Employers will pay higher fees to submit petitions for workers and to sponsor employees for permanent residence under a final rule published Tuesday by US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The new fees will go into effect April 1.

This is the first time since December 2016 that USCIS has increased the fees, according to the agency, which said that it receives approximately 96% of its funding from filing fees, not from congressional appropriations.

The new fees will “better meet the needs of our agency, enabling us to provide more timely decisions to those we serve,” USCIS Director Ur M. Jaddou said in a press release issued in conjunction with publication of the final rule. “Despite years of inadequate funding, the USCIS workforce has made great strides in customer service, backlog reduction, implementing new processes and programs, and upholding fairness, integrity and respect for all we serve.”

Employers are likely to see little change from January 2023’s proposed rule, Forbes reported. Senior living and care advocates said at that time that the USCIS proposal to significantly increase filing fees for many employment-based petitions would particularly affect long-term care providers, but “[e]very fee in the final rule is the same or lower than in the proposed rule,” USCIS said Tuesday.

Fees for named beneficiaries for H-2B petitions (for seasonal, nonagricultural workers) will increase from $460 to $1,080 (135%), and fees for H-2A petitions (for agricultural workers) will increase from $460 to $1,090 (137%). The rule provides special fee discounts for nonprofit organizations and small business employers.

Also according to USCIS, the final rule lowers the agency’s required annual cost recovery by $727 million. Additionally, among its other provisions, the rule expands fee exemptions for “special immigrant juveniles and victims of human trafficking, crime, and domestic violence; U.S. military service members and our Afghan allies; and families pursuing international adoption.”

Although the fee increases announced Tuesday “will allow USCIS to better offset overall costs, congressional funding continues to be necessary to sustainably and fully address the increased volume of caseloads associated with recent border crossers, including by hiring additional USCIS personnel to help right-size a system that was not built to manage the numbers of cases USCIS receives,” the agency said.

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