december 19, 2007
Application Fees for Non-Immigrant Visas to Increase On January 1, 2008
Effective January 1, 2008, the application fee for a U.S. nonimmigrant visa will increase from $100 to $131 and the application fee for U.S. immigrant visas will increase from $335 to $355. This increase allows the State Department to recover the costs of security and other enhancements to the visa application process. This increase applies both to non-immigrant and immigrant visas issued on machine-readable foils in passports and to border crossing cards issued to certain applicants in Mexico.
Applicants who paid the prior application fee before January 1 will be processed only if they are scheduled and appear for a visa interview before January 31. Applicants who paid the prior application fee and appear for visa interviews after January 31, 2008 must pay the difference before they will be interviewed.
The State Department is required by law to recover the cost of processing non-immigrant visas through the collection of the Machine-Readable Visa application fee. Because of new security-related costs, new information technology systems, and inflation, the Machine-Readable Visa fee is lower than the actual cost of processing non-immigrant and immigrant visas. In fact, the $100 fee was already lower than the cost of processing non-immigrant visas when the fee was reviewed as a part of the cost of service study in 2004. The Department has been absorbing the additional cost. We are now collecting 10 fingerprints from each applicant, and the cost charged by the FBI to review those fingerprints no longer allow us to do this. The application fee has increased twice since 9/11, the last time in 2002.
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