An entrepreneur can earn a green card by investing $800,000 in a company they build and run themselves, provided that company employs 10 full time US workers on real payroll within roughly two years of conditional residence beginning. That is the direct EB-5 route. No economist models the jobs for you, and no regional center absorbs the operating risk on your behalf. Every one of those 10 positions has to be a W-2 employee working at least 35 hours a week, which is a far heavier burden than wiring money into a pooled fund, and it explains why most investors never take this path at all. The threshold rises to $1,050,000 if the business sits outside a Targeted Employment Area.
What follows is a composite drawn from how direct cases typically run, rather than the file of one named investor.
The fork every founder hits first
Two doors. Behind the first, an EB-5 regional center pools your $800,000 with money from other investors and lends the total to a developer, then counts the indirect and induced jobs an economist attributes to that construction spending. Behind the second, you form your own new commercial enterprise and file Form I-526, the standalone investor petition instead of the regional center version. Every job is then proved from payroll.
Regional centers carry most of the volume for one reason. The job math is easier and the investor stays passive.
Founders choose direct anyway when the business itself is the point. Someone who was going to open a specialty manufacturing plant regardless would rather own the plant than hold a limited partnership unit in another developer's hotel. The trade is control in exchange for evidence, and the evidence never stops being your problem.
Year one goes to source of funds
Before a single employee is hired, the money has to be explained. USCIS wants an unbroken trail from the origin of the funds into the enterprise's bank account, and the standard applies to a gift or a loan exactly as it applies to salary or the sale of an apartment. Several years of tax returns. Bank statements covering every intermediate account. Sale contracts and independent valuations, plus evidence of currency conversion where local exchange controls apply.
Borrowed capital is allowed when the loan is secured by assets the investor personally owns and the investor is personally and primarily liable for repayment. Collateral cannot be the enterprise's own assets.
Translation costs alone surprise people. A source of funds exhibit running to several hundred pages is ordinary rather than excessive, and a thin one is the single most reliable predictor of a request for evidence.
Ten jobs have to be real people
The count is unforgiving in ways founders consistently underestimate. Independent contractors do not count. The investor does not count, and neither does the investor's spouse or children. Two half time roles do not combine into one qualifying position unless the position itself is genuinely full time and shared.
Evidence at the Form I-829 stage means payroll records and I-9 files. Federal Form 941 quarterly returns and state unemployment filings carry most of the weight, because they were filed with a different agency for a different purpose and are therefore hard to manufacture after the fact.
Build those files as you go. Reconstructing three years of employment history during the 90 day window before a conditional card expires is a miserable exercise, and it is when otherwise sound cases fall apart.
One more constraint catches expansion plans. Buying an existing business qualifies only where the purchase is followed by a restructuring, or by an expansion that lifts net worth or headcount by at least 40 percent, the threshold written into 8 CFR 204.6.
Where direct cases usually break
Slow hiring is the classic failure. A business plan promising 12 employees by month 18 is easy to write and hard to honor once a lease slips or a key supplier fails. USCIS reads that plan as a commitment.
Idle capital is the second failure. Money sitting in the company's bank account has not been deployed into the business, and a large unspent balance at the I-829 stage invites the argument that the capital was never genuinely at risk. Spend it on what the plan said you would spend it on.
Third comes the management requirement. A direct investor must be engaged in the enterprise, at minimum through policy formation, so an absentee owner has a problem that no amount of profit will fix. Investors who have already fought through a difficult adjudication describe the pattern well in our account of how one investor rescued a near failed EB-5 case.
When is a regional center the better call?
When you do not actually want a job. That sounds flippant and it is the honest answer, because a regional center investment is a financial position in which the sponsor carries the operating risk while you carry the credit risk. People searching for the best EB-5 regional centers are usually looking for the wrong object. There is no league table that survives contact with a specific project, since a strong sponsor can still put out a weak deal.
Judge the project first and the brand second. A handful of checks are concrete:
- Is the regional center registered on Form I-956 and current with its annual Form I-956G statement?
- Has this specific project been filed on Form I-956F, the project application, and has USCIS approved it?
- How many I-829 petitions have been approved across the sponsor's earlier funds?
- Has the sponsor ever failed to repay investor capital on time, and what happened to those investors?
- Does the project sit in a rural area, which carries a 20 percent visa set aside and priority processing by statute?
Audits and site visits became mandatory for regional centers under the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, which helps. No audit makes an individual deal safe.
Timing is its own factor here. The regional center program is authorized through 30 September 2027, and petitions filed by 30 September 2026 are grandfathered so they keep being processed even if authorization lapses. Direct EB-5 has no such sunset, which is one genuine argument in its favor that sales agents rarely raise.
Capital return is a separate question from immigration outcome, and plenty of investors get the card years before they see the money. Our case study on how one investor got repaid and kept the green card covers what that end game looks like.
Budget for US tax from day one
Permanent residence makes you a US tax resident on worldwide income from the day the card is granted. Founders who keep an operating company abroad feel this immediately, and often expensively. The IRS substantial presence test governs the day count for anyone still in transition, while foreign accounts above the reporting threshold trigger an annual FBAR filing with FinCEN.
Plan the tax position before the petition rather than after approval. Restructuring foreign holdings costs far less while you are still a non resident.
Two further pages fill in the rest of the picture: the mechanics of starting your own US business for a green card, and one household's account of the complete journey from investor to immigrant.