EB-5 receives roughly 10,000 immigrant visas in a normal fiscal year, and that count includes spouses and children as well as investors. Per country limits cap any single nationality at 7 percent of the annual total, about 700 visas, which is why an investor born in mainland China or India can wait years in the unreserved queue while one born in Brazil or Nigeria waits only for paperwork. Every published EB-5 wait time falls out of those two numbers and the size of the average applicant family.
How many EB-5 visas exist each year?
Statute gives the fifth preference 7.1 percent of the worldwide employment based limit. That limit sits at 140,000 in an ordinary year, which produces the familiar 10,000 figure. Unused family sponsored numbers from the previous year roll into the employment based pool, so the real total is not fixed. Employment based numbers rose to roughly 262,000 in fiscal 2021 and roughly 281,000 in fiscal 2022 because consulates were shut during the pandemic and family sponsored numbers went unused.
That windfall has passed. If the average family uses two and a half numbers, 10,000 visas admit roughly 4,000 investors a year worldwide.
Country caps and the 7 percent rule
No country may take more than 7 percent of the annual numbers in a preference category. On 10,000 EB-5 visas that works out at about 700 per nationality. The cap only binds when worldwide demand exceeds supply, and in slack years the surplus falls through to whoever is waiting. Mainland China absorbed the large majority of EB-5 visas for several years in the middle of the 2010s exactly that way, and built the backlog that still dominates the category.
Chargeability follows country of birth rather than citizenship. A spouse born elsewhere can sometimes cross charge the entire family into a shorter queue, which is worth checking before anyone accepts a decade of waiting as a fact. Numbers are also counted when a visa is issued or an adjustment approved rather than when a petition is filed, so an investor can watch a category go current, miss the month through slow paperwork, and find the door shut again.
Your family counts against the same 700
Every dependent consumes a visa number. An investor with a spouse and two children under 21 uses four, so a cap that reads like 700 investors serves fewer than 200 such families in a year. This mechanic explains most of the Chinese backlog and a growing share of the Indian one. Bills to stop counting derivatives have reached Congress more than once. None has become law.
What does the wait look like for India and China?
Mainland China holds the longest unreserved queue by a wide margin, with final action dates that have sat in the middle of the last decade for years at a time. Indian unreserved demand built quickly after 2022 and now carries a cut-off date of its own. Everyone else in the unreserved category has generally been current, which means their wait is adjudication time rather than queue time. Two investors funding the same project on the same day can be six years apart on nothing but place of birth.
Adjudication is a separate delay from the queue, and the two get muddled constantly. USCIS publishes median processing times for each form, and the 2022 Act gave rural petitions priority, which has opened a visible gap between rural and urban files of identical age.
Do not trust any wait quoted in years without a Visa Bulletin month attached to it. Cut-off dates move monthly and occasionally jump backwards by several years in a single step, a phenomenon our page on EB-5 backlogs and retrogression takes apart. Check the month.
Set asides created a second queue
The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 reserved 32 percent of annual numbers for particular project types. Statutory text sits in Public Law 117-103, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022.
- 20 percent rural. The largest reserve, and USCIS gives rural petitions priority processing.
- 10 percent high unemployment. Urban Targeted Employment Area projects.
- 2 percent infrastructure. Public works with a governmental job creating entity. Chronically undersubscribed.
Unused reserved numbers carry into the same reserved category the following fiscal year. Should they go unused a second time, they spill into the unreserved pool. Those rules kept rural filings from India and China current long after the unreserved queue had retrogressed, and they explain why the reserved categories have since begun developing cut-off dates of their own. Rural remains the fast lane.
Track how the minimum investment moved since 1990
Congress created the program in 1990 at $1,000,000, with a reduced $500,000 threshold for a Targeted Employment Area. A regional center pilot followed in 1992. Those numbers held for 29 years.
A rule effective in November 2019 lifted them to $1,800,000 and $900,000. A federal court vacated that rule in June 2021 on procedural grounds and the amounts reverted overnight to $1,000,000 and $500,000. Between 30 June 2021 and 15 March 2022 the regional center program was not authorized at all, and filings stopped. The 2022 Act then set today's $1,050,000 and $800,000 and scheduled the first inflation adjustment for 1 January 2027. Each of those swings produced a filing surge ahead of the deadline, which is the pattern to expect before the grandfathering date of 30 September 2026. Our page on legislative change and EB-5 demand traces the effect on volumes.
Read the Visa Bulletin before trusting an estimate
Two official sources settle most arguments about wait times. The Department of State publishes cut-off dates every month in the monthly Visa Bulletin and country level issuance counts in its immigrant visa statistics. USCIS publishes petition receipts and approvals in its immigration and citizenship data library, alongside current adjudication figures in the case processing times tool.
Reading those together is the only honest way to estimate your own wait. Learn the mechanics from our guide to reading the EB-5 Visa Bulletin and priority dates, then look at who is actually filing in the country breakdown of EB-5 investors. Approval odds are a separate question, covered in our summary of EB-5 approval rates.
A number without a source and a date is marketing.