Visas and the queue

Carryover of unused reserved visas

Also called Carryover, Unused reserved visas.

Carryover is the rule at 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(B)(i)(II) that keeps an unused rural, high unemployment or infrastructure EB-5 visa inside its own reserved category for one more fiscal year, after which any number still unissued goes to the unreserved EB-5 pool and is lost to the reservation for good.

What it decides

The subclause has two items and they work in sequence. Item (aa), headed Carryover, provides that at the end of each fiscal year any unused visas reserved for one of the three categories remain available within that same category for the immediately succeeding fiscal year. Item (bb), headed General availability, provides that numbers still not issued by the end of that second year are made available to qualified immigrants described in subparagraph (A), which is the unreserved pool. So a reserved category can carry up to two years of supply at once, which is part of why a young set-aside queue holds far more room than one year's reservation suggests. It also explains why that room is temporary. Nothing rolls forward a third year, nothing rolls sideways from one reserved category into another, and the numbers that fall out do not come back. Carryover is not the same thing as spillover, the separate mechanism by which unused numbers move between preference categories.

Governed by 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(B)(i)(II), items (aa) Carryover and (bb) General availability, quoted verbatim from the govinfo US Code 2024 HTML for section 1153 and cross-checked on uscode.house.gov and Cornell LII. No USCIS or Department of State page states the rule; it is read straight off the statute.

Related terms

Visa set-asidesThe reserved slices of each fiscal year's EB-5 visa numbers: 20 percent for investment in a rural area, 10 percent for a high unemployment area and 2 percent for infrastructure projects, so 32 percent reserved and 68 percent unreserved.
Unreserved visasThe 68 percent of each fiscal year's EB-5 visa numbers that sit outside the rural, high unemployment and infrastructure set-asides, and go to investors whose project qualifies for none of the three.
BacklogBacklog is the demand already waiting ahead of an investor in the same visa category, the same country of chargeability and, since the 2022 set-asides, the same reserved or unreserved pool, which must be worked through before a visa number reaches them.
RetrogressionVisa retrogression is a Visa Bulletin cut-off date moving backward, so a priority date that was current one month is not current the next, because demand in a category or country outran the visa numbers available.

Checked against primary sources on 10 August 2026. Back to the glossary