H-1B Visa Costs Are Rising: Who Really Pays?

Behind every policy line about the H-1B visa cost, there is a person who packed one suitcase, left a family behind and bet years of their life on a single approval notice. For decades that bet powered Silicon Valley, the outsourcing boom in Bangalore and Hyderabad, and thousands of quiet success stories in between. Now the price of that bet has changed — and the numbers deserve a slower read than a headline allows.

This post was sparked by reporting from The Times of India, whose headline says the H-1B visa cost is rising for US companies while America needs more than 157,000 engineers and skilled technicians. I couldn’t open the original article, and I couldn’t independently confirm that 157,000 figure, so treat it as the paper’s claim rather than mine. Everything else below comes from reporting I could check.

What changed in the H-1B visa cost

Not long ago, an employer paid somewhere between $1,700 and $4,500 to file an H-1B petition. On 19 September 2025, the White House announced a $100,000 fee on new applications. Two days later it was narrowed to applications from outside the United States. Then, in August 2026, a proposed rule floated a $103,265 fee across the 85,000 visas issued each year to for-profit companies, as IEEE Spectrum reports.

That isn’t an adjustment. It is a different product altogether.

What the numbers already show

These are not forecasts. They are things that have already happened:

• Between the proclamation and 15 February 2026, the Department of Homeland Security processed 87 percent fewer applications for the visas subject to the fee than the year before.
• Roughly two-thirds of H-1B visas go to computer-related roles, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google among the biggest recipients.
• By March 2026, international enrolment had fallen 20 percent at bachelor’s level and 24 percent at master’s level, according to IEEE Spectrum.
• Non-profit institutions and universities remain exempt from the fee.

Read that list again. The pipeline is thinning at both ends — fewer people applying to work, and fewer people applying to study in the first place.

Who really pays when the H-1B visa cost climbs

The easy answer is “big tech can afford it.” And for a company the size of Google, that is true. But a five-year-old startup with twelve engineers does not carry that kind of cash, which is why Northeastern University’s news service warned the fee hike could hit tech startups hardest. When the smallest builders can’t hire the person they need, they don’t stop building. They build somewhere else.

That is exactly the fear employers have voiced: that skilled workers, and the companies that want them, will drift toward Europe, Singapore and the UAE. Talent has always gone where the door is open. It doesn’t owe any country its loyalty.

The other side of the argument

It would be unfair to pretend there is only one view here. Some economists dispute that the H-1B program is really about a talent gap at all. As CBS News has reported, when a genuine shortage exists, wages in that field should rise — and wages across tech have stayed relatively stable. Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute has likewise suggested that companies will make more effort to recruit US workers when hiring abroad gets expensive.

Those are fair points, and they come from people who care about American workers, not from bad faith. If the fee pushes companies to invest in training people who are already there, that is a real good. The honest question is whether the cost lands on the intended target — or on the students, startups and families who never had a lobbyist.

What this means for engineers and learners

For the rest of us — the students, the self-taught developers, the ones building skills from a laptop in a small room — the lesson is not to panic. It is to become someone a company would pay for anywhere, under any rule. Skills travel. Portfolios travel. A person who can ship real work is valuable in Austin, in Berlin and in Bengaluru alike. If you are just starting out, our guide on how to learn coding faster with AI is a good place to begin.

The H-1B visa cost will keep changing, and courts, Congress and campaign trails will keep arguing over it. But zoom out and the larger story is not about a fee. It is about who gets to build the future, and who decides the price of the ticket to the room where it is built. Whatever the final number, the dreamers packing that one suitcase will still be out there — and the countries wise enough to welcome them will be the ones that shape the next decade.

Photo: Aerial view of Silicon Valley facing Downtown San Jose (2014), by Coolcaesar (CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons).