The H-1B $100,000 Fee Is Blocked by a Second Federal Court: What Changed in October 2026

The $100,000 H-1B fee has now been blocked by a second federal court. For anyone who has been tracking this story since the fee was first proposed, it's easy to lose track of which ruling applies to what. Here's a plain-facts breakdown of exactly what happened on September 30, what it changes right now, and what's still unresolved. As always: this is factual reporting on a legal and policy process, not legal or immigration advice, and Growx does not provide either.

What actually happened, and when

On September 30, 2026, U.S. District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. of the Northern District of California issued an order in Global Nurse Force v. Trump vacating the agency policies that implemented the $100,000 H-1B fee and enjoining the government from enforcing them. This is the second federal court to block the fee this year; the first was a Massachusetts ruling by Judge Leo T. Sorokin back in June. Judge Gilliam's order also reaches the fee's extension: a proclamation signed September 18, 2026 that extended the original fee policy's duration through September 21, 2027. The original policy, Proclamation 10973, was signed September 19, 2025 and was meant to run for one year before that extension.

Why the court blocked it

Judge Gilliam's reasoning tracked two main legal problems with how the fee was implemented. First, he found the agencies likely acted "arbitrary and capricious" under the Administrative Procedure Act because they never considered alternatives to the fee or weighed how much employers had relied on the existing rules before the policy changed. Second, he treated the fee policies as legislative rules, meaning the kind that legally require a public notice-and-comment period before taking effect, and found that period was never held. The government had argued that affected employers needed to first seek an individual "national interest exemption" before they could sue, but the judge rejected that argument, noting some employers had been waiting close to a year for a response to exemption requests they'd already filed.

How this is different from what we covered three weeks ago

If you read our earlier piece on the fee being blocked, that one covered the original Massachusetts ruling and the proclamation extending the fee's duration. This is a separate, second court independently reaching a similar conclusion, which matters because a single district court ruling is more vulnerable to being read as an outlier; two different courts in two different circuits blocking the same policy on overlapping grounds is a meaningfully stronger signal about how the policy is likely to fare on appeal. It's also a reminder that this entire fee has now been blocked, in some form, by federal courts twice within about three months, while the underlying rulemaking process the government would need to complete to make it stick has not finished.

The judge's standing ruling is worth understanding on its own, separate from the fee itself. The government's argument, that employers had to individually request and be denied a national-interest exemption before they could challenge the fee in court, would have meant employers facing an indefinite wait for an agency response before they were even allowed to sue. Judge Gilliam's rejection of that argument, on the grounds that indefinite agency delay shouldn't be allowed to defeat a plaintiff's standing, is a detail that could matter well beyond this specific fee if similar exemption-first arguments come up in future immigration litigation.

What's actually enforceable on H-1B right now

As of this ruling, the $100,000 fee tied to Proclamation 10973 and its September 2026 extension is blocked from enforcement while the government completes proper rulemaking. The separate $103,265 fee DHS proposed through ordinary notice-and-comment rulemaking is a different legal track entirely and isn't directly affected by this ruling one way or the other; it remains in its own process, which we've covered separately. Standard H-1B cap registration, the existing H-1B petition filing fees that predate this proclamation, and ordinary USCIS processing are unaffected by either court ruling. If you are currently on H-1B, in the process of being sponsored, or evaluating an offer that depends on H-1B sponsorship, the practical takeaway is that the headline $100,000 figure is not currently being collected, but the broader policy direction behind it, from this administration and from the separate DHS rulemaking track, hasn't gone away.

What this means if you're job searching on OPT or H-1B status

Court rulings like this one move on their own timeline, and litigation like this can take months or years to fully resolve, including likely appeals. The practical, non-legal takeaway for a job search is the same one we'd give regardless of which way this particular ruling went: employers who sponsor H-1B candidates are watching the same news you are, and a candidate who can speak clearly and calmly about the current, factual state of play, without overstating certainty either direction, tends to come across as more informed than one who either panics about the fee or assumes it's permanently gone. Neither extreme is accurate right now.

If you're navigating a sponsorship conversation with a potential employer, the most useful thing you can do is stick to verified facts rather than secondhand summaries, and be ready to discuss your status plainly if asked. That's part of what our interview preparation and application support is built around for candidates navigating sponsorship-related conversations, alongside the resume and LinkedIn positioning work we do for every candidate regardless of status.