The government fees appear in the USCIS fee schedule and include the petition itself and optional premium processing where speed matters. Around them sit larger and less visible costs: assembling corporate evidence, certified translation, professional drafting, and the delay and expense of answering a request for further evidence.
The petition fee is rarely the expensive part
Hypothetical example: Thibault is the senior manager that same group wants installed at the head of the acquired American business. Employers tend to price this exercise from the fee schedule and are then surprised. Form G-1055 gives the current filing amounts and should be consulted directly rather than quoted from memory, since they change periodically.
What the schedule cannot show is the work of producing evidence: retrieving corporate records from two jurisdictions, reconstructing a payroll history, obtaining certified translations of French documents, and having counsel draft a description of managerial capacity that reflects what Thibault actually does. A request for further evidence is the cost worth designing against, because it consumes weeks, forces the group to produce the same records under time pressure, and often arrives precisely on the point the file treated lightly. Where the acquisition timetable is fixed, premium processing buys a decision window rather than an approval, and it does not repair a thin organizational chart.