Authorization for the EB-5 regional center program expired on 30 June 2021 and was not restored until the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 became law on 15 March 2022. For most of a year, nobody could file a petition tied to a regional center. Direct EB-5 investment, where you own and run the business yourself, kept working the whole time. Today the program carries a published end date: authorization runs through 30 September 2027, and a separate protection at 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(S) preserves petitions filed on or before 30 September 2026 even if Congress lets the authorization expire again.
What expired on 30 June 2021
Congress created the regional center pilot in 1992 and then renewed it in short bursts, usually by bolting an extension onto a spending bill. Every extension carried a hard date. The last of them ran out on 30 June 2021 with no replacement in place.
EB-5 itself, set out in 8 U.S.C. 1153 in the U.S. Code, was written in 1990 and has no expiration date. What died was the narrower authority that lets a designated regional center pool capital from many investors and count indirect jobs produced by an economic model. Since the overwhelming majority of EB-5 investors use that structure, the practical effect was a near total stop.
Two shocks landed in quick succession. A federal district court in California vacated the 2019 modernization rule on 22 June 2021, which knocked the minimum investment in a targeted employment area from $900,000 back down to $500,000. Eight days later the regional center authority expired, so the cheapest entry price in years arrived at the exact moment the usual way of using it disappeared.
Filings that stopped, and filings that did not
USCIS shut the door on regional center petitions immediately. Past that, the picture was messier than most people remember.
- New regional center petitions: rejected outright. A Form I-526 naming a regional center could not be filed at all from 1 July 2021.
- Pending regional center petitions: held. Thousands of I-526 filings sat unadjudicated, because approval requires a live program to approve them under.
- Direct EB-5: unaffected. A standalone Form I-526 for a direct investment could still be filed, and a small number of investors switched routes rather than wait.
- Visa issuance abroad: frozen for regional center cases, which stranded families who already had interview appointments.
Investors already holding conditional green cards sat in a category of their own, and USCIS took months to state clearly how it would treat their Form I-829 petitions to remove conditions. No conditional resident had a card revoked because of the lapse. Plenty lost sleep anyway.
Why Congress let the authorization run out
A clean extension had been routine for almost three decades. By 2021 a bloc of senators refused to grant another one, and their objection was substantive. Fraud prosecutions had piled up. So had targeted employment areas gerrymandered to stretch a chain of census tracts from a poor neighborhood to a luxury tower, and overseas sales agents collecting undisclosed commissions with no registration requirement anywhere in the statute.
Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy had been pushing an integrity bill for years. Industry groups wanted a short extension first and reform later. Neither side moved, so the program simply switched off while the argument ran through the fall of 2021 and into the following winter.
How the Reform and Integrity Act closed the gap
The bill eventually rode into law on the back of an omnibus. H.R. 2471, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022, carried the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act as Division BB, and it was signed on 15 March 2022. Most of the new framework took effect 60 days after that, on 14 May 2022.
The program that came back had been rebuilt. Minimum investment was reset to $800,000 in a targeted employment area and $1,050,000 outside one, with the first inflation adjustment due on 1 January 2027. Visa set-asides were carved out of the annual allocation: 20 percent for rural projects and 10 percent for high unemployment areas, plus 2 percent for infrastructure. Existing regional centers had to apply for fresh designation on Form I-956, and every individual offering now needs its own Form I-956F project application.
One point about sequencing gets written wrongly all the time. An investor may file Form I-526E as soon as the regional center has filed the I-956F for that specific offering. USCIS has to approve the I-956F before it can approve those investor petitions, true, but sitting on your hands until that approval lands surrenders months of priority date and buys nothing.
The program end date now: 30 September 2027
Two dates matter, and they do different jobs.
Authorization for the regional center program runs through 30 September 2027. That is the date people mean when they search for an EB-5 program end date, and it is a genuine cliff for anyone who has not filed by then. The second date sits at subparagraph (S), titled Protection from expired legislation, which keeps petitions filed on or before 30 September 2026 alive for adjudication even if the authorization expires, so long as the project and the center stay compliant. File on 30 September 2026 and you are covered. File on 1 October 2026 and you are not, so treat it as a hard deadline rather than a target to drift past.
Nothing stops Congress from extending the program again, and history says it probably will. Our page on what Congress could change before the 2027 sunset runs through the live proposals. For the mechanics of how a mid-process rule change actually reaches your own file, read the grandfathering explainer.
Check these clauses before you wire $800,000
The 2021 lapse was survivable for investors whose paperwork was clean and whose project had financing that did not depend on the next tranche of EB-5 money landing on schedule. Everyone else had a bad year.
Ask the sponsor for the regional center I-956 approval notice and the I-956F receipt notice for your exact offering, by project name and receipt number. Read the escrow release conditions line by line. Then find out what happens to your money if the program goes dark for twelve months: does the subscription agreement give you a route to a refund, or does it simply confirm that the fund keeps your capital deployed? A serious sponsor answers in writing. Our due diligence checklist for choosing a regional center covers the rest of the file, and the audit and I-956G compliance rules set out what the center owes USCIS every year.
Statutory protection has improved a great deal since 2021. Subparagraph (M) now gives good faith investors a 180 day window to move their investment if their regional center is terminated or debarred, which simply did not exist during the lapse. The USCIS Policy Manual chapter on immigrant investors is where the agency writes down how it applies all of this in practice.
Read the sunset risk section of any offering document as though 2021 will happen again. It might.