USCIS Will Now Only Accept Credit Card and ACH Payments for Filing Fees

This past October, USCIS transitioned away from accepting checks and money orders as payment for form filing fees. USCIS now requires that all payments be made with a credit card via Form G-1450 or with an ACH debit from a bank account via Form G-1650. 

The credit card payment form has historically been unreliable due to manual data entry errors at USCIS Service Centers and Lockboxes, and IDC is still seeing some credit card forms being rejected for unknown reasons. To ensure the highest likelihood that USCIS accepts your payment forms, we recommend the following precautions: 

• If you are planning to make an ACH payment, confirm: (1) your bank will permit the US Department of Homeland Security to debit funds from your account by removing the ACH debit block; (2) your bank will permit the Department of Homeland Security’s Agency Location Codes (the Location Codes are available on USCIS’s filing fee webpage under “ACH Debit Block"); and (3) any daily maximum charge allowance is set higher than the total fees authorized. 

• If you are planning to make a credit card payment, confirm: (1) the filing fees can be covered by your card’s currently available line of credit; (2) any daily maximum charge allowance is set higher than the total fees authorized; and (3) your credit card company has noted the following entities as authorized parties so that your payment is not flagged as fraudulent: (a) USCIS; (b) US Department of Homeland Security; and (c) US Department of Treasury Pay.gov Trusted Collection Service (TCS).