knowable is the baseline it would sit on top of. ICE already collects the I-901 SEVIS fee from students at the front end — $350 for F and M visa applicants and $220 for J visa applicants, according to ICE’s own fee schedule. OPT itself currently carries no separate ICE charge; students pay USCIS by filing Form I-765 for the work permit. A new ICE fee would therefore be an additional layer, not a repricing of an existing one.
This filing does not arrive in isolation. ICE has a separate, broader rulemaking in the pipeline — RIN 1653-AA97, Practical Training — which appears in the 2026 Unified Agenda at the proposed rule stage with a target NPRM date of February 2027. That rule would amend 8 CFR part 214 and, in ICE’s own words, aims to address fraud and national security concerns, protect U.S. workers from being displaced by foreign nationals, and enhance the Student and Exchange Visitor Program’s capacity to oversee the program. Read together, the two dockets suggest ICE is pursuing a fee change on a faster track than the substantive overhaul of OPT eligibility rules.
For F-1 students and recent graduates, the practical takeaway is timing rather than panic. A rule at OIRA is still a proposal, and under Executive Order 12866 review generally runs up to 90 days and can be extended. Nothing changes until ICE publishes a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register, which would open a public comment period before any fee could take effect. Students currently on OPT or STEM OPT are unaffected today. Anyone weighing whether to file an OPT or STEM OPT application in the coming months should watch for that NPRM — and should factor in that OPT is the on-ramp many EB-2 NIW and EB-1A candidates use to build the U.S. work record their petitions later rely on.
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Source: Federal regulatory docket (reginfo.gov OIRA pending review)