EB-5 requires ten full-time jobs for qualifying US workers per investor, and the capital buys nothing without them. Those jobs must exist by the time you file Form I-829 to remove conditions, roughly two years after your conditional residence begins. A direct investment counts only the people the enterprise itself puts on payroll. A regional center investment can also count indirect and induced jobs generated by an economic model, which is the main reason most investors choose that structure.
What counts as a full-time job under 8 CFR 204.6
Thirty five hours a week, minimum. A qualifying position has to be permanent rather than seasonal. It must also be filled by a qualifying employee, meaning a US citizen or a lawful permanent resident. Certain other immigrants authorized to work in the United States, asylees among them, count as well. Definitions live in 8 CFR 204.6, the regulation governing EB-5 petitions.
Who does not count: you, your spouse, your children, anyone holding a nonimmigrant visa such as H-1B or F-1 OPT. Two part-time roles cannot be stapled together into one full-time job, though a genuine job-sharing arrangement filling a permanent 35 hour position can qualify. Independent contractors sit in the gray zone. USCIS looks for an employment relationship, so a project claiming a hundred jobs held by 1099 contractors deserves hard questions before you wire anything.
Three ways a project can claim a job
Direct jobs are W-2 employees of the new commercial enterprise, or in a regional center deal, of the job creating entity. Payroll registers, I-9 files and quarterly state wage reports prove them.
Indirect jobs sit at suppliers. The concrete plant that poured your foundation. The architecture firm. The furniture wholesaler that filled the guest rooms.
Induced jobs come from those workers spending wages locally, at restaurants and dentists and car dealerships near the site.
Only regional center investors may count the second and third categories. That single fact explains why an $800,000 direct investment usually has to be a labor intensive operating business, because ten payroll employees at 35 hours each is a real company with real overhead. It also explains why the large majority of EB-5 investors go through a regional center rather than building something themselves.
How economists turn dollars into job numbers
A regional center files a business plan with an economic impact report, usually built on RIMS II multipliers published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, or on the IMPLAN or REMI models. Inputs go in at one end: hard construction costs, operating revenues, sometimes tenant occupancy. Industry coefficients tied to a NAICS code and a county do the rest, and a job total comes out the other end.
Read the inputs before the headline number. Say a report claims 1,400 jobs from $95 million of hard construction costs. That figure is only as sound as the assumption that $95 million really will be spent, in that county, on that activity. Where a project counts jobs generated by the whole capital stack, and most do, your ten jobs are being carved out of an economy funded largely by the senior lender rather than by EB-5 money. That is lawful and normal. It also means a hole in the developer's own financing can quietly destroy the job model you relied on when you signed.
Limits the 2022 Act placed on modeled jobs
Congress tightened the arithmetic in the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022. Indirect jobs may supply no more than 90 percent of the requirement, so at least one of your ten has to be a genuine payroll position somewhere in the project. Construction activity lasting under two years is capped at 75 percent of the total claimed. Both ceilings push sponsors toward projects with an operating business at the end, a hotel that hires housekeepers and front desk staff for years rather than a condominium tower that is sold off and gone.
Troubled business: preserving jobs instead of creating them
One exception exists. Where the enterprise qualifies as a troubled business, holding employment at no less than the pre-investment level for at least two years satisfies the requirement, so ten existing jobs can be preserved rather than created. The regulation defines a troubled business as one that has existed for at least two years and has incurred a net loss of at least 20 percent of its net worth during the twelve or twenty four month period before the petition. Note the wording carefully. The test runs on net worth measured before the loss, and marketing decks routinely misquote it as a share of gross assets.
Why the job cushion matters more than the projection
Divide the total jobs the economic report projects by the number of EB-5 investors the offering will accept. A ratio of exactly 10.0 is a project with no margin whatsoever. Walk away from those. Careful sponsors typically model a cushion well above the minimum, so an offering selling 100 units shows comfortably more than 1,000 jobs. Ask what happens if the sponsor raises less EB-5 capital than planned, because a smaller raise against the same job model improves your ratio while a bigger one dilutes it.
Timing is the other half of the question. Jobs the model places in year one are worth more to you than jobs it places in year four, since your I-829 is filed on a fixed schedule that ignores construction delays. Ask for the job creation curve quarter by quarter, in writing. Most decks show only the total, which tells you nothing about whether the jobs land before you need them. The wider checklist sits in EB-5 Due Diligence 2026: Beginner Checklist to Avoid Bad Projects and Fraud, and the specific queries to put to a sponsor are in Questions to Ask an EB-5 Regional Center or Developer Before Investing.
The price of those ten jobs
Job counts do not move with the investment amount. Ten jobs is ten jobs whether you put in $800,000 in a targeted employment area or $1,050,000 outside one, which makes TEA qualification the largest single lever on your cost per job. How the rural and high unemployment tests work is set out in EB-5 TEA Explained: Rural vs High Unemployment Areas and the $800K Rule.
Both figures face their first inflation adjustment on 1 January 2027. The regional center program is authorized through 30 September 2027, with grandfathering for petitions filed by 30 September 2026, and what that means for a case caught mid-process is explained in EB-5 Grandfathering: What Happens If Program Rules Change Mid-Process.
Proving it at the I-829 stage
Form I-829, Petition by Investor to Remove Conditions on Permanent Resident Status is filed in the ninety day window before the second anniversary of your admission as a conditional resident. Evidence is documentary. Payroll registers, state and federal tax filings, an updated economic report keyed to money actually spent rather than money projected. 8 CFR 216.6, the rule on removing conditions also permits evidence that the jobs will be created within a reasonable time, which has rescued projects held up by permitting or a slow lease-up.
Job creation alone will not carry the petition. Your capital must have stayed at risk in the enterprise for the required period, and the enterprise must have continued to operate. USCIS explains its position at length in Volume 6, Part G of the USCIS Policy Manual. Read the program overview on the USCIS EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program page before you sit through any sales presentation. Our step by step map of the whole sequence is in EB-5 Green Card Process Steps: I-526E to I-829, Start to Finish.
Questions worth asking before the wire goes out
- How many jobs does the economic report project in total, and how many investors will the offering accept?
- What share of the ten comes from construction expenditure, and how long is the construction period?
- Which model produced the numbers, and which economist signed the report?
- What does the job count look like if the project opens twelve months late?
- Has this sponsor taken a prior project all the way to I-829 approvals, and at what rate?
A sponsor who cannot answer the last one in a sentence is telling you something. Job creation is the requirement that decides whether the two year conditional card becomes a permanent one, and it is the requirement investors examine least. How the whole structure fits together, from the enterprise to the visa, is laid out in EB-5 Visa Program Explained: How the Immigrant Investor Route Works.