The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 is the law that governs the program today. It set the minimum investment at $800,000 in a Targeted Employment Area and $1,050,000 outside one. Twenty percent of the annual EB-5 visa supply is now reserved for rural projects, 10 percent for high unemployment areas and 2 percent for infrastructure. The regional center program is authorized through 30 September 2027, under a compliance regime that includes mandatory audits and an Integrity Fund the centers pay into. Signed in March 2022, the RIA ended a shutdown of the regional center route that had run since the previous summer.
What the RIA replaced
Regional center authorization lapsed on 30 June 2021. For roughly nine months no new regional center petition could be filed at all, and thousands of investors sat with cases that had nowhere to go. Separately, a federal court had struck down the 2019 modernization rule that raised the minimums to $900,000 and $1.8 million, which briefly bounced the figures back to $500,000 and $1 million. Chaos is the polite word for that period.
The RIA arrived as part of a very large spending bill. The enacted text is available through the GovInfo record for Public Law 117-103, and the legislative history sits on the Congress.gov page for H.R. 2471. Our page on the 2021 regional center lapse covers what that gap did to the people caught inside it.
Money: $800,000, $1,050,000 and the 2027 indexing
The thresholds are statutory now rather than regulatory, which makes them considerably harder to move. A qualifying TEA investment is $800,000. Everything else is $1,050,000.
The first inflation adjustment falls due on 1 January 2027, with further adjustments every five years after that. A petition filed before the adjustment locks in the current figure. A petition filed after it does not.
TEA designation also changed hands. States no longer certify TEAs, which closed the loophole that produced those gerrymandered strings of census tracts running from a poor neighborhood to a luxury tower several miles away. DHS makes the call now, and the mechanics are in our page on how TEAs were redefined after RIA 2022.
Set-asides changed who waits and who does not
For investors from backlogged countries, the reserved visa categories are the most consequential thing in the entire Act. Rural projects take 20 percent of the annual supply. High unemployment areas take 10 percent. Infrastructure takes 2 percent. Unused reserved numbers carry forward within their own category for a year before falling into the general pool.
Rural petitions also receive priority processing by statute. That combination has made rural offerings the busiest corner of the market since 2022, and it has pulled a great deal of Indian and Chinese demand toward projects in places that would once have struggled to raise capital at any price. The infrastructure category has been slow to produce actual deals, for reasons our page on EB-5 infrastructure projects works through.
New paperwork the regional center owes USCIS
A regional center must hold designation on Form I-956, and each project it sponsors has to be approved separately before investors can safely rely on it. That project approval comes through Form I-956F, the application for approval of an investment in a commercial enterprise. Wiring money into a deal with no I-956F on file is a risk that any competent adviser would flag loudly.
Other obligations the Act created:
- An annual statement on Form I-956G covering capital deployment and job creation, together with the fees charged to investors.
- Background disclosures for principals and key personnel on Form I-956H, with bars on people carrying relevant criminal or securities histories.
- Registration of promoters and overseas migration agents on Form I-956K, so the person selling you the deal is on the record with USCIS.
- An audit of each regional center at least once every five years, along with site visits.
- Payments into the EB-5 Integrity Fund, set at $20,000 a year for centers with more than 20 investors and $10,000 for smaller ones.
Our page on regional center audits after 2022 covers what an audit actually examines and how centers fail them.
Protections for investors when a regional center fails
Sponsors rarely advertise this part. Investors should care about it most.
Before the RIA, a regional center termination could destroy the immigration case of an investor who had done nothing wrong and had no way of knowing anything was amiss. The Act built in a rescue. When a regional center is terminated or debarred, affected investors receive notice and a window of roughly six months to take corrective action, such as associating with a different regional center, instead of losing eligibility on the spot.
Fee transparency became mandatory too. Investors are entitled to disclosure of what is charged and who receives it, which makes the old practice of burying an overseas agent commission much harder to sustain. More on that in our page on the 2022 integrity measures.
Concurrent filing arrived as well. An investor already inside the United States in valid status, with a current priority date, can file the adjustment of status application at the same time as the petition, which brings work and travel permission years earlier than the old sequence allowed.
Deadlines every investor should have in a calendar
30 September 2026. Petitions filed by this date are grandfathered, meaning they continue to be processed even if the regional center program is not reauthorized afterwards. That protection is precisely why a 2026 filing carries a value that a 2028 filing may not.
1 January 2027. First inflation adjustment to the $800,000 and $1,050,000 figures.
30 September 2027. Current expiry of regional center authorization. Congress has extended this program repeatedly since it was created in 1992, and the direct EB-5 category does not expire at all, but nobody sensible treats reauthorization as automatic.
Where the RIA still leaves gaps
Processing time remains the loudest complaint. The Act told USCIS to work toward faster adjudication, and you can check where things actually stand using the USCIS case processing times tool, but a statutory aspiration is not a service level agreement with a remedy attached.
Sustainment is the second gap. A two year requirement replaced the old conditional residence standard, and USCIS has revised its reading of that provision more than once in Volume 6, Part G of the USCIS Policy Manual. Sponsors who describe the rule as completely settled are overstating what the agency has said.
And the reserved categories will not stay uncrowded forever. Demand for rural offerings since 2022 has been heavy enough that a backlog inside that category is a realistic expectation rather than a distant worry, which changes the calculus for anyone timing an entry. Our page on possible EB-5 reforms in the next immigration bill looks at what Congress may do next.
Read the RIA as a floor of protection rather than a guarantee of a good outcome. It cleaned up the industry considerably. Choosing a sound project is still entirely your job.