- Cost Comparison
- Time to Hire
DHS priced the paperwork. The delay is the actual bill.
The added paperwork cost per employer does not change the overall economics for employers. The wait does not.
An H-1B extension your firm treats as a formality could be reopened on the facts. The Department of Homeland Security wants immigration officers to stop deferring to their own prior approvals. Outsource Accelerator reported the proposal, published in the Federal Register on Oct. 14, with comments due Nov. 13. It would strike 8 CFR 214.1(c)(5), the instruction to defer to an earlier approval involving the same parties and the same facts. Deference was adopted in 2004, rescinded in 2017, reinstated in 2021 and written into a rule in December 2024. That is weather with a docket number. An extension would then be examined the way an application is.
What the rule removes
Officers could still read a prior approval, but they would no longer start from it. DHS argued that deference moves the burden of proof onto the officer rather than the employer. The agency cited combined non-compliance and fraud found at H-1B site visits for fiscal 2022 to 2025, when deference applied, set against fiscal 2018 to 2020, when it did not. For L-1A extensions, the figures were 24.46% and 18.37%. DHS acknowledged that other factors may have contributed to those rates, which are the whole of its case.
What DHS counted
DHS estimates about 6,044 more requests for evidence a year, a 2.9-percentage-point rise across 208,429 affected petitions. The added cost to employers comes to $133,987 annually, or roughly $22 per request, across 22,748 employers. Divide it out, and the burden is under six dollars per employer per year. Nobody changes a hiring plan over that.
Then there is the number underneath it. Petitions requiring evidence took 64 additional calendar days on average to process between fiscal 2022 and 2025. According to DHS, the extra processing time could disrupt staffing, project schedules and work assignments. The money was estimated. The calendar was mentioned.
Where that lands for a firm
Firms price the filing and staff the matter as if the approval were a formality. That has worked because deference made it mostly true. A fee is the part a firm budgets for, and it is the part that barely moves here. An extension that reopens on the facts is a new argument every cycle. This proposal charges in something else. It charges in calendar.
Two months of uncertainty at every renewal is not a line item. It is a hole in a schedule somebody already promised a client. A staffing plan has never been cross-examined on its timing, and this rule would do it. I read the $22 as the least interesting number in the filing. A cost you can pay is a cost. A date you cannot promise is a constraint.
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