The United States plans to raise the salary threshold for H-1B visas, tightening policies and further restricting high-skilled immigration pathways.

The U.S. government is working on a new round of adjustments to the high-skilled immigration system.

In local time on March 26, the U.S. Department of Labor released a proposed rule aimed at significantly raising the minimum wage standards for workers entering the United States for employment through H-1B visas and other high-skilled visas. For typical high-skilled positions such as software developers, the wage floor across different experience levels will be increased by about 21% to 33%. The move is widely seen as intended to curb companies from bringing overseas labor with relatively lower pay by raising employment costs, thereby reducing the replacement effects on local workers—another major action by the Trump administration in the areas of the labor market and immigration policy.

In addition to wage thresholds, the visa allocation mechanism is also planned to be adjusted. Currently, the H-1B lottery system has incorporated “wage levels” as a significant weighting factor, giving higher odds of being selected to applicants with higher pay. Under the current arrangement, the U.S. adds about 85,000 H-1B visa slots each year, but the number of applications companies submit typically far exceeds that figure, making competition intense. Notably, H-1B visas are not only an important channel for companies to bring in overseas professionals, but also one of the main pathways for international students to find employment in the U.S. In the current year’s quota, about half of the slots are allocated to foreign students who have completed their studies in the United States.

In addition, in September 2025 the U.S. government announced that it would sharply raise the fees related to H-1B visas to 100,000 dollars, far higher than the previous level (lottery fees are about 215 dollars, and the full application process is about 5,000 dollars). These fees are usually paid by employers, which would significantly increase employers’ labor costs and could create greater pressure on small and medium-sized businesses.

For years, the H-1B visa program has been mired in controversy. Large technology companies generally believe that there is a talent supply gap in the U.S. in certain high-skilled fields, and that bringing in international professionals helps maintain innovation capacity and industrial competitiveness. Opponents argue that, in actual practice, some companies engage in “cost arbitrage,” squeezing out local workers’ job opportunities by hiring foreign employees whose compensation is relatively low.

Against this backdrop, Stewart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, said that, in comparative studies of employees with similar educational backgrounds and work experience, “there is almost no evidence of a systematic pay gap.”

Anderson believes that the proposed rule would, to a large extent, continue the policy framework proposed at the end of Trump’s first term—“almost completely the same as the previous version.”