Money and structure

Rural area

Also called rural TEA, rural project.

One of the two routes into a targeted employment area: an area that is both outside every metropolitan statistical area and outside the outer boundary of any city or town of 20,000 or more people.

What it decides

The test is factual and both halves must hold: outside every metropolitan statistical area as designated by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and outside the outer boundary of any city or town with a population of 20,000 or more on the most recent decennial census. The regulation and the USCIS Policy Manual say "standard metropolitan statistical area" and abbreviate it MSA, which is the same list. Nobody designates a rural area, and no state has ever had the power to: state designation, available only for petitions filed before 15 March 2022, reached high unemployment areas alone. A rural project carries the $800,000 investment amount, which holds until the first inflation adjustment on 1 January 2027, and the 20 percent rural visa set-aside. Congress also told USCIS to prioritize processing petitions for rural areas, but read that narrowly. Under the case management approach USCIS published as effective 30 March 2026, the separate first in, first out rural queue holds Form I-526E petitions from regional center investors. Rural standalone Form I-526 petitions sit in the second queue, which USCIS works once the I-526E rural queue is empty or once it decides it has cleared enough of that queue, and which it may sub-group by visa category. Rural status is tested at the time of investment, so an area that qualified for an earlier investor in the same project may have stopped qualifying.

Governed by 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(D)(vii) for the definition, (b)(5)(B)(i)(I)(aa) for the 20 percent set-aside, (b)(5)(C)(ii) and (C)(iii)(II) for the $800,000 amount and its 1 January 2027 adjustment, (b)(5)(D)(viii) for rural as a targeted employment area tested at the time of investment, (b)(5)(E)(ii)(I) for rural priority processing; 8 CFR 204.6(e) for the definition only, since 8 CFR 204.6(f)(2) still carries the superseded $900,000 figure; USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 6, Part G, Chapter 2, Section A(5) (https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-g-chapter-2); USCIS EB-5 Questions and Answers, Inventory Management, last reviewed 20 April 2026 (https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent-workers/employment-based-immigration-fifth-preference-eb-5/eb-5-questions-and-answers)

Where this is explained properly

Pages here that go into rural area rather than mentioning it.

Related terms

Targeted employment areaA targeted employment area, or TEA, is a rural area or an area the Secretary of Homeland Security has designated as a high unemployment area, and an EB-5 investment placed in one requires $800,000 of capital rather than $1,050,000. An investment in an infrastructure project reaches the same $800,000 by a separate route without being a TEA.
High unemployment areaOne of the two routes into a targeted employment area: a census tract, or contiguous census tracts, that the Secretary of Homeland Security designates as a high unemployment area because the weighted average unemployment rate across them is at least 150 percent of the national average. The other route is a rural area.
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.
Infrastructure projectA second route to the $800,000 EB-5 investment amount, available only through the regional center program, in which a governmental entity is itself the job-creating entity and contracts with a regional center or new commercial enterprise to receive the investors' capital as financing for maintaining, improving, or constructing a public works project.

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