The programme

Regional Center Program

Also called RC program, regional center pathway, Immigrant Investor Program.

The Regional Center Program is the branch of EB-5 under which an investor files through a designated regional center and may count indirectly created jobs toward the ten-job requirement, and it is authorized through 30 September 2027.

What it decides

It is the program, not one of the centers inside it. Congress created it in 1992 as section 610 of Public Law 102-395, where it was called the Immigrant Investor Pilot Program. The RIA repealed that section and re-enacted the authority at 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(E), under which visas are made available through 30 September 2027 to investors pooling their capital in a program involving a regional center designated by the Department of Homeland Security. The dividing line from standalone EB-5 is job counting rather than pooling. Only an investor petitioning under this subparagraph may satisfy the ten-job requirement with indirect jobs, and 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(E)(iv) caps that at 90 percent, or at 75 percent where the jobs come from construction lasting under two years. Pooling by itself needs no regional center, since 8 CFR 204.6(g)(1) already lets more than one investor rely on the same new commercial enterprise. If the authority lapses again, 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(S) directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to keep processing both investor petitions and petitions to remove conditions that were filed on or before 30 September 2026, forbids denying them on the ground that the program expired, and forbids suspending or terminating the allocation of visas to beneficiaries of approved petitions.

Governed by 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(E), (E)(iv) and (S) (https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title8-section1153&num=0&edition=prelim); Public Law 117-103, Division BB, section 103(a) repealing section 610, section 103(b)(1) enacting subparagraph (E), and section 108 enacting subparagraph (S) (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-117publ103/html/PLAW-117publ103.htm); 8 CFR 204.6(m) and 8 CFR 204.6(g)(1) (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-204/subpart-A/section-204.6), noting that 8 CFR 204.6 predates the RIA, still calls this the Immigrant Investor Pilot Program, and has not been conformed to the statute, which governs where the two diverge.

Where this is explained properly

Pages here that go into regional center program rather than mentioning it.

Related terms

Regional centerA regional center is an economic unit, public or private, that USCIS has designated to sponsor pooled EB-5 investment within a defined, contiguous and limited geographic area, and it is the only route on which a petition may count indirect and induced jobs.
EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 is Division BB of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, Public Law 117-103, approved on 15 March 2022, and it rewrote the EB-5 category in the Immigration and Nationality Act.
8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5), cited in filings as INA 203(b)(5), is the statute that creates the EB-5 category and, since the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, carries the investment amounts, the visa set-asides, the job creation caps and grandfathering in the statute itself. It runs from subparagraph (A) to subparagraph (S).
EB-5 Immigrant Investor ProgramEB-5 is the employment-based fifth preference immigrant visa category: a foreign national who invests the required capital in a new US commercial enterprise receives permanent residence, granted first on a two year conditional basis, and keeps it by proving that the investment created full-time jobs for at least ten qualifying US workers. It leads to residence, not citizenship.

Checked against primary sources on 6 August 2026. Back to the glossary