USCIS Approves H-1B Petitions Without Trump's $100,000 Fee, Easing Path for Kenyan Professionals

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has begun approving H-1B petitions without the $100,000 fee announced by President Donald Trump, according to a report published on October 27, 2026 by India's Economic Times, a shift that removes the largest single cost barrier facing American employers that sponsor foreign professionals, among them thousands of Kenyans working in the United States on the specialty occupation visa.

The approvals reverse the trajectory of a policy that has disrupted skilled-worker hiring since September 2025, when Trump announced in a social media post that petitions for new H-1B workers would carry a $100,000 charge paid by sponsoring employers, framing the levy as a way to reserve the program for the highest-paid talent while pushing companies toward American hires. The administration's proposed rule later set the amount at $103,265, and the charge applied to petitions for new employment rather than to extensions for workers already holding the visa.

USCIS, the Department of Homeland Security agency that administers the H-1B program, began demanding the payment with new filings after the announcement, a requirement that drew immediate legal challenges. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, research universities and healthcare staffing companies sued the department led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in federal court, arguing that the administration imposed the charge without the notice-and-comment process required under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Economic Times reported that USCIS is now adjudicating and granting H-1B petitions without collecting the $100,000 payment, an indication that the fee is no longer being enforced at the filing stage. The report lands more than a year into a rollout that forced companies to budget more than twenty times the normal cost of a sponsorship for every new foreign hire.

Before the levy, the standard cost of sponsoring a new H-1B worker for a larger employer ran to roughly $3,600 under the USCIS fee rule that took effect on April 1, 2024. That total combined a $215 electronic registration fee, the $780 base petition filing fee, a $500 fraud prevention and detection fee, a $1,500 training surcharge under the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act and a $600 asylum program fee, with optional premium processing available at $2,805 for adjudication guaranteed within fifteen business days.

For Kenyan workers, the change bears most directly on the thousands of professionals in the United States on H-1B status, among them software engineers in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area and Dallas, nurses recruited by American hospital systems, and lecturers and researchers at U.S. universities. Petitions selected in the fiscal 2027 lottery and filed since the April 2026 window have been pending for months, and approvals now moving through the agency clear a path that the fee dispute had complicated. Employers can still pay the $2,805 premium processing charge to secure decisions on those cases within fifteen business days.

The stakes extend to families, since spouses and children of Kenyan H-1B holders live in the United States on H-4 dependent visas tied to the principal worker's petition, and a denial of the underlying case would end their authorized stay alongside it.

The H-1B program, established under the Immigration and Nationality Act, allows U.S. employers to sponsor foreign professionals in specialty occupations requiring at least a bachelor's degree. Congress caps new visas at 85,000 per fiscal year, 65,000 under the general cap and 20,000 under the advanced degree exemption, with USCIS conducting an electronic registration and selection each March. Initial grants run up to three years and are generally extendable to six, with additional time available to workers whose green card applications are caught in backlogs.

For employers, the reported approvals restore a measure of predictability to workforce planning ahead of the March 2027 registration window, when USCIS will run the lottery for fiscal 2028 visas. Startups, hospitals and university departments, the sectors that sponsor some of the largest shares of Kenyan and other African professionals, had spent thirteen months weighing the levy against every new foreign hire.

A permanent rollback would still require the agency to amend its fee schedule through formal rulemaking, and the guidance USCIS publishes in the Federal Register remains the controlling reference for what petitioners must pay until such a change appears.

Kenyans outside the United States whose petitions are among those newly approved will complete the process at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, which conducts H-1B visa interviews for first-time applicants, while those already in the country on student or exchange categories can move to H-1B status through change of status filings approved by USCIS.