A Department of Homeland Security proposal now under White House review would eliminate the 60-day grace period that currently gives H-1B and other nonimmigrant workers a structured runway after employment ends. The proposed rule was submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the federal regulatory clearinghouse within the Office of Management and Budget, on August 6, and full rule text has not yet been published in the Federal Register. For HR and People Operations leaders managing visa-dependent workforces, the proposal is not a footnote to immigration policy: it would compress the entire post-termination sequence, from offboarding and job search to immigration transfer and family relocation, into a window that may shrink to zero.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which represents approximately 340,000 HR professionals nationwide, has consistently flagged immigration stability as a core workforce-planning variable for employers in technology, life sciences, and engineering. The DHS proposal lands squarely in that territory. Whether or not it reaches final rule status, the operational question for HR leadership is the same: what does workforce risk look like if the 60-day buffer disappears entirely?

What the proposed rule would change

The 60-day grace period was created by regulation in 2016 and took effect in early 2017, codified under 8 CFR 214.1(l). It currently covers H-1B, L-1, O-1, E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B1, and TN workers. The practical mechanics matter for HR: during those 60 days, a laid-off H-1B worker can secure a new sponsoring employer and, critically, begin work as soon as the new employer properly files a new H-1B petition with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), without waiting for full adjudication. With premium processing available through USCIS, a new nonimmigrant petition is often decided in under 15 business days.

The grace period also covers dependents. Spouses whose immigration status is tied to the principal worker, and who hold an Employment Authorization Document or are employment-authorized incident to status, may continue their own work during the window. Eliminating the grace period would collapse both tracks simultaneously: the principal worker loses transfer runway, and the dependent spouse loses lawful work authorization on the same calendar date. For HR teams managing dual-income households with visa-dependent professionals, that double exposure is an operational factor that severance design, as currently structured, does not address.

Who carries the exposure

The affected population is concentrated among India-origin professionals on H-1B visas and their H-4 dependent spouses, though the grace period itself spans a broader range of nonimmigrant categories. For any employer with substantial populations of foreign-national engineers, researchers, or technical specialists, that concentration is the risk that matters: a single reduction-in-force (RIF) event can produce disproportionately severe consequences for a defined subset of the affected group, with no change in severance terms required to trigger that asymmetry.

The proposal remains at the proposed-rule stage. Full text is still under interagency review at OIRA, and a Federal Register publication date has not been announced. That said, HR functions that wait for published text to begin modeling exposure will be behind. The relevant planning question now is how retention architecture, offboarding sequencing, and immigration-transition support hold up in a zero-grace-period scenario.

The human timeline the current rule already sets

One documented account from American Bazaar Online illustrates how compressed 60 days already is in practice. Mahendra Singh, a pseudonym used by a software solutions engineer who spent eight years in the United States on H-1B status before being laid off, described completing his entire wind-down in 50 days, with a self-imposed 45-day internal deadline to absorb unexpected delays. The sequence he described included listing and selling the family home, withdrawing a six-year-old from school, liquidating household contents, and selling his car on the final day.

Singh said that 60 days were barely enough to pack everything up, and that the prospect of losing even that grace period would be a nightmare no H-1B holder wants to face.

Singh also reported that he could not afford an immigration attorney without an active paycheck and relied instead on immigration forums and social media groups for procedural guidance. That detail has a direct HR implication: when employer-side support ends at the termination date, the quality and legality of a foreign-national employee's next 60 days depends entirely on whatever the employer chose to provide in the offboarding package. Under the proposed rule, there would be no 60 days to fill at all.

What changes for HR if the grace period ends

Four structural implications follow for any workforce plan that includes H-1B or comparable nonimmigrant categories.

Retention pressure concentrates on visa-dependent roles. Candidates evaluating offers assign a measurably higher risk premium to any employer whose workforce-planning history shows RIF volatility. Under the current rule, a layoff creates a 60-day job-search sprint. Under the proposed rule, it creates an immediate deportation risk. That risk premium shows up at the offer stage as demands for longer contractual notice periods, higher severance floors, or written commitments on immigration bridging. SHRM compensation data consistently links immigration uncertainty to elevated offer-stage negotiation in technical roles, and that dynamic would intensify if the grace period is removed.

Severance design becomes a compliance instrument, not just a compensation one. If the grace period disappears, the practical value of four to six additional weeks of payroll continuation is no longer only financial. It becomes the difference between an orderly departure and a forced immediate exit. HR and in-house counsel need to model whether extended payroll continuation, paired with a formal notice date that shifts the termination date on paper, materially changes the affected worker's immigration status under 8 CFR 214.1(l). The answer is not uniform: it depends on how the termination is structured and what USCIS treats as the employment end date.

RIF decisions carry a sharper legal-reputational tail. Layoff decisions that disproportionately affect visa-dependent teams have drawn scrutiny under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when national-origin distribution in the affected group diverges from the broader workforce. Under the proposed rule, the downstream consequence for a portion of the affected group would be visible almost in real time, traveling through employee networks, review platforms, and internal mobility channels. That visibility feeds into employer-brand data well after the RIF closes, and it surfaces in candidate interviews in subsequent hiring cycles.

In-house counsel and global mobility teams need pre-cleared runbooks. Under the current rule, a laid-off H-1B worker has a documented 60 days to secure a new USCIS petition filing. Under the proposed rule, that window collapses. In-house immigration counsel, external global mobility firms, and any outplacement or transition-support vendor need updated protocols before the Federal Register text lands, not after.

Practical steps HR can take before finalisation

Several actions are defensible and carry low regret regardless of whether the rule is finalized in its current form.

• Map the visa-dependent share of the workforce by function, level, and work site. Aggregate exposure is the number that drives every downstream decision. USCIS data on H-1B approval and denial rates by employer is publicly available and useful for benchmarking the sponsorship footprint.
• Review current severance templates against a zero-grace-period scenario. Model whether payroll continuation, deferred termination dates, or bridge sponsorship options are feasible under existing policies and any applicable collective bargaining agreements governed by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
• Update offboarding sequencing for foreign-national employees. Immigration counsel involvement from day one of the offboarding process, not day thirty, becomes the operating standard when the available buffer may disappear.
• Brief hiring managers on the retention conversation. Visa-dependent candidates who previously asked about layoff history are likely to begin asking about immigration-transition support explicitly. Managers who cannot answer that question credibly lose candidates to employers who can.
• Coordinate with recruitment on inbound hiring strategy. If competing employers pull back from H-1B sponsorship in response to the rule, the effective high-skill talent pool shifts, and so does the negotiating position at the offer stage. The Department of Labor's (DOL) prevailing wage data for H-1B roles provides a useful baseline for modeling how offer packages would need to adjust to absorb increased immigration risk.

The signal under the rule

The 60-day grace period was, in regulatory terms, a small technical accommodation when it was added to 8 CFR 214.1(l) in 2016. Removing it is also, technically, a small change. Its workforce consequences are not small. For any HR function that has spent the last decade building globally distributed teams anchored in H-1B and related nonimmigrant categories, the DHS proposal is a direct signal that the operational contract with foreign-national employees runs through immigration policy as much as through compensation and benefits design. That policy is now in active motion, with the proposal sitting at OIRA pending interagency review.

The prudent response is to model the exposure now, tighten the offboarding runbook before a final rule is published, and treat the current 60-day period as the ceiling of what may be available to affected employees, not the floor. HR leaders who calibrate severance architecture, global mobility protocols, and candidate communications around the current rule are already behind where the rule may land. Those who plan for the zero-buffer scenario have at minimum a defensible position and, in the more likely outcome that some form of transition provision survives, an upside in employer-brand credibility with the visa-dependent talent pool they depend on.