$100,000 H-1B fee extended a year: what changes for Pakistani tech workers

The White House extended the $100,000 H-1B petition fee by another year on Friday, 19 September 2026. The original proclamation was issued in September 2025 and was due to lapse this month.

What the fee is

It is a $100,000 charge on an H-1B petition, paid by the US employer, not by the worker. Against the existing government fees of roughly $2,000 to $5,000, it is a twentyfold to fiftyfold increase in the cost of sponsoring one skilled foreign hire.

At Rs 277.25 to the dollar, $100,000 is about Rs 27.7m. No Pakistani engineer is paying that personally. The practical effect is on which employers are still willing to file at all.

The two exemptions that matter most

The extension does not apply to renewals of current visas. If you are already on an H-1B and your employer files an extension, the fee is not triggered.

It also does not apply to visas granted to foreign citizens already in the United States on student visas. That is the single most important carve-out for Pakistani graduates: the route from an F-1 student visa through optional practical training to a change of status inside the country is not hit by the $100,000 charge. The fee bites hardest on the other route, being hired from Lahore or Karachi and flown in on a fresh petition.

It is still being litigated

A federal judge ruled in June that the higher fee was illegal and blocked its collection. That decision is now before an appeals court in Boston. A separate court is weighing whether a judge was right to reject a challenge brought by the US Chamber of Commerce.

So the legal position is genuinely unsettled, and an employer deciding whether to file this year is deciding under a rule that may not survive. That uncertainty is itself a deterrent, which is why the extension matters even while the fee is blocked.

What it is already doing

The visible response from large employers has been to move the work rather than the worker. Alphabet, Google's parent, has been expanding its India operations. For Pakistani engineers, the practical consequence is that remote contracting for US clients and offshore development centres are absorbing demand that would once have gone through an H-1B.

If that is the route you are on, two things follow. Your income is export of services and is taxed accordingly; work it out with our freelancer tax calculator. And how you receive the money decides how much of it you keep, which our guide on the cheapest way to send money to Pakistan sets out, alongside the daily dollar rate.

What to watch

The Boston appeal is the decision point. If the fee is struck down and not replaced, new petitions from Pakistan return to normal cost. If it stands, the H-1B stops being a realistic route for anyone not already inside the United States, and the F-1 to OPT to change-of-status path becomes the only one that works.