NCE, JCE, RC and TEA are the four terms that carry most of the weight in EB-5, and once you have them the rest of the vocabulary falls into place. NCE means new commercial enterprise, the company that receives your $800,000. JCE means job creating entity, the business or development that spends the money and produces the jobs. A Regional Center is a USCIS designated sponsor that pools capital from many investors and may count indirect jobs toward the requirement, and TEA means Targeted Employment Area, the rural or high unemployment location that lets you invest $800,000 rather than $1,050,000.
Everything below is the language of an offering document, translated.
Start with these four
- NCE, new commercial enterprise. Any for profit entity formed for the ongoing conduct of lawful business, usually structured as a limited liability company or a limited partnership, whose members are the investors whose subscription money it holds.
- JCE, job creating entity. Whichever business actually employs people. In the loan structure that dominates regional center offerings, the NCE lends pooled capital to a separate JCE controlled by the developer, so the party you invested in and the party building the project are two companies with two balance sheets.
- RC, Regional Center. An entity designated by USCIS on Form I-956 and permitted to count indirect and induced jobs, which is the whole reason most investors use one. Our comparison of regional center and direct EB-5 sets out the trade.
- TEA, Targeted Employment Area. Either a rural area, meaning a place sitting outside any metropolitan statistical area and outside the boundary of any city or town of 20,000 people or more, or an area where unemployment runs at least 150 percent of the national average rate.
Money words
- Capital. Cash and cash equivalents count. Equipment, inventory and other tangible property count too, valued at fair market value, as does indebtedness secured by assets the investor owns. Every dollar has to be lawfully obtained.
- At risk. No guaranteed return of principal and no redemption right. A side letter promising a buyback destroys the requirement just as thoroughly as a clause in the operating agreement would, and assets described in the EB-5 regulation at 8 CFR 204.6 stop being capital the moment the deal becomes a loan owed back to you.
- Sustainment period. Two years, under the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022.
- SOF, source of funds. Documentary proof that the money was earned lawfully. Tax returns and sale contracts going back many years are ordinary here.
- Path of funds. The account by account trail from the original source into the enterprise. Investors regularly treat this as the same exhibit as source of funds, and requests for evidence land on the distinction often enough that experienced attorneys build the two files separately from the beginning.
- Escrow. An account holding subscriptions until a release trigger fires, usually the filing of your petition.
- Redeployment. Putting repaid capital back to work in a new at risk investment when the original project pays off early, which extends your exit by however long the second deployment runs.
- PPM, private placement memorandum. The securities disclosure document. Risk factors live in the back, and that is the section worth reading twice.
- Administrative fee. Charged on top of the investment and commonly running into the tens of thousands of dollars, as covered in our breakdown of what EB-5 costs beyond the $800,000.
How jobs get counted
- Qualifying employee. A US citizen or lawful permanent resident. Certain other immigrants authorized to work also qualify, while the investor and immediate family never do.
- Full time. At least 35 hours a week. Two employees formally sharing one full time position count as a single qualifying job, whereas combinations of part time positions are excluded outright by 8 CFR 204.6(e) even in cases where the weekly hours add up perfectly.
- Direct jobs. Real people on a payroll at the enterprise or at the job creating entity, evidenced by wage reports rather than by a model, and the only category a direct investment case is allowed to count.
- Indirect jobs. Positions modeled in the supply chain, at the firms selling goods and services to the project.
- Induced jobs. Positions modeled from household spending by workers whose pay traces back to the project.
- Job study. An economist's report applying an input output model to project expenditures. Ten jobs per investor is the arithmetic every offering has to satisfy, so a deal raising $40,000,000 from 50 investors needs 500 qualifying positions.
- Expansion. One route to qualifying as a new commercial enterprise, by growing an existing business through a 40 percent increase in net worth or headcount. Passing that test does not excuse the ten job requirement.
Forms you will meet
- I-526. The standalone investor petition, used where no regional center stands behind the deal.
- I-526E. The regional center version, which you may file as soon as the regional center has filed Form I-956F for your specific offering. USCIS must approve that I-956F before your own petition can be approved, though holding your filing back until the approval arrives simply throws away months of priority date for nothing.
- I-485 and DS-260. Two roads to the same green card. Adjustment of status happens inside the United States on Form I-485. Consular processing happens at an embassy abroad on the DS-260.
- I-765 and I-131. Work permit and advance parole, available while an adjustment application sits pending.
- I-829. The petition removing conditions, filed in the 90 day window before the second anniversary of conditional residence, with derivatives included on the principal investor's petition rather than filing their own. Approval removes the conditions as of that second anniversary.
- I-956 family. Form I-956 designates a regional center. I-956F approves a specific investment offering. I-956G is the annual statement, I-956H covers bona fides of persons involved with the center, I-956K registers promoters.
- I-90 and N-400. A ten year green card is renewed on Form I-90. Naturalization comes later on Form N-400.
Words about waiting
- Priority date. The day USCIS properly receives your I-526 or I-526E. Your entire place in the queue flows from it.
- Visa Bulletin. Published monthly by the State Department, showing which priority dates may move forward.
- Final action date. The cutoff at which a visa may actually be issued, a later thing than the date governing when paperwork may be filed.
- Retrogression. A cutoff date moving backward, which happens when demand outruns the supply of numbers partway through a fiscal year.
- Per country limit. No single country may take more than 7 percent of the annual employment based total, a rule found at 8 U.S.C. 1152 rather than in the EB-5 section itself.
- Set-asides. Reserved visas created in 2022. Rural projects hold 20 percent of the annual allocation, high unemployment areas 10 percent, infrastructure 2 percent. Rural filings also receive priority processing, as our rural project case study illustrates.
- Concurrent filing. Submitting the I-485 alongside the I-526E where a visa number is available, which hands an applicant already living in the United States a work permit and travel document years before the petition itself is decided.
- CSPA, Child Status Protection Act. Subtracts petition adjudication time from a child's age. Time spent waiting for a visa number is not subtracted, and for a backlogged country that is where nearly the whole wait sits.
Vocabulary for when things go wrong
- RFE, request for evidence. USCIS asking for more proof, most often on source of funds. Answerable, and common.
- NOID, notice of intent to deny. Considerably more serious than an RFE, because the officer has already reached a negative conclusion and is giving you a single chance to change it.
- Material change. An alteration to the project or the business plan big enough that the approved petition no longer describes what exists.
- Termination and debarment. USCIS ending a regional center's designation. Investors then get a window, 180 days under 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(M), to cure the problem in good faith.
- Integrity Fund. Financed by annual regional center fees of $20,000, reduced to $10,000 for centers with 20 or fewer investors, plus a separate amount collected on each investor petition.
Three dates worth memorizing
Grandfathering protection sits at 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(S), headed Protection from expired legislation, and it covers petitions filed on or before 30 September 2026. Anything lodged by that date keeps being processed even if the regional center program later lapses. Authorization for the program itself currently runs to 30 September 2027. You can read the provision in the current text of 8 U.S.C. 1153.
Then comes 1 January 2027, the date of the first scheduled inflation adjustment to the $800,000 and $1,050,000 thresholds. Budget for a number above $800,000 if your filing slips into 2027.
Definitions here are load bearing, which is why USCIS publishes its own reading of nearly all of them in Volume 6, Part G of the USCIS Policy Manual. When a sponsor's glossary disagrees with it, the Policy Manual wins. For the structure all this vocabulary describes, start with our overview of how the EB-5 program works.