United States · Residency by investment
Employment-Based Fifth Preference Immigrant Investor Programme
These amounts have not changed since the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act took effect in March 2022. The threshold is USD 800,000 for a targeted employment area, meaning rural or high-unemployment, or a qualifying infrastructure project. The standard threshold is USD 1,050,000. Neither figure has been adjusted for inflation in 2025 or 2026. The Act's inflation mechanism runs on a five-year cycle. The first adjustment is scheduled for 1 January 2027, based on CPI-U cumulative inflation since enactment. Industry projections put the targeted employment area figure near USD 900,000 and the standard figure near USD 1.2M, but no official number exists yet. Two separate deadlines matter here. 30 September 2026 is the last day an I-526/I-526E filing can earn statutory grandfathering. 30 September 2027 is when Regional Center Program authorisation itself expires, unless it is reauthorised.
For a UHNW family with no other US connection, EB-5 rural remains the only priced, rules-based green card available. The 30 September 2026 grandfathering cliff means the decision window is now measured in weeks, not years. Filing on or before that date locks in today's USD 800,000, today's rules, and statutory protection if Congress lets the Regional Center Program lapse in 2027.
Qualifying routes
This category gets statutory priority adjudication at USCIS, plus a 20% reserved visa pool. As of the July 2026 Visa Bulletin, all reserved categories are Current for every country, including India and China.
This costs the same as rural, but comes with half the visa pool and no statutory priority processing. It is strictly worse, unless the project itself is better.
Almost no qualifying projects exist in practice. The July 2026 NPRM proposes that only DHS may designate infrastructure projects. It would also bar standalone investors, meaning those outside a regional centre, from this category.
This draws only on the 68% unreserved pool, which happens to be the same pool that is retrogressed for India and China. It is rarely the right choice.
The facts
- Minimum investment
- $800k
- Total landed cost
- Budget USD 800k for the investment itself, plus roughly USD 70–90k in non-investment costs for a family. That includes a regional-centre administrative fee, typically USD 50–70k, the USCIS I-526E filing fee of USD 11,160, I-485 or consular processing, and USD 25–50k for immigration and securities counsel.
- Route type
- Residency by investment
- Timeline
- 1–5.1 years (Rural I-526E petitions are the fast lane. Reported averages run around 8–10 months in 2026, though USCIS itself posts a range of 11.5–36.5 months. High-unemployment petitions run 17–52 months. Unreserved petitions run 30.5–61 months. Add consular or adjustment processing time on top of that, then a 2-year conditional green card before filing I-829 (around 20 months).)
- Physical presence
- There is no presence requirement to file. But the conditional and permanent green card must be maintained. In practice, spending more than six months a year outside the US invites questions about abandonment. A re-entry permit (Form I-131) is required for absences over one year.
- Family
- SpouseUnmarried children under 21 at the time of filing, with some protection under the Child Status Protection Act
- Permanent residency
- Conditional permanent residence follows approval. The conditions are removed via I-829 after the 2-year sustainment period.
- Citizenship
- 5 years of permanent residence, with physical presence in the US for at least half that period, plus continuous residence.
- Language test
- English reading, writing and speaking, plus a US civics test (N-400). Age and disability waivers exist.
- Dual citizenship
- Permitted
- Requirements
- Put USD 800,000 (TEA) or USD 1,050,000 at risk in a new commercial enterprise, and keep it there for at least two years.Create or preserve 10 full-time jobs for US workers. Regional centre investors can count indirect and induced jobs toward that total.Documented lawful source and path of funds. This is the single most common cause of RFEs.No security or criminal inadmissibility issues.
- There is a grandfathering cliff here. An I-526E filed on or after 1 October 2026 carries no statutory protection. If Congress does not reauthorise the Regional Center Program by 30 September 2027, petitions like these could be frozen, just as they were during the 2021 lapse.
- The price rises on 1 January 2027 by statute, not by discretion. There is no lobbying this away.
- Retrogression by country of birth is severe and getting worse. India's unreserved EB-5 category became unavailable for the rest of FY2026 in the July 2026 Visa Bulletin. China's unreserved category sits at a December 2016 final action date. Only the reserved set-asides remain current, and with an estimated 15,000+ investors already in the rural pipeline, rural is expected to retrogress first, probably within months rather than years.
- Redeployment risk is the least understood exposure here. Once the project repays the loan, the new commercial enterprise must keep your capital at risk and in commerce, so it gets redeployed into something else, often for years, chosen by the fund manager rather than by you. USCIS guidance on scope and timing is loose. A retrogressed Indian or Chinese investor can have capital redeployed for a decade.
- The July 2026 NPRM, published 1 July 2026 with comments closing roughly 1 September 2026, would create a third tier: a USD 1,400,000 amount for high employment areas. It would also start the two-year sustainment clock at the date of investment rather than the petition filing date, and impose regional centre penalties of up to 10% of investor capital. This is a proposed rule only. It is not law.
- The USD 800,000 is genuinely at risk. There is no guaranteed return and no principal protection. Several post-2008 regional centre projects returned nothing.
- Approval of the petition does not mean approval of the project. Look into the developer, the escrow arrangement, the job-creation model and the exit plan on your own, separate from the migration agent, who is usually paid by the project.