The Rule to Delete the 60-Day Grace Period Just Cleared the White House

On August 27, 2026, a DHS proposal to eliminate the 60-day grace period cleared review at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

If you are waiting on an employment-based green card, that sentence deserves about two minutes of your attention and none of your panic. Nothing changed on August 27. But something moved, and the thing that moved is one of the few pieces of the system that protects you between jobs.

What the grace period does today

If your employment ends before your authorized stay expires, current regulations give you a discretionary period of up to 60 days — or until your I-94 expires, whichever is shorter — to find a new employer, change status, or leave. Without it, status ends the day the job does.

The word discretionary is doing real work in that sentence. It is not an entitlement; USCIS may decline to grant it. But in practice it is the bridge nearly every laid-off nonimmigrant walks across.

What actually happened

Stage	Status
Sent to OIRA	✅ August 6, 2026
OIRA review complete	✅ August 27, 2026
Published in Federal Register	⏳ Not yet — the next step
Public comment period	⏳ Not yet (typically 30–60 days)
Final rule	⏳ Not yet
Effective date	⏳ Not yet

The entry sits on the regulatory agenda as RIN 1615-AD22, titled “Eliminating the Discretionary 60-day Grace Period.”

The regulatory text is still not public. OIRA review does not release it — publication in the Federal Register does, and that has not happened. Anyone telling you the specific mechanics of what DHS will propose is guessing, and you should discount their advice accordingly.

Why this matters more for green card applicants than for most people

Most coverage frames this as an H-1B story. For readers of this site the sharper question is what a job loss does to a pending or planned adjustment of status, and there the answer depends entirely on where you are in the process.

If your I-485 has been pending 180 days or more. AC21 portability may let you change to a same-or-similar job without restarting. That is a statutory protection independent of the grace period — see our AC21 portability guide. This group is the least exposed.

If your I-485 is on file but under 180 days. You are in the most delicate window. Portability has not vested and your underlying nonimmigrant status matters.

If you have an approved I-140 but no I-485 — because your priority date is not current. This is the group the change would hit hardest, and on this site it is a very large group. You may be years from being able to file, and in the meantime your ability to stay depends on maintaining nonimmigrant status. The grace period is what gives you a runway to find a new sponsoring employer after a layoff. If your category has been retrogressed or unavailable — as EB-2 India has been — that wait is long, and the number of layoffs you have to survive inside it goes up accordingly. Our visa retrogression guide covers why those waits stretch.

If you are in a status other than H-1B. Note the breadth: E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B1, L-1, O-1 and TN are all named, plus dependents. L-1 in particular has no equivalent to H-1B’s portability rules, so the grace period carries more weight there.

What is worth doing now

Nothing urgent. But three things are worth knowing rather than discovering under deadline:

Know your I-485 filing date and whether you have crossed 180 days. That single fact determines which protections you have. If you do not know it, find it today rather than the week you need it.

Know your priority date’s realistic distance. If you are years out, your plan has to survive job changes, and the grace period is part of how it does that. The adjustment of status guide covers what filing actually unlocks.

Do not restructure anything around a rule that does not exist. No text has been published. Changing jobs, declining an offer, or filing early on the basis of a proposed rule that has not been written down is reacting to a headline.

What we will do

We will update this article when the rule is published in the Federal Register, because that is the first moment its actual contents become knowable — and the first moment a public comment from you would count for anything.

Until then the position is simple: the 60-day grace period is fully in effect, and one procedural step happened that makes it more likely to be proposed for removal in the coming months.

This is general information about a proposed regulation, not legal advice. The interaction between a job loss, nonimmigrant status and a pending adjustment of status is genuinely fact-specific — if you are facing a layoff, talk to an immigration attorney about your situation rather than reasoning from a general rule.