U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will raise a set of immigration fees on October 16, 2026, the second annual increase to a group of charges that are still new — created little more than a year ago by the reconciliation law known as H.R. 1. Underneath those adjustments sit the fees themselves: charges that asylum seekers, people on humanitarian parole, and Temporary Protected Status holders never had to pay before the current administration wrote them into law.
According to the Federal Register notice USCIS issued this week, four H.R. 1 fees go up on October 16. Any request postmarked on or after that date must include the new amount, or USCIS will reject it outright.
The annual asylum fee, which did not exist before, goes from $102 to $105 — a nearly 3% increase.
Form I-131 for immigration parole goes from $1,020 to $1,050, a $30 increase (about 2.9%).
Form I-765 for a work permit — which was free for asylum seekers before President Trump’s second term — goes from $560 to $570, a modest $10 increase (about 1.8%).
Although the administration has moved to end Temporary Protected Status for most beneficiaries, including Haitians, and the Supreme Court has allowed those terminations to take effect while the litigation continues, the Form I-821 TPS fee will still rise by $10, from $510 to $520.
The increases range from roughly 1.8 percent to 2.9 percent. They reflect inflation from July 2025 through July 2026, a Consumer Price Index rise of about 3.36 percent, but because H.R. 1 requires USCIS to round adjusted fees down to the nearest $10, most increases fall below that figure. The change is automatic and mandatory: the law directs the Department of Homeland Security to reset these fees for inflation every fiscal year, so a similar bump is expected each October going forward.
Fees that did not exist two years ago
The percentages tell only part of the story. Compared with what these same applicants paid before H.R. 1, the increase is not a few percent; it is the difference between something and nothing.
Applying for asylum in the United States was free for decades. The Form I-589 asylum application carried no USCIS fee. H.R. 1 changed that, adding a first-ever charge to file for asylum and a separate Annual Asylum Fee, the $105 line above, that a person must pay for every year their case remains open. Neither existed before 2025.
The same is true of the Immigration Parole Fee. Before H.R. 1, there was no across-the-board charge of this kind for a grant of parole; the law set it at $1,000, now $1,050 after two inflation adjustments. For work permits and TPS, H.R. 1 layered new statutory charges on top of the existing application process, which is why a TPS renewal and the work permit that goes with it now cost hundreds of dollars more than they did two years ago.
One more feature sets these apart from ordinary government fees: under H.R. 1, they generally cannot be waived. Legal-aid organizations, including the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), have noted that the statute’s fee provisions state plainly that they “shall not be waived or reduced.” A low-income applicant who once could ask USCIS to excuse a fee has no such option for the H.R. 1 charges.
What it adds up to for a family
For a single household, the fees stack. Consider a Haitian TPS holder with a pending asylum case who also needs to renew a work permit, a common situation. In one year, that person could face the $520 TPS filing, the $570 work-permit fee, and the $105 annual asylum charge, before counting any other costs or the initial asylum-application fee already paid. None of those amounts can be waived, and each will edge higher with every future inflation cycle.
Immigrant-services providers say the cumulative effect worries them most — not any single increase, but how the charges compound across the categories the diaspora relies on and arrive at the same time families are managing rent, work, and the uncertainty of their status.
The annual asylum fee, in particular, drew legal challenges when it was introduced, with disputes over how the government would even collect a recurring charge from people whose cases can take years to resolve. Applicants and their representatives have been advised to watch USCIS notices closely, because a filing sent in with the wrong amount is not corrected — it is returned.
The safest step is to confirm the current fee for each form on the USCIS website on the day you mail or submit it, and to keep proof of the postmark date. A request postmarked October 16 or later must carry the new fee to be accepted.
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