You resign, and a final invoice arrives itemising immigration costs "to be repaid in full". Some of those lines can be legitimate. Several commonly are not, and the regulation is unusually clear about which is which. Read your own invoice against it before you pay it. Nothing you enter below reaches any server.
An employer must not require, directly or indirectly, that an H-1B nonimmigrant pay a penalty for ceasing employment before an agreed date. A charge whose function is to punish the departure itself is prohibited outright — not merely unenforceable, but a violation of the required-wage obligation. This is the line most 'repay in full' letters are actually testing.
The regulation permits an employer to receive bona fide liquidated damages from an H-1B nonimmigrant who ceases employment before an agreed date. The distinction from a prohibited penalty is substantive: under applicable state law, liquidated damages are amounts fixed or stipulated by the parties AT THE INCEPTION of the contract which are reasonable approximations or estimates of anticipated or actual damage, while a penalty is not such a reasonable approximation. Calling a clause 'liquidated damages' in the paperwork does not make it one; a sum invented at exit, or wildly out of proportion to any real loss, is the thing the rule prohibits.
A deduction from wages may not recoup a business expense of the employer, including attorney fees and other costs connected to the performance of H-1B program functions which are required to be performed by the employer — the regulation names preparation and filing of the labour condition application and the H-1B petition as examples. An invoice line charging back the company's immigration lawyer or its petition filing costs is charging you for the employer's own regulatory obligations.
Where an H-1B worker is not performing work and is in a nonproductive status due to a DECISION BY THE EMPLOYER — the regulation gives lack of assigned work as an example — the employer must still pay the required wage: the full pro-rata amount due for a salaried employee, or for a full-time week of forty hours for an hourly employee. Unpaid bench time is not a neutral gap between projects; it is wages that were due and not paid, and it can be worth more than the invoice being disputed.
This is the general federal rule, not an assessment of your agreement. Two things in particular need a lawyer rather than a page: whether a specific stated sum is bona fide liquidated damages or a prohibited penalty, which turns on state contract law applied to your actual contract; and whether an employer that dismissed you owes the cost of return transportation, which sits in a different regulation this page has deliberately not quoted from memory. If an invoice is already in front of you, an employment or immigration lawyer reading the contract is worth more than any checklist — and the Department of Labor takes complaints about the required wage directly.
We already computed the public version — it is complete and stays free. Keep the dates and the paperwork in one place and the Square has them ready when you need them: Join DesiSquare and the Square remembers your dates, re-runs this when the rules change, and puts a credentialed human one message away.