A spouse and every unmarried child under 21 travel with the investor as derivative beneficiaries, and they add nothing to the price. One qualifying investment, $800,000 in a Targeted Employment Area or $1,050,000 outside one, covers the entire household. The authority is 8 U.S.C. 1153(d), which hands the spouse and children of an employment based immigrant the same classification and the same priority date as the principal. Derivatives never file their own Form I-526E. They are named on the investor's petition, then file their own Form I-485 or their own immigrant visa application, and at the end they appear on the investor's Form I-829 rather than filing separate ones.
Who counts as a derivative?
Two categories exist and nothing else gets in. The legally married spouse of the investor. Any child who is unmarried and under 21, measured against the immigration definition of child in INA 101(b)(1) rather than the everyday one.
That definition reaches further than most families expect. Stepchildren qualify when the marriage that created the relationship took place before the child turned 18. An adopted child qualifies when the adoption was final before the sixteenth birthday and the adoptive parent has two years of legal custody plus two years of joint residence. Children born after the petition is filed slot in without argument. Even a spouse married after filing can usually be added, because derivative eligibility is measured when the immigrant visa is issued or the adjustment is approved, not on the filing date.
Parents are out. So are siblings. A 19 year old who marries in the middle of the process drops out of the category on the wedding day. A divorce can restore it, because INA 101(a)(39) counts a previously married person as unmarried once the marriage legally ends, but the decree has to be final before the visa is issued and the child still has to be under 21.
One investment covers the whole family
The ten full time jobs required by 8 CFR 204.6 attach to the investor. Five people need the same ten jobs as one, and no rule scales capital or job counts to household size. Nobody pays twice.
Visa numbers work differently, and that is where a large family pays a hidden cost. Each derivative consumes one of the EB-5 immigrant visa numbers issued each year, a pool set as a share of the worldwide employment based quota that lands near 10,000. A household of four uses four numbers. That arithmetic drives the waiting lists, and it explains why the 7 percent per country limit in 8 U.S.C. 1152 bites hardest on families born in mainland China or India. The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 reserved 20 percent of the annual allocation for rural projects and 10 percent for high unemployment areas. Another 2 percent goes to infrastructure. Those reserved categories are the practical escape route for backlogged households, and picking a project that qualifies is covered in our guide to rural and high unemployment TEAs and the $800,000 rule.
What CSPA subtracts, and what it leaves alone
Families get this backwards constantly. It is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the whole category, and it usually surfaces at the interview, years after anything could have been done about it.
The Child Status Protection Act freezes a child's age by subtracting the number of days the immigrant petition sat pending at USCIS. Suppose Form I-526E was pending 26 months and the child is 22 years and one month old when a visa number becomes available. Subtract the 26 months and the CSPA age is 19 years and 11 months, so the child stays eligible. One condition attaches: the child must seek to acquire permanent residence within one year of that visa availability, normally by filing Form I-485 or by paying the immigrant visa fee at the National Visa Center.
CSPA does not subtract the wait for a visa number. Time spent watching an approved petition sit behind a backlogged priority date counts against the child in full, and for Indian and Chinese families that is where nearly all of the wait lives. Fast adjudication paired with a slow queue still produces age outs. The arithmetic is worked through step by step in CSPA in EB-5: how the Child Status Protection Act stops aging out.
A child who ages out anyway still has moves available. Many families keep that child in the United States on an F-1 while a separate route is built, a situation we take apart in EB-5 and the F-1 student.
Civil documents that prove the relationship
Officers want primary records. Every foreign language document needs a full English translation with the translator's signed certification of competence attached, and photocopies of photocopies get sent back. Start collecting a year out.
- Marriage certificate for the current marriage, plus final divorce decrees or death certificates ending every prior marriage for both spouses.
- Long form birth certificates naming both parents for each child.
- For a stepchild, the marriage certificate showing the marriage predated the child's eighteenth birthday.
- For an adopted child, the final adoption decree with evidence of two years of legal custody and two years of joint residence.
- Passport biographic pages for everyone, infants included.
- Evidence that each child remains unmarried, usually a sworn affidavit backed by a civil registry extract.
Thin or inconsistent civil records are among the most common triggers for a Request for Evidence at the consular stage. Every applicant also needs the immigration medical exam, described in our page on the EB-5 medical exam and vaccination rules. Families filing abroad rather than adjusting inside the country follow the route USCIS sets out under consular processing for immigrant visas.
Rights a derivative green card carries
Each derivative receives a card identical to the investor's, carrying the same two year condition. Nothing about it is second class.
Work is unrestricted. No employer sponsorship, and no Form I-765 employment authorization document once the card is issued, though families adjusting inside the country usually file Form I-765 and Form I-131 alongside the I-485 so they can work and travel during the wait. The spouse can take a salaried job or start a company, and none of it touches the investor's petition.
Children get the benefits families are usually buying. Public school without an F-1 visa. Federal student aid, since permanent residents qualify under the rules the Department of Education sets out for non-citizen students seeking federal aid. Resident tuition at state universities once the family satisfies that state's own durational residency test, commonly twelve months, which at many public flagships is a swing of tens of thousands of dollars a year against the international rate.
Where derivative cases break
Four failure modes account for most of the damage. None are exotic.
Age out is the first and the worst, and it is the strongest argument for filing early rather than holding out for a perfect project. Filing early carries a program benefit too: petitions filed on or before 30 September 2026 are protected by the grandfathering rule at 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(S), and the regional center program is authorized through 30 September 2027.
Divorce during conditional residence is the second. A former spouse usually keeps the ability to have conditions removed, but the record needs deliberate handling, and if the investor simply declines to file the I-829 the options narrow fast. Take advice early. We cover the mechanics in divorce, death and children turning 21 during conditional residence.
Third is inadmissibility nobody screened for, such as an old criminal record or a forgotten overstay. Fourth is abandonment. The spouse who spends most of each year abroad while the investor stays in the United States builds a record that officers read as abandoned residence, and the remedy, a reentry permit on Form I-131, must be filed before departure.
Count the years to naturalization
Conditional residence runs two years from the day each person is admitted or adjusts. The investor files Form I-829 in the 90 day window before the second anniversary, listing the spouse and children on that single petition. The clock does not restart for anyone. Approval removes the conditions as of the second anniversary of obtaining conditional residence rather than retroactively to some earlier point. USCIS describes what the two year status means on its page about conditional permanent residence.
After that, each family member holds an ordinary ten year card, renewed on Form I-90 when it expires. Work authorization does not expire with the card, because permanent residence itself is what confers it. That confusion is common.
Time in conditional status counts toward naturalization, so a derivative spouse is generally eligible to file Form N-400 five years after admission. Children still under 18 and living with a parent when that parent naturalizes usually acquire citizenship automatically, with no separate application. The program rules behind all of this sit in USCIS Policy Manual Volume 6, Part G on investors.