On 16 October 2026, a visitor from a visa-waiver country who applies to travel to the United States pays $40.62 for the privilege. Before the summer of 2025 the same authorisation cost $21. The new figure is not the result of a fresh decision. It is an automatic inflation adjustment, announced by the Department of Homeland Security in a notice of 1 October, because the law that raised the fee also told the department to raise it again every year.
Thirty-five cents is not news. The mechanism is. Around the world, governments have found that the easiest people to charge are those who cannot vote them out: visitors, migrants, temporary workers, people sending money home and, sometimes, their own citizens who live abroad. The amounts are usually small. The direction is consistent. For anyone who lives across borders, that consistency is worth understanding.
Three numbers that tripled or doubled
Start with what changed, from the governments' own publications.
The United States. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Public Law 119-21, rewrote several immigration-related fees. In its notice of August 2025, Customs and Border Protection explained that before the law it charged $21 for an ESTA authorisation, and that from 30 September 2025 the minimum became $40, now the sum of three separate statutory components. The October 2026 notice sets the fiscal 2027 amounts: ESTA $40.62, enrolment in the Electronic Visa Update System $31.75, the Form I-94 fee at land borders $30 (of which $24 is the new statutory fee), and a fee of $1,050 each time a person is paroled into the country. Every one of them is now indexed.
New Zealand. On 1 October 2024, Immigration New Zealand raised its International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy from NZ$35 to NZ$100 per eligible person, collected alongside most visitor visas, electronic travel authorities, student visas and several temporary work visas. The government announcement linked from the agency's notice described the increase as a way to ensure visitors contribute more to New Zealand.
Japan. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, the international tourist tax levied on travellers departing Japan rose from 1,000 yen to 3,000 yen on 1 July 2026, usually built into the airline ticket. The Japan Tourism Agency's notice sets out the new rate for departures from that date, with the old rate still applying to eligible tickets issued by 30 June 2026.
Each of these has its own justification: border administration, conservation, over-tourism. None of them is large on its own. But in each case the charge at least doubled within two years, and in none of them did the people paying it have a vote in the country setting it.
How a fee is built to grow
The US notices are worth reading closely, because they show how a modern fee is engineered rather than simply set.
The ESTA charge is no longer one number. According to the August 2025 notice, it is the sum of three statutory amounts: a pre-existing $17 per authorisation, an amount of not less than $10, and a new $13 per authorisation, for a minimum of $40. Splitting a charge into components makes each one easier to justify and harder to challenge as a whole. Even a refusal costs money: the October notice puts the fee for a denied ESTA application at $10.62 for fiscal 2027.
The indexation rules are written into the statute with the same care. For the parole fee, the department calculated an inflation adjustment of $34.32 for fiscal 2027 and, as the law requires, rounded it down to the next lower multiple of $10, so the fee rose by $30, from $1,020 to $1,050. The Form I-94 fee stayed at $30 for fiscal 2027 for one reason only, which the notice spells out: after rounding down to the nearest dollar, as the statute requires, the inflation adjustment came to nothing.
That is the difference between a fee and a price set by a market or a vote. Nobody decided this October that a visitor should pay 35 cents more. The decision was taken once, in 2025, and it now repeats itself every autumn by publication in the Federal Register. The only way to stop it is another act of Congress, the one body in which the payers have no representation.
The larger charges follow the same logic
The small fees are the visible edge of a broader pattern, and the larger charges are far from small.
The US proposed rule of 25 August 2026 would add a fee of $103,265 to every cap-subject H-1B petition, on top of all existing fees. The department describes it as "a dedicated revenue mechanism" to recover part of the cost of running the immigration system across four federal departments. The comment period closed on 24 September 2026; the rule is still a proposal. The Brief looked at the earlier phase of the H-1B story in The Death of H-1B.
Since 1 January 2026, the United States has also taxed certain transfers of money abroad. The Treasury's proposed regulations cover remittance transfers made after 31 December 2025. The Brief explained who pays and how in its piece on the 1% remittance tax. Its natural payers are migrants supporting families in other countries: a group with little political weight in the country that collects the tax.
Why the people who cannot vote pay more
There is nothing hidden about the logic, and it is not unique to any one government.
Fees are politically cheap. A tax increase on residents has to survive the people who pay it. A fee on visitors and temporary migrants is paid by people who are, by definition, not part of the electorate. The cost of raising it is close to zero.
Fees can be justified as cost recovery. Every one of the measures above is framed as paying for a service: processing, conservation, infrastructure, administration. The framing is often accurate. But it also places the charge outside the ordinary debate about tax rates, where it would attract more scrutiny.
Indexation makes them permanent. Once a fee is written into law with an annual inflation adjustment, as the US immigration fees now are, it rises without anyone having to propose an increase. The October notice for fiscal 2027 is a routine publication, not a political event.
Payers are dispersed. A visitor pays once. A temporary worker pays at renewal. A family sending money pays a little each month. Nobody pays enough, at any one moment, to organise against it.
The exception that proves the rule
One fee moved the other way this year, and it shows what it takes.
In April 2026 the US State Department cut the fee for processing a renunciation of citizenship from $2,350 to $450. The final rule records that the proposal attracted 910 comments, most of them drawn from templates supplied by groups representing Americans abroad, and that the Department called the reduction "a policy decision" to ease the burden on those who use the service.
The people paying this fee were not foreigners. They were citizens, with organisations to speak for them, and the change still took from a proposal in 2023 to a rule in 2026. Voice works. It is simply slower and rarer for people outside the electorate, and most of the people paying the fees above do not have it at all.
What this means for people who live between countries
None of this is a reason to stop travelling or to resent the countries that charge. Most of these fees are modest relative to the cost of a trip, and some fund things travellers benefit from. The argument is narrower: for internationally mobile families, the cost of access is a rising, indexed line item, and it should be planned like one.
Count the recurring charges, not just the one-off ones. A family of four that visits the United States, New Zealand and Japan each year now pays roughly two to three hundred US dollars more in authorisations, levies and departure taxes than it did two years ago, before a single hotel night. The Brief's estimate of what a Plan B actually costs per month is the right place for that line.
Expect indexation, not reversal. Fees written into law with automatic adjustments are designed to rise. The planning assumption should be that they keep doing so.
Notice who pays. Charges increasingly fall on status: visitor, temporary worker, parolee, remitter. A change of status, such as permanent residence or citizenship, can remove a whole category of charges, which is one reason residence decisions are rarely only about income tax.
Treat low headline taxes with the same care. A jurisdiction with low taxes on residents may still recover revenue from those it does not count as residents. The Brief made a related point in Zero Tax Is Not Zero Cost: the bill always arrives somewhere.
A quiet change in what access costs
For most of the past generation, the price of moving around the world fell. Flights became cheaper, visa waivers spread, and electronic travel authorisations replaced embassy queues. Those conveniences remain. What has changed is that governments have learned to attach a price to them, and to raise that price in the one constituency that cannot answer back at the ballot box.
The 35-cent increase that takes effect on 16 October will not change anyone's travel plans. It is worth noticing anyway, because it is what a permanent trend looks like when it is working as designed: small, automatic and paid by someone else's voters.
Work with Sebastian
If your family lives, works or invests across several countries and you want the full cost of that arrangement, including access, residence and status, to be planned rather than discovered, that is the kind of cross-border setup Sebastian works on with internationally mobile clients. Book a consultation.
