Four legislative moments actually shaped EB-5. Congress created the category in the Immigration Act of 1990 and added the regional center pilot in 1992. DHS then raised the targeted employment area minimum to $900,000 in 2019, only for a federal court to erase that rule in June 2021. Congress answered with the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, signed on 15 March that year. Everything in between was reauthorization, usually stapled to a spending bill and usually passed days before a deadline. Investors should read that pattern as a warning rather than as trivia, since the current authorization expires on 30 September 2027 and the investment amounts adjust for inflation on 1 January 2027.
1990: Congress invents the fifth preference
The Immigration Act of 1990 built the architecture still in use. Ten thousand visas a year, counting spouses and children under 21. One million dollars of capital, or half that inside a targeted employment area. Ten full time jobs for qualifying American workers. Two years of conditional residence before an investor could ask for the conditions to come off.
Statutory text lives at 8 U.S.C. 1153, and the implementing regulation at 8 CFR 204.6 has changed remarkably little across more than three decades. Definitions written in 1991 still decide cases today. Note that 8 CFR 204.6(e) continues to exclude combinations of part time positions from the job count even where the hours add up, while a genuine job sharing arrangement between two employees does count. Two features fixed in 1990, the ten job requirement and the two tier investment amount, have survived every rewrite since, which is a fair guide to what Congress treats as negotiable and what it will not touch. Why Congress wanted any of this appears in our page on congressional intent.
How a 1992 pilot became the whole industry
Direct investment proved slow. Wealthy families did not want to run a restaurant in Ohio, and the agency counted only jobs an investor's own enterprise created directly. Section 610 of Public Law 102-395, an appropriations act passed in 1992, created the Immigrant Investor Pilot Program and reserved 300 visas a year for investors in designated regional centers.
One change did all the work. Indirect and induced jobs, estimated with economic models, could now be counted, and large real estate deals became financeable with pooled EB-5 money almost overnight.
That pilot stayed a pilot for thirty years. Its authorization expired again and again and had to be renewed, occasionally for a matter of weeks.
Four 1998 decisions froze the market for years
In 1998 the agency issued precedent decisions, Matter of Izummi and Matter of Soffici the best known among them, that rejected structures the industry had assumed were acceptable. Redemption agreements and guaranteed returns went first. Installment arrangements and thinly capitalized enterprises followed.
Thousands of petitions stalled, and some approved investors were left in limbo for years. Congress eventually stepped in with the 21st Century Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act of 2002, Public Law 107-273, which gave relief to investors caught by the retroactive shift and pushed the agency to work through its backlog. That episode still shapes how attorneys draft offering documents, as the early years of EB-5 describes in more detail.
Reauthorization by spending bill, and one long lapse
From the late 1990s onward the regional center program lived on borrowed time. It was extended more than a dozen separate times, normally inside a continuing resolution or an omnibus package. A three year extension signed in 2012 carried it to 30 September 2015, and after that renewals came in increments of months while competing reform bills died in committee. Attorneys learned to draft escrow releases around expiry dates that Congress might or might not honor, and every marketing deck from that decade carried a paragraph about political risk which turned out to be entirely justified. Nobody planned it this way.
Then the music stopped. Authorization lapsed on 1 July 2021, and for eight and a half months no new regional center petition could be filed at all. Money already committed sat in escrow. Projects paused. Whether a program of this size should keep living on a sunset date at all is argued out in the debate over making EB-5 permanent.
Why the minimum went from $500,000 to $900,000 and back
DHS published the EB-5 Modernization Rule in July 2019. Effective 21 November 2019, it lifted the targeted employment area minimum from $500,000 to $900,000 and raised the standard amount from $1,000,000 to $1.8 million. State agencies also lost the power to designate a targeted employment area by stringing together census tracts across a city.
That rule survived 19 months. In June 2021 a federal judge in the Northern District of California vacated it in Behring Regional Center LLC v. Wolf, holding that the official who signed it had not been lawfully appointed. Minimums reverted to $500,000 and $1,000,000 overnight. Regional center filings stopped nine days after that, when authorization lapsed, so for most of the nine months until the RIA took effect it was direct investors who filed at the old numbers.
Two lessons outlived the episode. Rules created by regulation can be undone in court on procedural grounds alone. Amounts written into a statute take an act of Congress to move, which is precisely what happened next. The full sequence is unpacked in our page on the 2019 modernization rule.
Read the 2022 statute for what it actually changed
The Reform and Integrity Act arrived as a division of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, which is how a rewrite of an entire visa category ended up inside a government funding bill. Full text sits in Public Law 117-103, with legislative history on the congress.gov page for H.R. 2471.
- Amounts. $800,000 inside a targeted employment area and $1,050,000 outside one. First inflation adjustment falls due on 1 January 2027, then every five years.
- Set-asides. 20 percent of annual EB-5 numbers reserved for rural projects. High unemployment areas take 10 percent, infrastructure 2 percent.
- Concurrent filing. An investor lawfully in the United States with an available visa number can file Form I-485 at the same time as the investor petition.
- New forms. Regional centers apply for designation on Form I-956 and file Form I-956F for each individual offering. Annual reporting moved to Form I-956G, and paid promoters register on Form I-956K.
- Integrity Fund. Every regional center pays $20,000 a year, reduced to $10,000 where it had 20 or fewer investors in the prior fiscal year, plus $1,000 for each investor petition filed.
- Audits. USCIS must audit each regional center at least once every five years, and it may make site visits on 24 hours notice.
- Grandfathering. Petitions filed on or before 30 September 2026 continue to be processed even if the regional center program lapses again.
USCIS also picked up authority it had lacked for three decades, including the power to terminate a regional center for a pattern of misrepresentation and to keep anyone with a disqualifying criminal or securities history out of any role in an offering, which is what Form I-956H is for. One sequencing point gets stated wrongly in marketing material all the time. An investor may file Form I-526E once the regional center has filed the I-956F for that particular project. USCIS must approve the I-956F before those petitions can be approved, and holding your own filing back until approval arrives simply surrenders months of priority date. For the wider picture, see our overview of the RIA, then read the agency's own guidance in the USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 6, Part G.
Put three dates in your calendar before you wire
- 30 September 2026. Petitions filed on or before this date are grandfathered under 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(S), which protects processing through a future lapse.
- 1 January 2027. First statutory inflation adjustment to the $800,000 and $1,050,000 thresholds.
- 30 September 2027. Current expiry of regional center authorization, and the deadline Congress will be arguing about.
Congress has never let EB-5 die permanently. It has also never granted the program more than a few years of certainty at a stretch, a habit unbroken since 1992. What might come next is examined in our look at possible reforms before the 2027 sunset.