UPDATE: As of September 29, 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Immigration Legal Resource Center et al., v. Wolf, et al., 20-cv-05883-JWS, preliminarily enjoined DHS from implementing or enforcing any part of the Fee Increase. This means that the fee rule will not go into effect on October 2, 2020: neither the fee increases nor the changes to fee waivers in the rule will be implemented at this time.
On July 30th, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published its new, fee schedule for immigration applications. The new fee schedule goes into effect on October 2nd, 2020. Applications filed before October 2nd, follow the old/ current fee schedule. While a few types of filing fees are going down (such as the filing for a green card renewal, the I-90 form, is decreasing from $455 to $415) the cost of most immigration petitions is going up, and the fee waiver option has been eliminated for most applicants. The fee for a naturalization/ U.S. citizenship application will increase from its current $725 to $1,160 or $1170 (depending on whether or not one files online via the USCIS portal) (biometrics included) on October 2, 2020. In addition, USCIS also announced that it will eliminate the fee waiver for naturalization with very few exceptions, along with the reduced fee option. More information about the fee increases can be found here. If you have questions about these fee changes, please call the APALRC multilingual helpline at: 202-393-3572. If you want the APALRC’s assistance applying for naturalization/ citizenship, please register here.