Every USCIS filing fee since 2004: 40 forms across six Federal Register rules

Every USCIS filing fee since 2004: 40 forms across six Federal Register rules

Immigration fees go up one Federal Register rule at a time. Each rule is public when it publishes — and then it stops being the current answer. The government’s fee schedule tells you what a form costs today; it does not tell you what it cost in 2010, or when it changed, or by how much. That history is scattered across two decades of rules that no single page keeps together.

This is that record, assembled: the filing fee for 40 USCIS forms, from the earliest rule the Federal Register’s full-text archive can read (2004) through the schedule in force today, with every amount traced to the final rule that set it. You can check any line against the primary source in one click.

A few of the lines people ask about most: the naturalization application (N-400) rose from $595 under the 2010 rule to $760 today. The work permit (I-765) went from $380 to $520. Renewing a green card (I-90) — one of the few forms the record follows across the full span — climbed from $185 in 2004 to $465.

How to read this — and the mistake that matters

A fee in this table is what a rule published. It is not automatically what you will pay.

Two things move a real cost away from the published number, and both matter:

• Fee waivers and add-ons. Many applicants qualify to file with a reduced fee or no fee at all (Form I-912), and some rules bundle biometric or other charges that this base-fee record does not carry. What you owe depends on your form, your category, and your situation — confirm it on the official USCIS fee schedule before you file.
• The 2020 increase that never happened. A 2020 rule (85 FR 46788) would have raised fees across the board, but it was enjoined nationwide before its effective date and never took effect. Its amounts were never lawful fees, so they appear nowhere in this timeline. That is why the record steps from the 2016 schedule straight to 2024 — the jump is correct, not a gap in the data.

Why the record starts in 2004

The Federal Register’s full-text archive is what makes a row here verifiable — each fee is read from the rule’s own regulatory text and linked back to it. That archive is searchable in the form this dataset needs from the mid-2000s forward, so the earliest fee rule it reads cleanly is the 2004 schedule. The 2004 and 2007 rules list far fewer forms than the 2010 and later rules — not because those forms were free, but because their regulatory text does not state an amount this record could read with certainty. A form that is absent from an early rule means we did not find a trustworthy amount for it, not that it had no fee. We would rather show under-coverage than guess.

Method

Every amount is extracted from a Federal Register final rule and is asserted to appear verbatim in that rule’s own text before it is published here — no fee is typed in by hand, and the numbers on this page are rendered from the dataset, not written into the prose. The 2024 extraction reproduces every one of the fees we had already hand-verified, exactly, which is the check that the same method applied to the older rules is trustworthy. The rule that was enjoined is kept in the dataset flagged as never-in-effect and is excluded from every fee timeline. The full method, source, and build date are in the panel above.

Use it

The full dataset is free to download as JSON and free to use with attribution to MigrantUSA. If you are a journalist, researcher, or legal-aid organization and you need a cut we have not published — one form’s whole history, every fee a single rule set, the percentage change since a form first appears — the underlying data is all there, and the source for every amount is one click away.

This is general information, not legal advice. USCIS fees change, can be waived, and depend on your specific form and situation. Always confirm the current fee on the official USCIS fee schedule, and consult an immigration attorney or accredited legal-aid provider about your case.