Filing Form I-130 costs $535 and it can be paid with a check or money order. No matter how you pay, the following two guidelines must be followed:
The payment must come from a bank or financial institution in the United States and be payable in U.S. dollars; and
The payment must be made payable to: U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This must be spelled out and cannot be abbreviated.
If you choose to pay by check, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will use your account information on the check to electronically take the money from your account. Typically, the debit will take 24 hours and will show up on your regular account statement.
Please note that you will not receive your original check back. Instead, it will be destroyed and the government will keep a copy of the check on file.
I used a check when I submitted the first application. It was nice to see how quickly the USCIS took the funds out of the account. I was able to see that they had actually received the application and had begun working on it.
@liweiyao123 you cannot pay anything during the USCIS interview. DO NOT BRING A CHECK TO THE INTERVIEW. You will not even receive an interview until after you have paid the filing fee anyways.
@will_nguyen131313 I have never seen these fees change in the past 4 years that my family and I have been going through this process.
Remember that this is just the Form I-130 fee of $420. Expect to pay $2,000~ in US government fees. Then a couple thousand dollars more in lawyer fees.
The check for my green card I just stapled to the front of my green card application. I paid for all of the application with one check. So, basically I paid for the government fees for the I-485 government fee and the I-130 government fee and the biometrics exam fee all in the same check. It was better that way.
Confirmed. If you want to make sure that you are submitting the correct application fees, double-check, because the fees have increased. It is more expensive now to submit the Form I-130. The USCIS has increased the fee for the I-130.
