Companies that want to hire employees from other countries using the popular H-1B visa program now have to pay $100,000 per worker. The new fee, which went into effect on Monday, will drastically change the math for businesses that consider using the program.
Because sponsoring a visa comes with significant upfront costs, employers need higher-earning workers, who tend to generate the most revenue, to justify the expense. Each visa typically lasts three years, and economists estimate the break-even salary for someone who stays that long to be roughly $225,000. If the visa is renewed for another three years, those costs are spread out, lowering the threshold to about $111,000.
In practice, how long someone stays, and how profitable the person is to the company, can vary a lot — making the new accounting even more complex.
H-1B applications by salary
Only 5 percent of H-1B applications were for jobs that paid more than $225,000 per year.
The New York Times analyzed hundreds of thousands of H-1B applications filed last year, using data on job postings submitted to the Labor Department as part of the visa sponsorship process. About a third were for positions that paid a salary less than or equal to the new $100,000 fee, and most paid salaries that were less than the three-year break-even point of $225,000.
Previously, there was no set fee a company needed to pay. A typical H-1B visa cost companies about $10,000, including legal fees and administrative costs, immigration lawyers have said.
By setting such a high fee, the visa program would make sense primarily for the highest-paid employees because they are likely to generate the most revenue for their companies, said Kirk Doran, an associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame.
When companies submit applications for the visas, they are entered into a lottery system. Since the overall number of applications could drop drastically as a result of the fee, Amazon, Google and other big companies who regularly hire H-1B workers at high salaries may find that their bids have less competition than they used to.
But even the big companies that bring in high-earning workers on these visas often recruit employees at salaries that fall below the $225,000 break-even point. Amazon, for example, submitted 21,600 H-1B postings, and only 4 percent were for jobs that pay above that level. Most paid at least $100,000.
Amazon’s H-1B applications by salary
Only 4 percent of Amazon’s H-1B applications were for jobs that paid more than $225,000 per year.
Tata, an I.T. staffing and consulting company based in India, applied for 9,608 H-1B jobs in the fiscal year that ended in September 2024. All were for jobs that paid under $225,000, though about a quarter paid at least $100,000 per year. The average salary for those jobs was $89,461.
Tata’s H-1B applications by salary
None of Tata’s H-1B applications were for jobs that paid more than $225,000 per year.
Economists estimate that Tata, which did not respond to a request for comment, could be among the companies hardest hit by the new application fee. Amazon also did not respond to a request for comment.
The new fee introduces a degree of uncertainty around the visa program generally, said Jennifer Hunt, a professor of economics at Rutgers University. “If there’s still a lottery, you’re paying a hundred thousand without even being sure of getting it. The details of how the policy works really matter because firms need to know what everyone else is doing in order to judge whether it makes sense to apply.”
The visa program has been used across industries, including by law firms and hospitals. Companies submitted more than 480,000 applications for H-1B jobs in the 2024 fiscal year, which is more than double the amount submitted five years earlier. Less than 20 percent of the 2024 applications were awarded visas, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. The number of new H-1B visas granted each year is capped at roughly 85,000.
The number of H-1B applications submitted by year
The new fee, which was issued by President Trump as an executive order, was intended to discourage companies from hiring lower-wage international workers over Americans, according to the White House.
Mr. Doran, the Notre Dame professor, said the H-1B program was originally intended to bring in workers with unique skills that “generate value for the entire American economy.” That implied that the program would benefit people across the spectrum of incomes.
The H-1B visa is one of several immigration programs for workers with specialized skills. A person can stay in the United States for a maximum of six years under this kind of visa, which has often been a pathway to a green card.
About 4.3 million college-educated people working in the United States are citizens of other countries, a number that has nearly doubled over the last two decades, according to Census data. Many of them come from India and China, but some also come from Mexico, Venezuela, the Philippines and elsewhere.
Nearly 3 percent of the overall U.S. work force falls into this category, and almost 7 percent of college-educated workers are not American citizens.
But the share is much higher in certain occupations: Nearly one in four scientists and one in five computer programmers are college-educated people from other countries. More than 10 percent of college professors were born elsewhere, as were various kinds of engineers, the Census data shows.
