By Matt Gordon, Esq. | April 8, 2026
The DOL’s proposed prevailing wage rule is one to watch. The full rule is now published in the Federal Register and the numbers are striking. If finalized, entry-level H-1B salary floors would jump by more than 30% as estimated by many practitioners. This is a further disruption to the (F1) student to (OPT) worker to (H1-B) Professional pathway to a Green Card and citizenship.
What DOL is proposing
The proposed rule, published March 27, would overhaul the four-tier prevailing wage system that has been essentially unchanged since 2005. The Level I (entry-level) wage floor would move from the 17th percentile of wages for a given occupation and geography to the 34th percentile — which is where Level II sits today. Level IV would jump from the 67th to the 88th percentile. DOL estimates the average impact at roughly $14,000 per worker per year. For a company sponsoring multiple H-1B employees, that is not a rounding error.
This is not a new idea. The proposal mirrors a wage rule issued at the end of the first Trump administration that was briefly implemented but then enjoined/vacated and never remained operative. What’s different now is the policy infrastructure surrounding it. The September 2025 Presidential Proclamation already imposed a $100,000 fee on certain H-1B petitions. The FY 2027 H-1B cap lottery now weights selection toward higher-offered wages. And now the wage floor itself is moving up. Each of these individually is manageable. Stacked together, they represent a systematic repricing of the H-1B pathway.
The rule also hits PERM labor certifications for EB-2 and EB-3 green cards — the traditional employer-sponsored permanent residence route. DOL found that more than 75% of LCA positions certified between FY 2020 and FY 2024 fell below the proposed new wage floors. That’s not a marginal adjustment. That’s a signal that the government views the current wage structure as fundamentally misaligned with the market.
Why this matters for investment visa clients
I talk to prospective EB-5, E-2, and L-1A clients every week who are evaluating their options against the ‘traditional’ H-1B pathway — either because they’re stuck in it, or because they’re trying to decide whether to enter it. The calculus has changed materially in the last six months.
Consider the position of an aspiring or mid-career IT professional from India. The EB-2/EB-3 backlog already stretches decades. The H-1B lottery is now wage-weighted, disadvantaging early-career applicants. If this wage rule is finalized, the employer’s cost to sponsor that worker goes up by $14,000 a year — on top of the $100,000 fee that may already apply (if the applicant is not in the US). At some point the employer says: this isn’t worth it. And the worker is left without a pathway. There are many anecdotal reports that employers are already cutting back on H-1B sponsorship.
That’s the moment when an $800,000 EB-5 investment in a TEA project — with concurrent filing, work authorization, and a statutory path to a green card — starts to look less like a big-ticket alternative and more like the rational choice. The investment is (hopefully) recoverable. The H-1B fees are not. And unlike the H-1B, nobody else gets to decide whether you stay, or where you live and work.
The grandfathering clock is ticking
This brings me back to the September 30, 2026 grandfathering deadline under the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act. I’ve written on this several times before, but the DOL wage rule gives it a sharper edge and it’s such an important point, I feel obligated to keep pounding on it. We are now less than six months out.
The grandfathering provision protects I-526E petitions filed by September 30, 2026, against future program lapses. The Regional Center program itself is authorized through September 2027, but authorization and grandfathering are different things. If Congress doesn’t reauthorize the program, petitions filed before the deadline continue to be adjudicated. Petitions filed after it do not have that protection.
For an investor who is currently watching the H-1B squeeze tighten and thinking about EB-5 as Plan B — or Plan A — the deadline is not abstract. Source of funds documentation takes time to assemble as does project due diligence and selection. Investors who want to comfortably beat the deadline need to start now.
April Visa Bulletin: Quiet stability for EB-5
Meanwhile, the April 2026 Visa Bulletin tells an interesting story for EB-5 by what it doesn’t say. We are now in Q3 of the fiscal year — historically, the point where the State Department starts posting warning notes if set-aside categories are approaching their annual limits. No such warning appeared in April. The absence of a warning note heading into Q3 suggests that State is not on pace to issue all available visas.
For investors, particularly those filing in Rural TEA or High Unemployment Area categories, this is good news — it means the set-aside pipeline is not yet under pressure, and current filings are unlikely to face near-term retrogression in those reserved categories.
The bottom line
The DOL prevailing wage rule is still a proposal. The comment period runs through May 26, 2026. It could be revised, delayed, or challenged in court. But the direction is unmistakable and unlike previous ‘reforms’, the administration seems to actually be following the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. The cost structure of employer-sponsored immigration — H-1B, PERM, EB-2, EB-3 — is being pushed upward at every level. For investors with capital, the investment visa pathway offers something the worker visa pathway increasingly does not: control over your own outcome, statutory protections, and a green card that doesn’t depend on your employer’s willingness to absorb ever-increasing costs.
If you’re evaluating your options, the time to start is now — not because of manufactured urgency, but because the grandfathering deadline is real, the document preparation takes real time, and the regulatory environment is moving in one direction.