L-1 Extension Fee: USCIS Guidance on the $4,500 Charge

Large employers that staff mostly with H-1B and L-1 workers now owe the $4,500 L-1 fee on routine extensions too, and USCIS has rewritten its manual to say so for every petition postmarked since Sept. 9.

The L-1 extension fee for companies that depend heavily on foreign workers is now written into USCIS’s own guidance. In a policy alert dated Oct. 27, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the $4,500 fee created by Public Law 114-113 applies to every L-1 petition filed by a covered employer, including a request to extend a transferred manager’s or specialist’s stay with the same company, if the petition was postmarked on or after Sept. 9, 2026. The only carve-out is an amended petition that does not ask for more time.

The obligation itself comes from a Department of Homeland Security final rule published Aug. 10 that took effect Sept. 9. What changes now is the guidance USCIS officers use when they accept and decide Form I-129 petitions. For seven weeks the rule was in force while the Policy Manual still described the older, narrower practice. Employers that filed same-company L-1 extensions after Sept. 9 without the added payment have the most immediate reason to check their files, because USCIS generally rejects a filing that arrives without the correct fee.

Which employers the L-1 extension fee reaches

The fee applies to a small but heavy-filing group. Under the rule, a covered employer has 50 or more employees in the United States and more than half of them in H-1B or L-1 status. The alert adds that USCIS counts the two visa categories together and includes part-time as well as full-time staff, which it describes as codifying longstanding practice. That profile fits mainly IT services and outsourcing firms built on transfers from overseas affiliates and H-1B hires.

One wording gap deserves attention: the alert describes the threshold as “50 percent or more” of employees, while the rule says “more than 50 percent.” It matters only for a company at exactly half, and the regulation is the binding text.

From new hires to routine extensions

Until September, DHS tied this fee to the separate $500 fraud prevention and detection fee, which applies only to initial petitions and changes of employer. A covered company extending an L-1 manager it already employed paid neither. DHS now reads the 2015 statute’s phrase “including an application for an extension of such status” as reaching every extension, and calls that a correction of its earlier interpretation.

L-1 petition filed by a covered employer	Before Sept. 9, 2026	Postmarked Sept. 9, 2026, or later
Initial petition	Fee applied	Fee applies
Change of employer, including an individual petition under a blanket L	Fee applied	Fee applies
Extension with the same employer	No fee	Fee applies
Amended petition that seeks no extension	No fee	No fee

Source: DHS final rule “9-11 Response and Biometric Entry-Exit Fee for H-1B and L-1 Visas” (Aug. 10, 2026) and USCIS Policy Alert PA-2026-16 (Oct. 27, 2026).

The rule’s own figures show how much the reinterpretation widens the net. From fiscal 2018 through fiscal 2025, DHS says, 27 percent of H-1B petitions filed by covered employers were subject to the fee; under the new reading the share would have been 75 percent. Collections tell the same story from the other side: the fee brought in $25.6 million in fiscal 2025, according to the rule, against the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of $420 million a year. As the rule’s title signals, the money is tied to biometric entry-exit funding, which is why U.S. Customs and Border Protection, not USCIS, wrote the regulation.

The same rule applies the parallel $4,000 fee to H-1B extensions by covered employers. The Oct. 27 alert covers only the L-1 chapter of the Policy Manual. For H-1B employers the fee sits alongside the separate $100,000 payment on certain new H-1B petitions, which is still being fought in court.

A fee with a 2027 expiration date

Under the current congressional extension, the 9-11 Biometric Fee expires Sept. 30, 2027, and the alert limits it to petitions postmarked on or before that date. Whether it survives past then depends on Congress, which has extended it before.

The cost increase also lands as DHS moves to make extensions harder in other ways. A pending proposal would end deference to earlier approvals on extension petitions, and another would eliminate the 60-day grace period after a job ends. Taken together, the practical effect for outsourcing-heavy employers is that keeping an existing L-1 worker is becoming more expensive and less predictable, not only bringing in a new one.

The alert also removes dollar amounts from the Policy Manual and points filers to the Form G-1055 fee schedule, which USCIS reissued in an edition dated Oct. 26, 2026.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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