The Department of Homeland Security published a final rule in this morning's Federal Register that rewires a fee most people have never heard of, and the rule's own record explains why it needed rewiring. The 9-11 Biometric Fee, created by Congress in 2015, was projected to collect $420 million a year. In fiscal year 2025 it collected $25.6 million [1]. That is about 6 cents on every projected dollar.
The fee itself is simple. Covered employers owe $4,000 on each H-1B petition and $4,500 on each L-1 petition [1]. A covered employer is a specific kind of company: one with 50 or more employees in the United States, more than half of whom are in H-1B or L-1 status [1]. The definition was written to reach large staffing and outsourcing firms whose business model runs on visa workers, not the typical company that sponsors a handful of engineers.
The reason the money never showed up is in the plumbing. Until now, the fee applied only to initial petitions, the filing that first puts a worker on an employer's books. Extensions of status and change-of-employer petitions carried no fee [1]. An employer could pay once, or in some paths not at all, and then keep the same workforce running through fee-free renewal filings year after year. By DHS's own count, the fee was reaching just 27 percent of the H-1B petitions covered employers filed [1].
Today's rule closes that pathway. Effective September 9, 2026, the fee attaches to extension-of-status and change-of-employer petitions as well, which DHS estimates will lift its reach from 27 percent to 75 percent of covered-employer H-1B petitions [1].
The department's logic deserves to be stated plainly, because it is sound on its own terms. If Congress set a fee on a class of employers and the revenue came in at 6 percent of projection, the gap is evidence that the taxed behavior simply moved to untaxed filings. Extending the fee to those filings is the direct fix, and the 27-to-75 jump in DHS's estimate is the measure of how much of the activity had migrated. Whatever one thinks of the fee's underlying policy, the loophole was real, it was large, and this rule addresses the actual mechanism.
What the rule does not do is recover anything. Against the original projection, the shortfall ran on the order of $394 million a year, and it compounded quietly for a decade before this rewiring [1]. The fee's history is a record-keeping lesson as much as an immigration story: Congress attached a revenue estimate to a statute in 2015, the estimate failed by roughly 94 percent, and the failure sat in collection tables, visible to anyone who compared two numbers, until a rulemaking in 2026 finally matched the fee to the filings it was meant to cover.
The employers who will pay are not a mystery. The 50-employee, majority-visa-workforce test names a business model, and firms fitting it now have a date, September 9, after which each extension and each change of employer carries a four-figure fee [1]. For everyone else, the rule is a reminder worth filing away: when a federal fee collects 6 percent of its projection, the projection was not wrong so much as the fee was avoidable, and it took eleven years for the paperwork to catch up to that fact.
