Process and timing

Visa availability approach

Also called VAA, visa availability inventory management approach.

The 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.

What it decides

Once a month the Immigrant Investor Program Office works out which petitions count as having a visa available or soon available, using Chart B of the Department of State Visa Bulletin together with the visas allocated to each country, a dependent multiplier, a will not act rate covering approved petitioners who never take the visa, and the target inventory the State Department keeps for EB-5. It then queues the inventory three ways: no visa available or soon available, ordered first in first out; visa available but the project not yet reviewed; and visa available with the project reviewed or a single investor standalone case, which is the queue petitions are assigned from. Since 18 July 2023 petitions in that third queue are grouped by new commercial enterprise, a window widened in April 2024 to filing dates up to March 2022. An investor entitled to cross charge to a spouse or parent must email the office to have it counted. For post-RIA Form I-526 and Form I-526E, USCIS says that effective 30 March 2026 it generally assigns first in, first out, reaching a Form I-526E only after deciding the associated Form I-956F and taking rural petitions first.

Governed by USCIS Update to Visa Availability Approach for Form I-526, uscis.gov, last reviewed and updated 18 July 2023, for the three workflow queues, the pre-RIA scope and the new commercial enterprise grouping; USCIS EB-5 Questions and Answers, last reviewed and updated 20 April 2026, for the 31 March 2020 start, the cross chargeability procedure, the April 2024 widening of the grouping window and the 30 March 2026 first in first out change; USCIS EB-5 National Stakeholder Engagement transcript of 19 October 2022, the description USCIS links from that Q&A page, for the Chart B calculation, which appears in no other USCIS source; 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(E)(ii)(I) and (II) for the rural priority and for the discretion to process petitions in a manner and order the Secretary establishes.

Related terms

Processing timesA 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.
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.
Priority dateA priority date is the date USCIS properly receives a complete, signed and paid Form I-526 or I-526E, and it fixes the investor's place in the visa queue for their country of chargeability and their EB-5 category.
Dates for FilingDates for Filing is the more permissive of the two cutoff charts in each monthly Visa Bulletin, and its date is normally later than the matching Final Action Dates cutoff, so it opens paperwork earlier in the queue than a visa number is actually ready. For Form I-485 it applies only in the months and categories USCIS designates; the State Department uses it separately to decide when the National Visa Center asks a consular applicant for documents.
Form I-956FForm I-956F, Application for Approval of an Investment in a Commercial Enterprise, is the application a designated regional center must file for each particular investment offering before any investor may petition on that offering.

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