The Department of Homeland Security's proposal to charge for Optional Practical Training sets two deadlines in a single DATES line, and they are a month apart.

DATES: Comments must be received on or before November 9, 2026. Information collection comment period: Comments on the information collection described in the Paperwork Reduction Act section below must be received by December 7, 2026.

The rule proposes a $70,000 fee, payable by the school, the first time it recommends an F-1 student for Optional Practical Training, and $30,000 for each period after that. The public has until November 9 to say anything about that. It has until December 7 to say something about the paperwork that would record the payment.

The document calls the shorter window a "30-day public comment period" in its own text. November 9 is thirty-two days after publication, which is that same window landed on a weekday: thirty days from October 8 falls on Saturday, November 7, and November 9 is the Monday after. December 7 is sixty days after publication. Both of those sums are this desk's arithmetic on the printed dates — the document prints neither.

Where the sixty comes from

The longer window is set in the rule's Paperwork Reduction Act section: "Comments are encouraged and will be accepted for 60 days from the publication date of the proposed rule." The collection is the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, and what the rule would change about it is small: the agency calls the change a revision making non-substantive edits to the collection instrument, and the people affected are designated school officials, who would update the system to confirm their school had paid the fee.

Sixty is the number the Paperwork Reduction Act names. Under 44 U.S.C. 3506(c)(2)(A), an agency shall, "except as provided under subparagraph (B) or section 3507(j), provide 60-day notice in the Federal Register, and otherwise consult with members of the public and affected agencies concerning each proposed collection of information" — to evaluate whether the collection is necessary, to evaluate the accuracy of its burden estimate, to improve its clarity, and to minimize the burden on the people who have to respond.

Now read the clause that subparagraph opens with, because it is the part that decides which provision governs a collection like this one. Subparagraph (B) covers "any proposed collection of information contained in a proposed rule", and it names no number of days at all: it tells the agency to "provide notice and comment through the notice of proposed rulemaking for the proposed rule", for those same four purposes. The Office of Management and Budget's implementing regulation says it plainly. Under 5 CFR 1320.8(d)(3), an agency "need not separately seek such public comment" for a collection contained in a proposed rule, so long as the rulemaking notice solicits comments for those purposes — which this one does.

So on the text read here, the sixty is not a floor Congress laid under a collection that sits inside a proposed rule. It is the agency's number, the same as the thirty.

Nor does the statute on the other side supply one. The Administrative Procedure Act's rulemaking section, 5 U.S.C. 553, requires notice in the Federal Register and an "opportunity to participate in the rule making through submission of written data, views, or arguments", with or without an oral presentation. It names no number of days either. Both windows in this document are numbers the agency wrote.

The one sentence the rule spends on the thirty days

The agency does say something about the thirty, and that matters: an explained choice and an unexplained one are not the same finding. One sentence, in the rule's discussion of reliance interests, is the only passage in its text that touches the length of the comment period at all.

DHS believes that a 30-day public comment period, a delayed effective date, and prospectively applying the new fees provide ample time and notice for F-1 nonimmigrant students to apply for a change of status, depart the United States, or make any other necessary arrangements.

It is a real justification, and it answers a real question — whether people who planned around the old rules are being given room to adjust. The comment period appears there as one of three things that together "provide ample time and notice for F-1 nonimmigrant students". The other two are the delayed effective date and prospective application, and both of those are about what happens after the rule is final.

What the sentence measures the thirty days against, then, is how long it takes a student to change status or leave the country. Not how long it takes anyone — a student, a university, an employer, an economist — to read a proposal that runs from page 64566 to page 64600 of the Register, work through its fee schedule and its economic analysis, and write something an agency has to respond to.

Those are two different uses of a deadline. One is notice: here is what is coming, arrange yourself. The other is consultation: tell us what we have got wrong. The rule's sentence is about the first, and comment on the rule itself goes in the thirty-day window.

The same issue, the other number

Nothing here says the thirty days broke a rule. The Administrative Procedure Act names no minimum, the fee is a proposal, nothing is in force, and an agency that takes thirty days of comment and then reads them has consulted the public.

But the same day's Federal Register carried a second proposal from the same department. U.S. Customs and Border Protection's low-value shipments rule would modify the filing requirements for informal entries of goods valued at $2,500 or less, establish a new electronic informal entry type for merchandise arriving through the mail, and impose bonding requirements on certain informal entries. Its DATES line reads, in full: "Comments on the rule must be received on or before December 7, 2026."

Sixty days, with no explanation offered. The same search that found the fee rule's one sentence finds nothing in the Customs document about the length of its own period; the phrase "comment period" does not appear in it.

The rest of that day's issue is not uniform, and thirty days should not be read as an outlier of one. By this desk's count from the Register's own index, 133 documents published on October 8, eight of them proposed rules. Two of those eight close November 9 — this fee rule and an Environmental Protection Agency proposal on Arizona's air quality plan. Three Federal Aviation Administration airworthiness directives close November 23. Two close December 7: the Customs rule and a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposal on clinical laboratories. The eighth, an Agriculture marketing order for almonds grown in California, prints a referendum window rather than a comment deadline. A NHTSA notice — a notice, not a proposed rule — announcing an intent to form a negotiated rulemaking committee on vehicle lighting also closes November 9, with committee applications due at 5 p.m. Eastern that day.

What does not vary is the pairing. One department, one day, two of its own proposals, and a month between their deadlines.

What a reader can do with this

A comment period is a number an agency writes, in a line it drafts, in a document it controls.

The practical part is short. If you intend to file on the fee, the date is November 9, 2026, in docket ICEB-2026-0100, and the rule says comments "must be submitted online by 11:59 p.m. ET of the last day of the comment period." If what you have to say is about the information collection rather than the fee, you have until December 7 — and that is not a loophole. It is a separate window with a separate subject: the rule asks that comments on the collection address one or more of four points, every one of them about the collection's necessity, its burden, its clarity and its cost, and it routes them to the agency's docket or to OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The longest window in this rulemaking is not the one for the $70,000.

A $70,000 fee gets a 30-day comment period; the paperwork that would record it gets 60, in one DATES line

Where the sixty comes from

The one sentence the rule spends on the thirty days

The same issue, the other number

What a reader can do with this

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