President Trump signed a proclamation on September 18, 2026 extending the H-1B entry restriction that carries the $100,000 payment requirement for another year. The original measure, Proclamation 10973 (Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers, signed Sept. 19, 2025), was due to lapse on its own terms this month. The new proclamation takes effect at 12:01 a.m. EDT on September 21, 2026, and says the restriction “shall expire, absent extension, 12 months after the effective date” - that is, September 21, 2027.
The scope is unchanged. The restriction still applies to H-1B workers who are outside the United States and seek entry, and the Secretary of Homeland Security keeps authority to exempt individuals, companies or industries when their hiring is “in the national interest.” As under the 2025 guidance, the payment is not triggered by extensions for current H-1B workers or by change-of-status petitions for people already in the U.S., such as F-1 students.
The White House used the renewal to argue the policy is working. The proclamation says the $100,000 payment “has been made for over 700 petitions” since September 2025. It also says H-1B registrations by the largest IT staffing firms fell from 24,946 to 2,055 (92%), that consular-processing requests fell nearly 97%, and that the share of FY 2027 registrations for people with U.S. master’s degrees rose from 45.1% to 66.1% in the FY 2027 registration season.
The court fight is still unresolved. On June 8, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts vacated the agency guidance that implemented the payment in California et al. v. Mullin (No. 25-13829). The government appealed to the First Circuit on June 11, and that appeal is still pending. A separate challenge brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which a lower court rejected, is also on appeal. Renewing the proclamation does not change the vacatur. What it does is keep the payment requirement legally alive: if the government wins on appeal, it can resume collecting the fee right away, without writing a new proclamation.
The renewal also overlaps with a second, separate charge. DHS has proposed a $103,265 fee on every initial cap-subject H-1B petition, including change-of-status filings for workers already in the U.S., under its ordinary fee-setting authority. Comments on that rule (docket USCIS-2026-0298) close on September 24, 2026, and the proposal says petitioners subject to both charges would have to pay both. On the same day as the proclamation, the President also signed a separate executive order telling agencies to weigh employers’ recent and planned layoffs when they review H-1B filings.
What this means: employers planning to sponsor H-1B workers from abroad over the next year should plan for the $100,000 payment to be reinstated if the First Circuit rules for the government, and should watch the $103,265 fee rule separately. For H-1B workers weighing a long-term option that does not depend on employer sponsorship, the EB-2 National Interest Waiver is self-petitioned and is not subject to either charge.
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Source: Reddit r/h1b