The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 set the minimum investment at $800,000 for a project inside a Targeted Employment Area and $1,050,000 for a project outside one. Those figures replaced $500,000 and $1,000,000, which had stood unchanged since Congress created the category in 1990. Both amounts are indexed to inflation now, with the first adjustment due on 1 January 2027 and another every five years afterwards.
So the current price is a floor with an expiry date.
What counts as a Targeted Employment Area
Two kinds of place qualify. A rural area means anywhere outside a metropolitan statistical area and outside the outer boundary of a city or town of 20,000 or more residents. An area of high unemployment means unemployment running at 150 percent of the national average or above. A qualifying infrastructure project carries the $800,000 price too, whichever kind of area it sits in. Capital requirements and the definitions supporting them sit in 8 CFR 204.6, the federal regulation governing EB-5 petitions.
Congress tightened that second category hard in 2022. A high unemployment TEA is now a census tract, or a group of directly adjacent census tracts, in which the new commercial enterprise principally does business. Stringing a ribbon of tracts from a luxury development site out to a distressed neighborhood no longer works. States also lost the power to designate. DHS decides, and the designation gets tested when your petition is adjudicated rather than when the marketing brochure was printed, a shift explained in TEA After RIA 2022: What Changed and Who Decides Now.
Investors search constantly for an official TEA map. No such thing exists. USCIS publishes no interactive national map of Targeted Employment Areas, so every map you are shown belongs to a private data vendor or to the sponsor raising the money. Inputs behind those maps are public. County and city unemployment series come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics local area unemployment statistics program, and tract level figures come from the Census Bureau American Community Survey. Ask which vintage of data the TEA letter used. A tract that qualified on 2021 numbers may fail on the current release.
Why Congress killed the $500,000 tier
Those 1990 figures went untouched for thirty two years while the dollar did not. By the late 2010s the discounted tier bought a fraction of the economic activity the original drafters had in mind, and the overwhelming majority of petitions were claiming it anyway. Lifting the floor to $800,000 clawed back part of the lost value. Not all of it.
It also compressed the gap between tiers. Under the old rules a TEA project cost half what a non-TEA project cost. Today the premium for going outside a TEA is roughly 31 percent, or $250,000 in cash. Whether $800,000 is still the right number is argued at length in EB-5 Investment Amount: Is the $800,000 Minimum Too Low or About to Rise?
The 2019 rule that a court threw out
Congress was not the first to try. In November 2019 the Department of Homeland Security put a regulation into effect lifting the TEA minimum to $900,000 and the standard minimum to $1.8 million, narrowing TEA designation at the same time. A federal court vacated that rule in 2021, on the ground that the official who signed it had not been lawfully appointed. Prices snapped back to $500,000 for a short and slightly unreal window before the Act closed it. Our page on the 2019 modernization rule and its reversal in court traces the whole sequence.
Congress took a procedural lesson from it. A number written into statute cannot be undone by an argument about who signed a rulemaking, so the 2022 Act put the amounts into law directly and wrote the inflation adjustment as a formula instead of leaving it to future agency discretion. Enacted text sits at Public Law 117-103 as published by GovInfo, with the EB-5 provisions in Division BB.
Does TEA status still save you money?
It saves exactly $250,000. Real money, and it has stopped being the main reason experienced investors pick a TEA project.
Queue position is the reason now. The Act reserved 20 percent of the annual EB-5 visa supply for rural projects, 10 percent for high unemployment areas and 2 percent for infrastructure. Those reserved visas run on a separate count from everything else. An investor born in a country with a long wait in the unreserved category can file into the rural set-aside and receive a green card years ahead of somebody who wired the same $800,000 into an urban deal qualifying for no set-aside at all. Read how the reserved visa set-asides work before you compare two projects on price alone. The saving is the smaller half of the decision.
Costs that sit on top of the $800,000
The threshold covers the investment and nothing else. Above it sit several separate bills. A regional center administration fee, commonly quoted somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000. Immigration counsel at market rates. Certified translation of a source of funds file that can run to several hundred pages. Government filing fees on top of all that. The fee for Form I-526E, the immigrant petition by regional center investor is published on the form page and moves on its own schedule, unconnected to the investment thresholds.
Ask for those numbers in writing, itemized, before you sign anything. One all inclusive figure almost always hides a line the sponsor would rather you did not price separately.
Check the designation before you wire
A TEA letter is an opinion an economist wrote for the party selling you the deal, and while it is entirely legitimate evidence, an adjudicator reading the same census tracts against a newer data release two years later is free to reach a different conclusion about them. Four questions do most of the work here.
- Which census tracts does the letter cover, and does the enterprise principally do business inside them?
- What data vintage did the economist rely on, and when exactly was the letter written?
- Has anyone rerun the numbers against the data release you will actually be filing under?
- If the tract stops qualifying before you file, who absorbs the extra $250,000?
Planning around 1 January 2027
File well before 2027 and the adjustment is somebody else's problem. Run close to it and the receipt date becomes the whole game, because the threshold binding you is the one in force on the day USCIS receives a properly filed petition. A petition received on 31 December 2026 is priced at $800,000. One received the following morning pays the new figure.
Nobody knows the 2027 figure yet. The statute ties the adjustment to consumer prices, so the direction is upward and the size depends on inflation between now and then. Anyone quoting you a precise future number is selling something.
Two things stay put on that date. The program does not end, and petitions already on file keep the amount that applied when they were filed.
A different deadline gets confused with this one constantly. Regional center authorization runs through 30 September 2027, and investors whose petitions are filed by 30 September 2026 are grandfathered, so their cases continue to be processed even if that authorization were to lapse. Two dates, two entirely separate subjects. EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act 2022: The New Rules Every 2026 Investor Must Know sets out how the pieces interlock.