Process and timing

Processing times

Also called USCIS processing times, case processing times.

A USCIS processing time is a figure published for a form: the number of months it took USCIS to complete 80 percent of the cases it adjudicated over the previous six months. It reports finished work rather than the position of any case still waiting, so it moves every month, and USCIS says to treat it as a reference point and not an absolute measure of how long a case will take.

What it decides

Because the figure trails completed work, a number quoted without the month it was read tells an investor very little. For the legacy pre-RIA Form I-526 USCIS also publishes months of inventory, the pending pre-RIA inventory divided by average monthly completions over the past six months, and the two can diverge sharply: USCIS gives March 2024 as an example where the 80th percentile time was 54.5 months while months of inventory was around 14. Behind both sits the Reform and Integrity Act, which set goals of completing adjudications on average within 240 days for a regional center investor petition, 120 days where the investment is in a targeted employment area, 180 days for a project application, 90 days for a project application in a targeted employment area, and 240 days for the Form I-829. Those goals were written as targets for setting the fee, not as deadlines in an individual case, and real times have run years past them.

Governed by USCIS EB-5 Questions and Answers, uscis.gov, last reviewed and updated 20 April 2026, for the 80 percent methodology, the months of inventory calculation, the March 2024 example and the reference point caveat; EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, Pub. L. 117-103, div. BB, sec. 106(b), headed Timely Processing, for the average adjudication goals and their framing as a fee setting instruction. The live figures themselves sit in the USCIS processing times tool at egov.uscis.gov, which returns a Cloudflare block page to any automated fetch and is therefore named but not linked here.

Where this is explained properly

Pages here that go into processing times rather than mentioning it.

Related terms

MandamusMandamus is a suit in federal district court, brought under 28 U.S.C. 1361 and the Administrative Procedure Act, asking a judge to order USCIS to decide a petition it has left pending. It buys an adjudication and nothing more: the court can compel the agency to act but has no power to say what the answer must be, so the decision it forces may be a denial.
Visa availability approachThe visa availability approach is the USCIS method of sorting pending Form I-526 petitions into monthly workflow queues according to whether a visa is available, or soon will be, for the investor's country of chargeability, so that filing order decides only the order within a queue. It began on 31 March 2020 and applies to pre-RIA Form I-526 petitions only.
Expedite requestAn expedite request asks USCIS to take a pending application, petition, request, appeal or motion out of turn and decide it ahead of cases filed earlier. USCIS weighs each one case by case against a list of criteria it calls non-exhaustive, generally requires documentary support, and treats the decision as within its sole discretion.
Priority processing for rural projectsThe statutory instruction that USCIS prioritise the processing and adjudication of EB-5 petitions for rural areas, which moves a case up the assignment queue and changes nothing about the standard for approval.
Request for EvidenceA Request for Evidence, or RFE, is a written USCIS notice that the record as filed does not establish eligibility and that named further evidence must reach USCIS by a stated deadline, which can never exceed twelve weeks and cannot be extended. It is a stage in the adjudication rather than a denial, but USCIS is under no duty to issue one before denying.

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