U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has posted an online notice warning that its Pay.gov payment portal will be offline from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, September 26. During that window, applicants will be unable to submit filing fees for forms such as the I-485 adjustment of status or the I-131 re-entry permit. Though only two hours long, the outage coincides with the final weekend of the U.S. government’s fiscal year—a period when many employers race to file last-minute petitions before fee increases or quota resets. Immigration attorneys therefore urge clients to process payments no later than Friday close of business to avoid missing statutory deadlines. If a payment attempt fails during the blackout, USCIS will treat the submission as received on the actual timestamp of successful payment, not the form-upload time. That nuance could create status-maintenance gaps for applicants whose lawful stay depends on timely filing. Employers should remind foreign national staff to capture screen shots of error messages and payment timestamps; these can serve as evidence if a late fee triggers a rejection. The maintenance underscores USCIS’s broader IT modernization challenges. A September GAO report found that 42 percent of agency forms remain paper-based despite a decade-long digital transformation project. Short outages thus have outsized impact because few alternate payment channels exist. Looking forward, USCIS says it plans to add Apple Pay and Google Pay options in 2027, which would provide built-in redundancy via third-party gateways. Until then, applicants remain vulnerable to even brief system downtimes.
