What Does a Contract Immigration Paralegal Cost?

Most attorneys weighing contract help ask the same thing first, and they ask it quietly: what is this going to cost me. It is a fair question, and a hard one to get answered, because almost no contract provider will tell you until you get on a call. I do it differently. My rates are published, every filing type, on one page. So here is the honest version of what contract business immigration paralegal support costs, and more importantly, how to judge whether it is worth it.

The rate is not the number that matters. Your margin is.

Start with the framing that changes everything. The rate you pay a contract paralegal is a fraction of what you bill your client for the same matter. When you hand off an H-1B, an I-140, or a PERM, the paralegal work that goes into it is a slice of what that petition is worth to your firm. So the real question is not what the paralegal costs, it is how much of your margin you keep by not doing the work yourself and by not carrying a full-time salary for it. Priced right, contract support protects your margin instead of eating it.

Two ways the pricing works: flat per filing, or hourly.

Defined work gets a flat rate. An H-1B, an L-1, a PERM, an I-140, an extension, a green card filing: each carries a published flat starting price, because the scope is predictable and you deserve to know the cost before you say yes. Variable work gets billed hourly, at a single rate, because the scope genuinely varies. An RFE response, a thorny consular issue, an overflow stretch where you are not sure how much help you will need: those are more honest to bill by the hour than to force into a flat number that is either a guess or a trap. You can see every published rate, flat and hourly, on the services page.

No retainer is part of the price.

There is no retainer and no minimum. You are only ever committed to the work you confirm in writing. That matters to the math, because it means you are not paying to reserve capacity you may never use. A full-time hire costs you a salary whether this month is slammed or slow. Contract support costs you only the filings you actually hand over. In a practice with seasonal swings, cap season being the obvious one, that difference is the entire point.

What you are actually paying for.

The number buys filing-ready work product from someone who has prepared these petitions for more than seven years, across the full range of business and employment-based immigration, under your supervision and your sign-off. You are not paying for onboarding, benefits, payroll tax, software seats, ramp-up time, or the management overhead of an employee. You are paying for the work, and only the work, done by a specialist who already knows it.

When it is cheaper than the alternative.

Three comparisons make the cost easy to judge. Against a full-time hire, contract support has no salary floor, no benefits, and no idle time, so it wins whenever your volume is uneven. Against doing the work yourself, it wins almost every time, because your billable hour is worth far more than the paralegal rate, and every hour you spend assembling a petition is an hour you are not spending on the work only you can do. Against a cheap generalist who does not know immigration, it wins on rework, because a filing that comes back wrong costs you twice and puts the client at risk. The specialist rate is the one that does not generate a second bill.

The honest answer.

So what does a contract immigration paralegal cost. Less than the alternatives, and you can see the number before you commit. That is the part most providers will not give you, and the part I lead with: every rate published, no retainer, scoped in writing. If you want to see exactly what your filings would run, the full rate menu is on the services page, and if you would rather just talk it through, you can book a short call.