EB-5 Grandfathering Deadline and Reauthorization: Backlog and Fee Updates

File your EB-5 petition on or before 30 September 2026 and your case stays alive even if Congress never renews the regional center program. That is the grandfathering clause of the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, and it is the one date that should drive your planning. The regional center program itself is authorized only through 30 September 2027. Everything else in the current news cycle, the growing backlog, the fee schedule, the arguments in Washington, sits underneath those two dates.

What the grandfathering clause actually protects

The 2022 statute provides that petitions properly filed on or before 30 September 2026 remain valid for processing, approval and visa issuance even if the regional center program is not extended past its sunset. Filing is the trigger, not approval. You do not need an approved petition by that date. You need one that was properly filed, with the fee paid, tied to a project that already has an I-956F application for approval of an investment in a commercial enterprise on file with USCIS.

Three cautions. Grandfathering protects the petition, not the project: if your regional center fails or the developer defaults, the clause does nothing for your money. A filing that USCIS rejects for a missing signature or a wrong fee is not a filing at all, so a package returned in October 2026 leaves you outside the protection. And grandfathering does not manufacture a visa. You still wait behind everyone ahead of you in your category and country of birth.

The statutory language sits in the enacted text of the reform act, published as Public Law 117-103 on GovInfo. If you are relying on grandfathering, have your attorney read it rather than a marketing summary of it. Our own plain language walkthrough of the law is in The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022: Overview.

Why the 2027 sunset is a genuine risk, not a talking point

People who joined EB-5 after 2022 sometimes assume reauthorization is routine. It is not. The regional center program lapsed on 30 June 2021 and stayed dark until the reform act was signed in March 2022. Petitions sat frozen, projects stalled and investors who had already wired capital had no idea when, or whether, adjudication would resume. That episode is documented in The 2021 Lapse: Suspension of the EB-5 Regional Center Program, and it is the reason the grandfathering clause exists at all.

The politics this time are also different. Senior officials have publicly floated a separate, far more expensive residence by investment concept, sometimes described as a gold card, as a replacement rather than a supplement. Whether that idea goes anywhere is unknowable today. What is knowable is that a program with a hard expiration date and no scheduled renewal vehicle is an uncomfortable thing to be standing under in 2027. We look at the downside cases in Sunset 2027: What If Congress Fails to Extend the RC Program?

The backlog is the real constraint

Since the reform act, filing volume in the reserved categories has climbed steadily, with rural projects and investors born in India driving much of it. Visa issuance has not kept pace. Two things follow. The line in the set-aside categories is getting longer even though those categories still show as current on the monthly bulletin, and the day when country caps bite for China and India is being pushed around by issuance rates rather than by demand alone.

Be skeptical of the arithmetic you see in webinars. Dividing the number of pending investors by the annual visa supply produces wait times measured in decades, which nobody actually experiences. Real queues shrink through abandonment, denials, deaths, category changes, children aging out and unused visas rolling across categories. None of that makes the backlog small. It just means the honest answer to "how long will I wait" is a range, not a number. The mechanics are explained in Backlogs and Retrogression: The EB-5 Visa Queue Explained.

The practical consequence is simple. Your priority date is the most valuable thing you own in this process after the investment itself, and it is created by filing. Every month you spend deciding is a month of queue position you gave away. See Keeping Your Priority Date: Protections for EB-5 Investors for what happens to that date if you later switch projects or refile.

Reading the monthly bulletin without overreacting

The Department of State publishes a visa bulletin every month with two charts, final action dates and dates for filing. A month with no movement is normal and is not a signal about the health of your case. What matters to you is which chart USCIS has told applicants to use for employment based adjustment of status, and whether your category is current on it.

The three set-aside categories created by the reform act, twenty percent rural, ten percent high unemployment and two percent infrastructure, have been current for applicants of every nationality since they were created. Current means an investor already in the United States in valid status can file the immigrant petition and the Form I-485 application to register permanent residence at the same time, and apply for work and travel authorization while they wait. That concurrent filing option is worth real money to families already here on H-1B, L-1 or F-1 status. How the set-asides work is covered in Visa Set-Asides (Rural, Urban, Infrastructure): How They Work, and chart mechanics in The EB-5 Visa Bulletin: How to Interpret Priority Dates.

The unreserved category is a different story. Final action dates for applicants born in mainland China and India sit years in the past, and investors from those countries are generally choosing set-aside projects for that reason alone.

Fees, and the money that is not the investment

USCIS revised its fee schedule in 2024 and EB-5 filings were not spared. Verify current amounts on the USCIS filing fees page before you write any check, because a wrong fee causes rejection, and in 2026 a rejection can cost you the grandfathering date. Regional centers separately pay an annual integrity fund fee scaled to how many investors they sponsor, plus the cost of the Form I-956G annual statement and any audit that follows.

Those costs never appear on your wire instructions, but they come out of the same deal economics that fund your return. Add your own legal fees, the regional center administrative fee, translation and consular costs. A realistic budget is in The Real Cost of EB-5: Fees and Expenses Beyond the Investment.

The 2027 inflation adjustment

The reform act requires the minimum investment amounts to be adjusted for inflation, with the first adjustment on 1 January 2027 and further adjustments every five years after that. Today the numbers are $800,000 in a Targeted Employment Area and $1,050,000 outside one. From 2027 they go up. Combined with the September 2026 grandfathering deadline, that gives anyone still deliberating a fairly narrow and very concrete planning window.

A sequence that works

• Decide on your immigration counsel first, before you look at a single project. The lawyer is not the salesperson.
• Start source of funds documentation immediately. It is almost always the slowest step, and it does not depend on which project you pick.
• Shortlist projects whose I-956F project application is already filed, and ask for the receipt notice rather than a promise.
• Confirm which set-aside category the project claims and what evidence supports the designation.
• File the Form I-526E petition for regional center investors with months to spare, not weeks.
• Put the conditional residence window and the eventual Form I-829 petition to remove conditions in your calendar the day your green card is issued.

Advocacy helps, but it is not your plan

Industry groups are lobbying for reauthorization and for more visa numbers. That work matters to the program, and it should not affect your personal timeline by a single day. Treat legislative outcomes as weather, not as a schedule. The part you control is filing early enough that the 2027 debate does not decide your family's status. For official program conditions and adjudication policy, see the USCIS EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program overview and the Policy Manual chapter on immigrant investors.

Related reading

• Sunset 2027: What If Congress Fails to Extend the RC Program?
• Backlogs and Retrogression: The EB-5 Visa Queue Explained
• The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022: Overview