Money and structure

Targeted employment area

Also called TEA, targeted employment area designation.

A 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.

What it decides

There are exactly two routes into TEA status. A rural area is any area outside a 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 at the most recent decennial census. A high unemployment area is a census tract, or contiguous census tracts, that the Secretary of Homeland Security designates because the weighted average unemployment rate is at least 150 percent of the national average, and the Secretary may fold in a directly adjacent tract. Since 15 March 2022 nobody else may make that designation, not another federal official and not a state or local government, so a state TEA letter issued under the old rules no longer supports the $800,000 figure. The lower amount turns on where the business sits, not where the investor sits. The new commercial enterprise must be principally doing business in the TEA, and where the investment runs through a regional center it is the job creating entity whose location controls. Timing is not simply the date of the investment. USCIS asks whether the area qualified at the time the investment was made or at the time the petition was filed, whichever came first. For petitions filed on or after 15 March 2022 the designation is made on the standalone Form I-526, or as part of the regional center's Form I-956F for a regional center project, and it lasts two years from the I-956F filing date for a regional center investor or from the time of investment for a standalone investor, renewable for further two year periods. An investor who has already put in the TEA amount does not have to add capital if the designation later expires, and does not have to show the area is still a TEA when Form I-829 is filed. An infrastructure project is the other way to $800,000. It is a second route to the same figure rather than a kind of TEA, and only a regional center investor can use it; a standalone investor cannot. Both figures adjust for inflation for the first time on 1 January 2027 and every five years after that, at which point the TEA figure is set at exactly 75 percent of the standard figure.

Governed by 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(D)(vii) and (viii) (rural area and targeted employment area defined); (b)(5)(B)(ii) (designation of a high unemployment area, prohibition on designation by anyone else, two year duration, no additional investment on expiry); (b)(5)(C)(i) to (iii) ($1,050,000, $800,000 for a targeted employment area or infrastructure project, first adjustment 1 January 2027 with the lower figure then at 75 percent of the standard); (b)(5)(D)(iv) (infrastructure project). USCIS Policy Manual Volume 6, Part G, Chapter 2, Section A, Subsection 5, Targeted Employment Area, and Subsection 6, Infrastructure Projects, at 6 USCIS-PM G.2(A)(5) and (A)(6), https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-g-chapter-2 8 CFR 204.6(e) may be cited for the rural area definition only, and 8 CFR 204.6(j)(6)(i) for the rural evidence. The section was last amended on 3 August 2020 (85 FR 46922) and has never been rewritten for the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022. Its TEA definition still describes the pre-2022 regime, and 8 CFR 204.6(f) still carries $900,000 and $1,800,000, amounts USCIS records as vacated in Behring Regional Center LLC v. Wolf, 544 F. Supp. 3d 937 (N.D. Cal. 2021). Never quote a capital amount from 8 CFR 204.6.

Where this is explained properly

Pages here that go into targeted employment area rather than mentioning it.

Related terms

Rural areaOne 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.
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.
High employment areaA high employment area is a part of a metropolitan statistical area that, at the time of investment, is not a targeted employment area and has an unemployment rate significantly below the national average. It is the statutory opposite of a high unemployment area, but it carries no price premium today: an investment there requires the standard $1,050,000, the same as any investment outside a targeted employment area or infrastructure project.
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.
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.

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