EB-5 receives 7.1 percent of the annual employment based immigrant visa supply. With the employment based level at its statutory floor of 140,000, that is about 9,940 visas a year, and spouses and children consume those numbers alongside the investors themselves. Since the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, 32 percent of the EB-5 pool is reserved: 20 percent for rural projects, 10 percent for high unemployment areas and 2 percent for infrastructure. A reserved visa nobody uses stays in the same reserve for one more fiscal year, and if it is still unused after that, it moves into the unreserved EB-5 pool.
Unreserved numbers behave differently. Anything EB-5 leaves on the table in a fiscal year goes up to EB-1 within that same year and never comes back.
Where the 7.1 percent comes from
Congress sets a worldwide employment based level of 140,000 a year. Family sponsored numbers left unused in the previous fiscal year are added to it, which is why the employment based total ran well above 140,000 in the two years after the pandemic closed consulates. That total is then divided by statute across five preferences, and EB-5 sits at the bottom with 7.1 percent. The allocation rules are in 8 U.S.C. 1153, the statute governing preference allocation, and the program itself is summarized on the USCIS overview of the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program.
Fiscal years run from 1 October to 30 September. Numbers do not carry across that boundary except in the narrow reserved visa case described below.
Four EB-5 buckets in the monthly Visa Bulletin
The State Department publishes a monthly Visa Bulletin with final action dates and dates for filing. EB-5 shows up there as four separate lines rather than one.
- Unreserved. 68 percent of the supply, roughly 6,759 numbers in a base year. Mainland China and India queue here.
- Rural set-aside. 20 percent, about 1,988 numbers, for projects in a rural area.
- High unemployment set-aside. 10 percent, about 994 numbers, for projects in a high unemployment targeted employment area.
- Infrastructure set-aside. 2 percent, about 199 numbers, for qualifying public infrastructure projects.
Demand for the infrastructure line has stayed minimal, because very few projects are administered by a governmental entity in the way the statute requires. Rural is the opposite story. Filings surged after 2022 precisely because that column was empty and dates were current, which is exactly the behavior a set-aside is designed to provoke. Our page on EB-5 Visa Set-Asides explains how a project qualifies for each one.
What happens to a reserved visa nobody uses
The statute answers this cleanly. A reserved visa left unused in a fiscal year remains available in the same reserve category for the immediately following fiscal year. Still unused at the end of that second year, it stops being reserved and becomes available to any qualified EB-5 applicant.
Two consequences follow. A set-aside that looks generous today can tighten fast, since unused numbers do not pile up year after year into an ever growing cushion. And the eventual spillover lands in the unreserved category, which is where the mainland China and India backlogs sit, so rural numbers that go begging for two years end up feeding the very queue the set-aside was meant to let investors bypass.
Country caps sit on top of everything
No single country may take more than 7 percent of the annual preference total. That limit lives in 8 U.S.C. 1152, a different section from the one that creates the EB-5 category, and it keys on country of birth rather than citizenship. For EB-5 the cap works out at roughly 700 visas a year for any one country. That arithmetic, and nothing else, is why applicants born in mainland China face a wait measured in years while applicants born in Brazil or Nigeria generally walk straight through.
Set-asides are not exempt from it. Once demand from a single country inside the rural line passes that country's share, a cut-off date appears in that column and the category stops being current for those applicants alone while remaining open to everyone else. How each category actually performed in past years is published in the State Department annual immigrant visa statistics, which is a better guide than any projection you will be shown.
One relief valve exists. When total demand in a category falls short of total supply, the per country limit is lifted for that year and numbers go out in priority date order regardless of birthplace. EB-5 worked that way for every country until mainland China first retrogressed in 2015.
Why unused EB-5 numbers fall up instead of forward
Section 203(b) sends EB-5 numbers that are not required in a fiscal year to EB-1 in that same year. EB-1 leftovers then drop to EB-2, and EB-2 leftovers drop to EB-3. Nothing flows in the other direction. EB-5 receives no spillover from the higher preferences at all, so a light year for EB-2 physicians does precisely nothing for an investor waiting in the unreserved line.
Advocacy groups lean on that asymmetry when they argue for a bigger EB-5 quota. Whether Congress ever acts is a separate question, and both sides of it are laid out in More EB-5 Visas: Quota Increase Plans and Backlog Math.
Read the bulletin before you sign a subscription agreement
Your priority date is the day your I-526 or I-526E was properly filed, and under the 2022 statute an investor can generally carry the priority date of an approved petition over to a later one. Priority dates matter more than marketing claims about how fast a project moves.
Families need one extra calculation. The Child Status Protection Act subtracts the time USCIS spent adjudicating the petition from a child's age. It does not subtract the years spent waiting for a visa number, and for a backlogged country nearly all the delay sits in exactly that waiting. Work the numbers before a 16 year old becomes the reason a plan collapses. Reading the bulletin properly is covered in EB-5 Visa Bulletin Explained.
Two statutory dates frame all of this. Regional center authorization runs to 30 September 2027, and petitions filed on or before 30 September 2026 are protected by 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(S) if the program lapses. The framework that created the set-asides in the first place is summarized in the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 overview.