H-1B Visa Minimum Salary Jumps to $150,000 as Tech Student Work Program (OPT) Is Terminated

The American Tech Workforce Act of 2025 is a massive, two-front change to how skilled foreign labor enters the U.S. workforce, specifically targeting what Congress sees as loopholes that depress wages for American workers. This bill immediately kills the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program for international students and slams a hefty new minimum wage floor on the H-1B visa.

The End of OPT: What It Means for Students and Employers

Let’s start with the biggest, most immediate change: Section 3 terminates the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program. If you’re an international student here on an F-1 visa, OPT is the program that allows you to work in the U.S. for up to three years after graduation, especially if you studied a STEM field. Under this new bill, that’s gone. Your work authorization ends the moment you complete your course of studies. Period. If you’ve already applied for OPT but the law takes effect before it’s approved? Your application is denied, and the government must refund your application fee. This is a huge shift, essentially cutting off the primary pipeline that lets U.S.-educated international talent gain experience here. For tech firms, this removes a major, tax-exempt source of entry-level talent, forcing them to rely exclusively on H-1B visas or U.S. workers for these roles.

The $150,000 Minimum Wage Floor for H-1B

Section 4 fundamentally rewrites the rules for the H-1B skilled worker visa. Citing findings that many H-1B workers are paid significantly less than local market rates, the bill establishes a new, high minimum salary. For the first year, an employer must offer an H-1B worker at least $150,000, or the prevailing wage for a similar U.S. worker, whichever is higher. After that, the $150,000 benchmark will increase annually based on the Consumer Price Index (inflation). This is designed to ensure that companies are hiring H-1B workers only for highly compensated, specialized roles, not as a cost-saving measure. If you’re a U.S. tech worker, this could be good news—it eliminates the low-wage competition that Congress claims has been undercutting your salary for years.

High Pay Gets You to the Front of the Line

Another significant change in Section 4 deals with the H-1B lottery. Currently, the lottery is random, meaning a company offering a worker $60,000 has the same chance as one offering $200,000. This bill changes the prioritization, requiring the government to approve applications that offer higher salaries before those offering lower salaries, regardless of when they were filed. This means that if you’re a company looking to secure an H-1B visa, you’ll be strongly incentivized to offer top-tier compensation to secure your spot. This reinforces the bill’s core goal: making the H-1B program a mechanism for only the highest-paid workers.

New Restrictions on Third-Party Work Sites

The bill also tightens up on the practice of “job shopping,” where H-1B workers are placed at client sites (third-party worksites) rather than working directly at the sponsoring company’s office. If the H-1B worker will be placed at a third-party site, the visa’s validity is capped at one year. Furthermore, the assignment must be clearly defined and non-speculative for the entire period requested. This seems aimed at preventing large IT consulting firms from using H-1B workers primarily to staff short-term projects at client locations, which Congress views as displacing U.S. workers in those external companies. This could force major changes in how large consulting and outsourcing firms staff their client contracts.