USCIS mandates new I-129 form for work visa petitions starting Nov. 9
Employers must use the updated Form I-129 for work visa petitions after Nov. 8, coinciding with new DHS fees for certain H-1B and L-1 filings.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has established a new deadline for employers seeking work visas for foreign nationals. Starting Nov. 9, 2026, the agency will reject petitions filed on older versions of the I-129 form and will only accept the updated edition.
The change affects companies that use this form to hire workers under various immigration categories. These categories include H-1B, H-2B, L-1 and O-1 visas, among others. The new version was published on Sept. 9, 2026, and will permanently replace the previous edition, dated Feb. 27 of the same year.
USCIS notes that the form is used to process several work visa categories, including H-1B for professionals in specialty occupations and H-2A for temporary agricultural workers. It also covers L-1 for intracompany transferees, O-1 for people with extraordinary ability, and P-1 for certain athletes and entertainment groups.
The company or employer seeking to hire the worker, not the foreign national, is responsible for filing. For that reason, the updated form means companies and their representatives will need to check which version they are using before sending an immigration petition to the agency.
The rule applies to both filing methods, by mail and through a USCIS online account. Employers should therefore make sure all pages of the form match the same edition and that the current date is correctly identified.
The new version is tied to a DHS regulatory change involving the 9-11 response fee and biometric entry-exit data for certain H-1B and L-1 petitions. While updating the form is mandatory for all categories filed on Form I-129, the new additional-fee rules do not affect all employers or all visas equally.
DHS requires two conditions to be met simultaneously for a company to be subject to the fee. When both conditions are met, the employer must pay an additional fee of $4,000 for H-1B petitions and $4,500 for L-1 petitions. The requirement also applies to stay-extension requests filed by companies that meet this definition.