Goodbye “D/S”: What the New Fixed-Stay Rule Means for F-1 Students—and What to Do Now

⚠️ This article was reviewed by Jinwen Liu, Esq., licensed attorney in New York. Last updated: June 19, 2026.

June 17th, 2026. A Tuesday. In a lab outside Pittsburgh, a fifth-year PhD candidate—call her Lin—was loading samples when her phone lit up with a forwarded email from her university's international office. The subject line read: “Important: anticipated changes to F-1 status.” She read it twice and set the pipette down. She had at least two more years of dissertation work ahead of her. On her I-94, in the box that asks how long she may stay, were two letters she had never once worried about: D/S.

That afternoon, the White House Office of Management and Budget finished its review of a Department of Homeland Security rule that would retire those two letters for hundreds of thousands of students like Lin. The rule has not taken effect. As of this writing it has not even been printed in the Federal Register. But the last bureaucratic gate before it becomes real has now swung open—and if you are on an F-1, J-1, or I visa, the era when “stay as long as you're enrolled” was simply a given is ending.

What “D/S” means—and what's replacing it