Money and structure
Capital account
Also called member capital account, partner capital account.
The ledger a limited partnership or LLC keeps for each investor, recording capital contributed, profit and loss allocated, and anything distributed back out. It is an accounting term, not an immigration one.
What it decides
Not an immigration term, and USCIS does not define it: the phrase appears nowhere in 8 CFR 204.6, 8 CFR 216.6, the USCIS Policy Manual or the EB-5 regulations. The accounting comes from partnership tax law, where 26 CFR 1.704-1(b)(2)(iv)(b) increases a capital account by money and the fair market value of property contributed and by allocations of income and gain, and reduces it by distributions and by allocations of loss and deduction. It earns a place in an EB-5 glossary because it is where two things USCIS does test become visible: that the capital was actually contributed to the new commercial enterprise, and that it stayed there. On the immigration side, 8 CFR 216.6(a)(4)(ii) accepts an audited financial statement or other probative evidence that the investor invested or was actively in the process of investing the requisite capital, and (a)(4)(iii) asks for evidence the investment was sustained, including bank statements, invoices, receipts, contracts, business licenses, Federal or State income tax returns and Federal or State quarterly tax statements. Read (a)(4)(iii) with care, because it has not been rewritten since the RIA. Its standard, capital continuously maintained over the two years of conditional residence, governs petitions filed before 15 March 2022. For petitions filed on or after 15 March 2022, 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(A)(i) instead requires only that the capital be expected to remain invested for not less than two years, and USCIS reads that period as starting on the date the full amount of qualifying investment is made to the new commercial enterprise and placed at risk, including being made available to the job creating entity. DHS proposed on 2 July 2026 to rewrite the regulation to match, and to add a requirement that the capital still be at risk on the filing date, but that was a proposal open for comment on 5 August 2026 and is not yet law.
Where this is explained properly
Pages here that go into capital account rather than mentioning it.
Related terms
- Sources and usesThe table in an EB-5 business plan or offering that lists every source of money for a project against every category it will be spent on, with the two columns totalling the same figure.
- Preferred returnA claim to be paid first out of an EB-5 project's distributions, ahead of the sponsor, up to a stated rate. Immigration law does not define the term, which EB-5 borrows from private fund practice, and the rate an offering quotes is a priority rather than a promise: capital carrying a guaranteed rate of return is excluded from the statutory meaning of capital. Rates quoted in EB-5 offerings typically sit far below what a commercial lender or ordinary equity investor in the same project would require.
- Redemption and buy-back optionA redemption or put right is a contract term letting the investor demand that the new commercial enterprise repay or repurchase the investment, and by statute it takes the money out of the definition of capital. A buy back option is the mirror image, exercisable by the enterprise rather than the investor, and it is the one such term the statute allows.
- TrancheA slice of an EB-5 offering that closes separately from the rest, so a project raises its capital in stages rather than in a single closing. The word is market jargon: no statute, regulation or USCIS policy defines it, so a tranche means only what the offering documents make it mean.
Checked against primary sources on . Back to the glossary