DHS Ended 'Duration of Status' for Students. The OPT Fine Print Is Your New-Grad Hiring Timeline.

“They will be considered to be in a period of authorized stay while the EOS application is pending but may not start new employment until both EAD and EOS are approved.”

That sentence is in the response-to-comments section of a 156-page Department of Homeland Security rule published this morning [1]. It is about F-1 students finishing a degree and starting optional practical training, which is how a lot of international engineers get their first U.S. job. This column usually covers AI rules and export controls. This one is about who you can hire next spring, and when they can start.

What DHS changed

The rule, FR Doc. 2026-14439, ends “duration of status” for F students, J exchange visitors and I foreign media workers [1]. Since 1978, F-1 students have been admitted for as long as they are studying or in authorized practical training, with no end date on the I-94 [1]. Starting September 15, 2026, they get a fixed date instead: the program length on the Form I-20, capped at four years, plus a 30-day arrival window before the program starts and 30 days after it ends [1]. Anyone who needs more time applies to USCIS for an extension of stay, or leaves and re-enters [1].

DHS’s case is oversight. It says students under the old framework rarely have to deal with the agency directly, and it points to more than 2,100 people who entered as F-1 students between 2000 and 2010 and were still in F-1 status in April 2025 [1]. F-1 admissions passed 1.8 million in fiscal 2024 [1]. The proposed rule came out August 28, 2025, with a 32-day comment period, and drew close to 22,000 comments; DHS says it adopted most of what it proposed [1].

The pieces that touch hiring:

• Grace period: after a program or post-completion OPT ends, a student gets 30 days to leave or change status, down from 60 [1].
• OPT filing window: the I-765 for post-completion OPT must be filed within 30 days of the program end date, not 60, and the requested start date can’t be more than 30 days after it [1].
• OPT admission: a student entering for OPT or STEM OPT can be admitted to the later of the EAD expiration date or the school’s recommended OPT end date, plus 30 days [1].
• Unchanged: cap-gap still runs to April 1 of the H-1B fiscal year or the petition start date, whichever comes first, and a timely STEM OPT applicant can still work up to 180 days past the old EAD [1].
• Graduate students can’t change educational objectives during a program, and can’t transfer schools without an SEVP exception [1].

How the March 18, 2027 OPT cutoff works

Students already here under duration of status on September 15 keep it until the program end date on their I-20 or their EAD expiration, whichever is later, but no later than November 14, 2030 [1]. Leave the country and come back, though, and CBP issues a fixed date [1].

The OPT exemption is the date to put on a calendar. Under the regulatory text, a student who files the I-765 for post-completion OPT or STEM OPT on or before March 18, 2027 doesn’t have to file the I-539 extension of stay [1]. DHS can push that date out in six-month increments with a Federal Register notice [1]. (One passage in the preamble describes the cutoff as September 15, 2026. The regulation says March 18, 2027.)

After the cutoff, DHS says students starting post-completion OPT or STEM OPT “will most likely need to file for an EOS” unless they travel abroad and re-enter, can file both forms together, and wait for both [1]. DHS says USCIS will find and decide related files together “to avoid gaps in authorization” [1]. It also says, plainly, that the rule “does not provide for automatic extension of post-completion OPT employment authorization during the pendency of an EOS application” [1].

What it means if you hire engineers

My read from here.

Your offer-to-start gap gets longer, and less predictable. Today a new grad’s OPT start date depends on one USCIS decision. After March 18, it depends on two, and the second is the I-539. Commenters told DHS that I-539 decisions often take longer than 240 days, and that the backlog once reached 18 months [1]. DHS’s answer was the March 2027 exemption and a line that it “will continue planning operational adjustments” [1]. If you’re planning a June 2027 class of new grads, assume some start dates slip, and don’t build a team’s launch plan around a specific Monday.

The 30-day windows are where people get hurt. A student who finishes in May now has half the time to file for OPT and half the time to sort things out if a job falls through [1]. For a startup, the risky case is the offer that gets rescinded or the round that doesn’t close. Thirty days is not a long job search.

DHS’s view of “status” and “work” are separate questions. A student with a pending extension is lawfully here but may not be allowed to work [1]. DHS also says a student without a valid OPT EAD doesn’t accrue unemployment days in SEVIS [1]. That’s helpful, and it’s buried in a comment response. Your immigration counsel should be reading the preamble, not just the reg text.

Compliance cost lands on the smallest players. DHS puts the rule’s annualized cost at $443.1 million to $448.6 million, of which $119.9 million to $125.1 million falls on U.S. parties [1]. Most of that is filing fees and time for students and schools. A commenter cited a $420 fee for an extension request, and DHS said USCIS “may set fees to support the additional workload” [1]. Big employers have immigration teams that will absorb the new filings. A 30-person company with two OPT hires usually has a law firm on retainer and a founder who learns what an I-539 is the week someone can’t start.

Process. This went through notice and comment and DHS answered the comments in detail, which is more than I can say for some of what I cover. DHS frames the second application as oversight, and says the rule makes no substantive change to OPT itself beyond admission and extensions [1]. GAO did look at OPT oversight in 2014: it found 38 percent of OPT records, 48,642 of 126,796, had no employer name, and that ICE wasn’t requiring students to report it [2]. GAO’s tracker says SEVIS has required employer fields since December 2015 [2]. That was a data problem inside SEVIS, and it was fixed inside SEVIS. Whether a second USCIS adjudication fixes it, or just slows hiring, is a fair question the rule doesn’t really answer.

The scale is why this matters past universities. According to the Institute of International Education, 294,253 international students were on OPT in 2024/25, up 21 percent, and 26 percent of international students studied math and computer science [3].

What I’m watching

• September 15, 2026. The effective date, subject to congressional review [1]. Anyone with an OPT application pending that day doesn’t have to refile or add an extension request unless USCIS asks [1].
• March 18, 2027. Whether DHS extends the OPT exemption by notice before it runs out, as the rule allows [1]. If it doesn’t, spring 2027 graduates are the first class under the two-application process.
• USCIS fees and processing times for the I-539. DHS tied any fee change to USCIS’s biennial fee review [1]. Watch for that, and for the first published processing times after September.