A $70,000 fee to work after graduation: the OPT proposal, explained

On October 8, 2026 the Department of Homeland Security published a proposal that would make a school pay $70,000 the first time it recommends an international student for Optional Practical Training — the work authorization F-1 students use during and after their studies — and $30,000 for every recommendation after that. A graduate who uses the full STEM path would generate $100,000 in fees.

It is a proposal. There is no effective date, no amount owed by anyone, and no mechanism at all to collect it until a final rule is published and its waiting period runs. That single fact is the most useful thing on this page, because the rest of it — the amounts, the exemptions and the timing — is a draft an agency has invited the public to attack.

The short version

Status	A notice of proposed rulemaking. No fee is charged today, and none can be until a final rule is published.
The amounts	$70,000 for a first OPT recommendation; $30,000 for each subsequent one
Who is billed	The school, under the proposed text — and DHS says in the same document that schools may pass the cost to students, all students, or employers
The mechanism	The school must pay before its designated school official enters the OPT recommendation in SEVIS; USCIS would not grant work authorization before payment
A full STEM path	$70,000 + $30,000 = $100,000 per student
Comments close	November 9, 2026, at Regulations.gov, docket ICEB-2026-0100
Earliest possible start	60 days after a final rule is published in the Federal Register — and no final rule exists

What was actually proposed

The notice is Optional Practical Training Fees, filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the department, and it would amend 8 CFR Part 214. It creates two amounts and attaches both to a single event: the moment a designated school official (DSO) recommends a student for OPT.

$70,000 for initial OPT. A one-time fee per F-1 student, owed by the institution before the DSO enters the recommendation in SEVIS. “Initial” means the first time a student engages in any type of OPT — pre-completion or post-completion, and regardless of whether the student was admitted in F-1 status or changed into it.

$30,000 for any subsequent OPT. Owed each time the school makes a later recommendation for a student who has already participated in OPT and for whom the $70,000 was paid. The notice says this covers “any type of OPT” that follows, including the 24-month STEM OPT extension.

Two structural details matter more than the dollar figures.

The student is not the payer — on paper. The obligation in the proposed text sits on the SEVP-certified school, and no DSO may enter an OPT recommendation until it is satisfied. But DHS says out loud, in its discussion of who relies on the program, that schools “may mitigate their budgetary impact by passing the financial obligation of this proposed fee onto F-1 nonimmigrant students, all students, or employers.” The notice names the school as the payer, then lists the student first among the parties the cost may be passed to.

The fee is a gate, not an application. There is no new form for a student to file and no new deadline attached to a student’s own calendar. What the proposal does is insert a payment between the school’s decision to recommend and the government’s decision to authorize. A student whose school declines to pay cannot proceed, whether or not the student could afford it. That is consistent with what the notice says it wants the fee to achieve: schools exercising “greater oversight and selectivity” before recommending anyone.

“Subsequent” reaches the STEM extension, and DHS does the arithmetic itself

The cleanest way to see what the two tiers mean is DHS’s own worked example. A student who splits 12 months between pre-completion and post-completion OPT generates two recommendations, so the school pays $70,000 for the first and $30,000 for the second — $100,000 in total. DHS says it assumes institutions and students will shift to post-completion OPT only, to pay $70,000 rather than $100,000 for the same twelve months, and it builds its cost estimate on that assumption.

For a STEM graduate the $100,000 total is what the three-year path costs: $70,000 for the initial year, $30,000 when the school recommends the extension.

Who would be spared, and for how long

Schools would not owe the fee for a student who, on the effective date of a final rule, is already engaging in previously approved OPT, has already been approved for OPT, or has already received a DSO recommendation for it. In other words, an authorization in hand or in progress on the day the rule starts is protected.

The protection is not a permanent exemption. The notice states that if the same student later submits a subsequent OPT request on or after the effective date, the fees apply. A student grandfathered into a first year of OPT is still exposed the moment the STEM extension is recommended.

When it could start, and two numbers to ignore

The mechanism is narrow and worth repeating exactly: a final rule takes effect 60 days after publication, and the fees apply to DSO recommendations dated on or after that date. Because only a proposal exists, there is no effective date — and any date circulating as though there were one is a guess about how a rulemaking will end.

The comment deadline is real, and it is the one date a reader can act on. Comments are due November 9, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern, filed through Regulations.gov under docket ICEB-2026-0100. A separate window on the paperwork requirements the fee would create runs to December 7, 2026.

Two other numbers have been reported and neither is the operative one, so it is worth naming the confusion. The Associated Press wrote that the public has 60 days to comment; the notice’s own DATES line says November 9, which is 32 days after publication. Separately, DHS’s discussion of reliance interests describes “a 30-day public comment period.” Where a notice’s own deadline and someone’s description of that deadline disagree, the deadline in the notice is what a commenter has to file by.

What DHS says it is for

Three reasons appear in the notice, and they overlap: fraud control, the integrity of the student-visa system, and the protection of American workers.

The department’s stated premise is that OPT has drifted from its purpose — that it is being used, in its words, as “an informal and unlimited employment benefit that has little to or no relationship to an F-1 nonimmigrant student’s program of study.” The fraud patterns it cites are concrete: shell companies, fabricated offer and employment-verification letters sold to students, “pay-to-stay” arrangements, and worksites that failed inspection. It also says the fee should be set high enough to stop people using OPT to sidestep H-1B fees, and that the amount was chosen to be comparable to H-1B visa fees for that reason.

A DHS spokesperson put it more bluntly to reporters: Optional Practical Training “was never meant to be a back door into the American workforce, a subsidy for cheap labor, or a prize for those who game the system,” and “American workers should not have to compete against a program that has been turned into a pipeline for cheap foreign labor.”

Two design choices follow from that logic and are worth noticing, because they are not incidental:

• Small institutions get no carve-out. DHS says it “carefully evaluated various fee options, including exemptions to the fee for small educational institutions,” and declined, because it estimates that 56 percent of regulated SEVP-certified institutions are small entities — an exemption would therefore leave much of the program uncovered.
• The money is not retained by the enforcing agency. Fees would be deposited in the Treasury as miscellaneous receipts under 31 U.S.C. 3302. This is a restriction on behavior, not a funding stream for ICE.

The notice also states that without the fees, DHS “cannot operate OPT consistent with its focus on preventing fraud and may shut down the program entirely” — and describes the fee as “an immediate first step in a graduated strategy,” with further OPT measures to follow if warranted. Curricular Practical Training, a separate work-training category, is flagged in the same passage as showing “historically prevalent” fraud and is not covered by this proposal.

How much money is in question

DHS’s own estimate of the fee revenue ranges from $8.4 billion to $16.5 billion a year, with a primary estimate of $12.4 billion. Annualized transfers are put at $8.7 billion to $16.9 billion (primary estimate $12.8 billion, discounted at 3 percent; $12.9 billion at 7 percent). The ten-year total cost estimate has a primary figure of $35.1 billion at 3 percent and $29.0 billion at 7 percent.

The population underneath those numbers: 194,554 F-1 students were granted employment authorization for pre- or post-completion OPT and reported working in calendar 2024, up from 160,627 in 2023 — an increase of 33,927, or about 21 percent. DHS also notes that roughly 56 percent of OPT participants went on to obtain a STEM extension the following year, based on 2021–2024 data, and that there were about 6,186 SEVP-certified schools as of June 2026.

For scale on the other side: reporting on the proposal puts the cost of an OPT authorization today at roughly $500, ordinarily paid by the student rather than the school. The proposed initial fee is about 140 times that.

What the objections are

The organized opposition so far comes from international-education groups rather than from a court filing. NAFSA, the association of international educators, criticized the proposal in a statement on October 7. Its chief executive, Fanta Aw, said the fees would add uncertainty for international students and that “driving away the talents, perspectives, and aspirations of international students will only hurt American innovation, economic growth, workforce development, and global leadership,” arguing that practical training lets students build experience while employers fill shortages in high-demand STEM fields. The Associated Press frames the cost the same way — as “a blow to American colleges and universities that heavily recruit students from overseas as a source of tuition revenue, as well as tech companies and other industries that hire many international students for technical roles.”

Whether the rule survives is a separate question from whether it is proposed, and the notice itself supplies the relevant history. It records that a federal district court vacated the 2008 STEM OPT rule as unlawfully issued under the Administrative Procedure Act and then stayed the vacatur so the department could write a new rule — which became the 2016 rule still in force. The Associated Press reports that higher-education groups or business associations could sue over this proposal and that litigation could delay it; separately, the department’s own July 2026 rule fixing a four-year limit on F-1 status was blocked by a federal court in September before it took effect.

None of that predicts the outcome here. It does mean the honest reading of a $70,000 proposed fee is “a stated intention with a comment period,” not “the price of OPT.”

What a reader should do

If you are an F-1 student or the parent of one:

• Do not pay anyone. No fee exists. An offer to reserve a place, lock in a rate, or take a deposit against the OPT fee is an offer to collect money that the government has not yet created and may never create.
• Nothing about your status changes today. The OPT rules in force are unchanged: 12 months per education level, a 24-month STEM extension for eligible graduates, a DSO recommendation, then a Form I-765 filed with USCIS.
• Talk to your school’s international office about your own timeline, not about the proposal. If you are weighing the STEM extension, the relevant fact from the notice is that the proposal treats the extension as its own $30,000 tier, not a free add-on.
• Treat advice from a chatbot as a lead, not an answer. America.gov says in its own terms that its replies can be incomplete or wrong and that nothing on the site is legal advice — see what its fine print actually commits to. Status questions belong with your DSO or an immigration lawyer.

If you are an employer, a university, or simply want to be on the record: the comment window is the only lever that exists right now. The notice commits to considering “all comments and materials received during the comment period” and says it “may change this rule based on your comments” — which is the agency’s own statement that this document is not final. File at Regulations.gov under docket ICEB-2026-0100, on or before November 9, 2026, 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Comments are published publicly, so leave out anything you would not want read back to you. DHS states that comments sent by email or letter “will not be considered” and will not receive a response, which makes the portal the only route that counts.

Watch three things from here: whether a final rule keeps these amounts, whether a court stays it, and the effective date — which will be fixed only when a final rule is published, and will be 60 days after that publication.

One note for readers of the rest of this site

This is federal immigration law, and it would apply the same way in every state. Unlike the employment, housing and contract questions covered elsewhere on Counsel, none of this turns on which state you live in — the 60-day clock, the comment docket and the SEVIS gate are the same in all fifty.

A wider list of the official pages worth bookmarking for federal programs lives at omc.center/resources.