U.S. Non-Immigrant Visa Fee to Increase

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Travel Tips

Wednesday, 26 May 2010 06:00

By press release

The Department of State published an interim final rule in the U.S. Federal Register to increase non-immigrant visa application processing fees.

Under the new schedule of fees, applicants for all visas that are not petition-based, including tourist and business visitor (B1/B2) visas and all student and exchange visitor (F, M and J) visas, will pay a fee of US$140.

Applicants for petition-based visas will now pay an application fee of US$150. These visa categories include:

· H visa for temporary workers and trainees

· L visa for intra-company transferees

· O visa for aliens with extraordinary ability

· P visa for athletes, artists and entertainers

· Q visa for international cultural exchange visitors

· R visa for religious occupations

The application fee for K visas for fiancé(e)s of U.S. citizens will be US$350 (BB$707). The fee for E visas for treaty-traders and treaty-investors will be US$390 (BB$788).  The new fees are scheduled to go into effect on June 4, 2010.

“Along with announcing the new visa fees to take effect June 4, as we head into the peak summer season for U.S. visas, I would like to remind all applicants to apply as early as possible and to visit our website for information on how to best prepare for their visa interview,” said Nicole Theriot, Consul General of the U.S. Embassy for Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean.

The new, tiered fee structure was created to cover the higher unit costs for processing certain categories of non-immigrant visas that are more complicated and require more in-depth consideration than most other categories of non-immigrant visas. The State Department is required to recover, as far as possible, the cost of processing non-immigrant visas through the collection of the application fees.  For a number of reasons, including new security enhancements, the US$131 fee set on January 1, 2008 no longer covers the current, actual cost of processing non-immigrant visas.

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