A US proclamation now charges $100,000 for each new H-1B visa petition. Indians receive about seven in ten of these visas. The fee will change how Indian IT works, and probably move more of it to India.
On September 19, the US announced a $100,000 payment on every new H-1B visa petition. The H-1B is the visa that lets American companies hire skilled foreign workers, mostly in technology, and Indians have received roughly seven in ten of those approved in recent years. A day after the announcement, the White House clarified that the fee is one-time and applies only to new petitions, not to renewals or people already in the US. That calmed the panic, but it did not change the arithmetic for anyone hoping to go next year.
Why a fee changes behaviour
For a large company hiring a senior engineer at $200,000 a year, a one-time $100,000 fee is painful but possible. For an Indian IT services firm placing a junior developer at an American bank on $80,000, it makes the hire unviable. The fee therefore lands hardest on precisely the model that built Indian IT in the 1990s and 2000s: sending engineers to work on-site at a client’s office.
The big Indian firms saw this coming. Over the past decade they cut their dependence on H-1B workers by hiring more locally in the US and doing more work from India. Their share of new H-1B approvals has fallen sharply, while American technology giants have become the largest sponsors.
If the engineer cannot go to the work, the work comes to the engineer.
The likely winner
Companies that cannot bring talent to America tend to take the job to where the talent already is. India now hosts more than 1,700 global capability centres, offices run directly by foreign companies to do engineering, analytics and operations work. A $100,000 visa fee makes a desk in Hyderabad or Pune look even better value. The loss shows up elsewhere: in remittances that H-1B workers send home, and in the career path of students who planned a master’s degree in the US expecting a visa at the end of it. For them, the fee is a reason to rethink the plan, not just the budget.
Sources: US Presidential Proclamation of September 19, 2025, and White House clarification of September 20; USCIS H-1B data.
- New H-1B petitions now carry a one-time $100,000 fee. Existing visa holders and renewals are not affected.
- Indians received roughly 71% of approved H-1B petitions in recent years.
- Indian IT firms had already cut their reliance on the visa. The fee speeds that up.
- The likely winner is India itself, as more work moves to global capability centres here.
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