Skip to content
HelloStampedSign in
← What changed
ConfirmedAs of September 16, 2026

In force now

A court has blocked the duration-of-status rule, and D/S still applies

On 14 September 2026, one day before it would have taken effect, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts postponed the effective date of the DHS rule that would have replaced “duration of status” (D/S) with a fixed admission date for F, J and I visa holders. Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV granted relief under section 705 of the Administrative Procedure Act “to the extent that it seeks to postpone the effective date of the Final Rule”, and made that relief nationwide rather than limiting it to the colleges and unions who sued — writing that “nationwide relief … prevents chaos and confusion that a party-specific order would inevitably generate”. Duration of status is therefore still the rule, everywhere in the United States. The four-year cap, the fixed admission date, the Form I-539 extension requirement and the 30-day departure period are all postponed with it. None of them took effect on 15 September.

In force since September 14, 2026

This date is being challenged in court and could move.

What has not changed

The rule still exists. The court postponed it; it did not strike it down, and it said so plainly — the plaintiffs also asked for the rule to be vacated, and that part of their motion was “DENIED without prejudice to its renewal”. The government may appeal, and the case continues. Nothing about your own status changed on 15 September, and nothing changed on the 14th either: your current I-20, your I-94 and your programme end date are exactly what they were, and nobody has had a stay shortened or extended by any of this. The rule never touched H-1B, H-4, L-1 or a pending green card, and the order does not change the eligibility rules for CPT, OPT or STEM OPT, the 180-day automatic extension for a timely STEM OPT filing, or H-1B cap-gap. This is not a new benefit and not an amnesty. It is the arrangement that has been in place since 1978 carrying on unchanged.

What to do

Nothing to file, and nothing to cancel. If you brought a filing, a trip or a programme decision forward to get ahead of 15 September, none of that work is wasted — but the deadline it was racing is gone, so speak to your DSO before spending a fee on anything you had not otherwise planned. Keep the PDF of your current I-20 and I-94 that the earlier alert asked you to save: it costs nothing and those documents are much harder to retrieve later. If a university office, an employer or a portal still tells you that your stay now ends on a fixed date, the signed order is the first citation on this alert and is the document to put in front of them.

Next update

If the government appeals to the First Circuit, or if the district court rules further on vacatur — the plaintiffs may renew that request, and the court left the door open to it. We will also update this if DHS says how it is treating any I-20 or I-94 issued in the days either side of 15 September.

Sources