The H-1B Fee Got Blocked in Court. So DHS Is Moving the $100,000 Charge to OPT.

The Department of Homeland Security is pursuing a new $100,000 fee on the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, according to the Wall Street Journal. OPT allows foreign nationals who have completed undergraduate or graduate degrees at US universities to work in the United States on their student visa — no H-1B required. The standard authorization is one year; STEM graduates get two additional years, for a total of three.

The OPT-to-H-1B conversion is the dominant hiring pipeline for foreign talent in US tech and finance. Companies recruit at top universities, hire graduates on OPT, and then sponsor them for H-1B once they've been evaluated. Disrupting OPT disrupts that pipeline at its first stage.

In 2024, approximately 419,000 foreign students were working in the US under OPT. A $100,000 fee applied to that population would generate an estimated $41.9 billion in government revenue — roughly ₩60 trillion.

Why OPT, and Why Now

This move follows a direct legal defeat on the same fee applied to H-1B visas. Trump signed a proclamation in September 2025 raising the H-1B fee from $1,000 to $100,000 — a 100x increase. Courts blocked it.

OPT exists in a different regulatory space. It is administered through DHS rulemaking rather than the same statutory framework courts used to block the H-1B increase. The administration's pivot to OPT is a legal workaround: the target is the same (foreign talent entering the US labor market), the mechanism shifts to avoid the injunction.

DHS has not finalized who pays — the foreign student or the hiring employer. The WSJ noted that if students pay, the barrier is effectively prohibitive for most. If employers pay, the fee functions as a large per-hire premium that changes the economics of recruiting international graduates. Either way, hiring behavior changes.

The $100,000 OPT fee is not primarily an immigration measure — it is a labor cost intervention disguised as an immigration fee. The H-1B fee was blocked by courts. OPT is the administration's second attempt at the same objective: raising the price of foreign talent entering the US tech and finance workforce through the graduate school pipeline. Whether the legal architecture of OPT rulemaking survives challenge is the critical variable.

Who Gets Hit and How

Large US tech and finance employers — Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan — are the heaviest users of the OPT-to-H-1B pipeline. These companies absorb the H-1B lottery risk by converting from OPT first. A $100K employer-side OPT fee effectively becomes a per-person visa premium on top of existing H-1B lottery and processing costs.

STEM graduates specifically face the longest OPT exposure — three years rather than one. The fee structure for STEM OPT (which is the policy-relevant category for most tech hiring) is not yet defined; it could be a one-time charge or charged annually, making the total liability significantly higher for the three-year pathway.

Indian IT staffing and outsourcing firms — Infosys, TCS, Wipro — that place talent in the US face structural cost increases or reduced competitiveness against domestic alternatives. These firms already operate under H-1B lottery uncertainty; adding OPT cost risk compounds the exposure.

US universities with large international graduate programs face enrollment risk if the OPT pathway becomes economically unviable. The value proposition for international students choosing US graduate programs — work authorization after graduation — diminishes if OPT costs $100,000 to use.

The Revenue Number Is the Tell

$41.9 billion in projected revenue from a single fee change is not an immigration policy objective. It is a fiscal objective using immigration as the mechanism. The context: the Iran war has already depleted the defense budget by $40 billion and the Pentagon says it needs $75 billion more. The "Big Beautiful Bill" spending framework requires revenue offsets. A $100K OPT fee generating $42 billion is sized like a revenue measure, not a border control measure.