The EB-5 programme, the United States' green card for investors, has had a stable price since 2022: $1,050,000, or $800,000 in a targeted employment area or an infrastructure project. Within the next ten weeks, two things change. On 30 November 2026, a new fee schedule takes effect for every EB-5 form. On 1 January 2027, the law itself raises the investment minimums for the first time.
Both changes are already fixed in published law. Neither depends on a new vote. And because they arrive in sequence, the date a petition is filed now decides both what it costs to file and how much capital it needs.
The route in brief
Under section 203(b)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5), up to 7.1 percent of employment-based immigrant visas each year go to investors who put capital into a new commercial enterprise in the United States that is expected to stay invested for at least two years and to create at least ten full-time jobs for US workers.
Most investors now go through regional centres, designated entities that pool capital from many investors into approved projects. The 2022 Reform and Integrity Act reauthorised that programme through 30 September 2027 and reserved part of the annual visa supply: 20 percent for investments in rural areas, 10 percent for high-unemployment areas and 2 percent for infrastructure projects. Rural petitions also get processing priority.
The process runs in two steps. A Form I-526E (regional centre) or I-526 (standalone investment) petition establishes eligibility and leads to a two-year conditional green card. A Form I-829 petition, filed near the end of those two years, removes the conditions if the investment and job creation have held.
Step one: the new fees on 30 November
The final fee rule, published in the Federal Register on 30 September 2026, applies to any application postmarked on or after 30 November 2026. The new amounts, set out in 8 CFR 106.2(d):
- Form I-526E, regional centre investor petition: $7,850 (amendments $7,775)
- Form I-526, standalone investor petition: $7,615
- Form I-829, removal of conditions: $5,000
- Form I-956F, approval of a regional centre investment offering: $42,675
- Form I-956, regional centre designation: $44,115 (amendments $9,835)
- Form I-956G, regional centre annual statement: $2,165
- Form I-527, a new form for pre-2022 investors whose regional centre was terminated: $10,330
The I-526 and I-526E figures include a $75 technology fee. Every regional centre petition also carries the EB-5 Integrity Fund petition fee, which the rule raises from $1,000 to $1,100 for inflation. The annual Integrity Fund fee for regional centres rises from $20,000 to $22,000, or $11,000 for centres with 20 or fewer investors.
There is some history behind these numbers. USCIS raised EB-5 fees in April 2024 as part of a general fee rule. In Moody v. Noem, a federal court in Colorado stayed those EB-5 fees, finding that the Reform and Integrity Act did not allow them to be set that way, and on 12 November 2025 USCIS went back to the fees in force before April 2024. The new rule is the EB-5-specific fee study the Act requires. DHS estimates that it raises EB-5 form fees by about 70.7 percent on a weighted average, or roughly $2,946 per form, against the fees it has been collecting since the court decision.
For an individual investor, the fee is small next to the capital. For regional centres and project sponsors, the I-956F at $42,675 per offering is a more meaningful cost, and sponsors may pass some of it on to investors.
Step two: the investment minimum on 1 January
The bigger change is written into the statute. Under 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(C)(iii), beginning on 1 January 2027 and every five years after that, the standard investment amount "shall automatically adjust for petitions filed on or after the effective date of each adjustment". The adjustment follows the cumulative change in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) between 1 January 2022 and the date of adjustment, rounded down to the nearest $50,000. The reduced amount for targeted employment areas and infrastructure becomes 75 percent of the new standard amount. DHS must publish the new figures as a technical amendment in the Federal Register.
As of 25 October 2026, that technical amendment has not appeared. But the arithmetic can be run on official data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U stood at 281.148 in January 2022 and 336.940 in September 2026, an increase of about 19.8 percent. Applied to $1,050,000, that gives about $1,258,000, which rounds down to $1,250,000. Seventy-five percent of that is $937,500.
Those are not official figures, and the result depends on which index month DHS uses. But the rounding rule makes the outcome fairly robust: the index would have to rise sharply in the last months of 2026 to reach the next step at $1,300,000. Investors should plan on the assumption that, for petitions filed from 1 January 2027, the minimums will be around $1.25 million and $937,500, and then check the Federal Register notice when it is published.
On those figures the targeted employment area investment rises by $137,500. For a family that has been weighing EB-5 for a year, that is a concrete cost of waiting.
Why the project's location matters as much as the amount
The two-tier price is not the only way the statute steers where money goes. A targeted employment area is, by the statute's definition, either a rural area or an area designated as having high unemployment, judged at the time of investment. A rural area is anything outside a metropolitan statistical area and outside the boundary of any city or town of 20,000 or more people.
The visa reservations follow the same map. Because 20 percent of each year's EB-5 visas are held for rural investors, 10 percent for high-unemployment areas and 2 percent for infrastructure, each reserved category has its own pool of visa numbers, and its queue can move quite differently from the unreserved one; the State Department's monthly Visa Bulletin publishes the dates for each category and country. The statute also lets DHS go the other way: for an investment in a low-unemployment part of a metropolitan area that is not a targeted area, it may set a higher minimum, up to three times the standard amount.
For an investor, the practical consequence is that the label on the project, rural, high-unemployment, infrastructure or none of these, decides the price, the queue and the processing priority at once. It deserves as much scrutiny as the projected return.
The date that has already passed
A third date matters for anyone already in the system. The regional centre programme is authorised only until 30 September 2027. The statute provides that if it lapses, DHS must continue processing regional centre petitions filed on or before 30 September 2026, may not deny them because of the lapse and may not stop issuing visas to their beneficiaries.
That protection date passed four weeks ago. Petitions filed from 1 October 2026 onwards do not have it. They depend on Congress reauthorising the programme before September 2027, or on being decided before then. Investors filing now should understand that their petition sits in a different legal position from one filed in September.
More scrutiny is coming
DHS has also proposed a rule to implement the integrity provisions of the 2022 Act, published on 2 July 2026. Its title points to its content: ensuring programme integrity and the automatic revocation of petitions in certain cases. The comment period closed on 31 August 2026, and the rule is not yet final. The direction is the same as in other investor programmes worldwide: more checks on where the money comes from, who promotes the project and whether the jobs exist.
A green card is also a tax status
One more point is often missed in investor marketing. A green card is not only an immigration status. Under the IRS green card test, a lawful permanent resident is a US tax resident and is taxed on worldwide income, much as US citizens are under citizen-based taxation. Estate tax exposure changes too: the Brief's piece on the US estate tax for non-residents explains how much depends on whether a person counts as resident for estate tax purposes, a question of domicile that moving to the United States can change. An investor who plans to keep living mainly abroad needs that analysis before the I-526E, not after.
The Brief looked at the government's alternative offer for wealthy applicants in its piece on the Trump Gold Card. Whatever happens to that idea, EB-5 remains the route written into statute, with prices that now adjust automatically, much like the inflation-indexed charges described in the fee state.
The sequence, in short
- Until 29 November 2026 (postmark): current fees; current investment amounts of $1,050,000 and $800,000.
- 30 November to 31 December 2026: new fees (I-526E $7,850 plus the $1,100 Integrity Fund fee); current investment amounts.
- From 1 January 2027: new fees and, by statute, adjusted investment amounts, by the official CPI-U data likely around $1,250,000 and $937,500, pending the Federal Register notice.
- 30 September 2027: the regional centre programme's current authorisation ends; only petitions filed by 30 September 2026 carry the statutory protection.
Filing early only helps if the project is sound. A rushed subscription to a weak project to save $137,500 can cost the whole investment and the green card with it. The deadlines argue for doing the due diligence now, not for skipping it.
Work with Sebastian
If you are weighing a US green card through investment and want the immigration timing, the project risk and the worldwide tax consequences of becoming a US tax resident looked at together, that is the kind of cross-border decision Sebastian works on with internationally mobile clients. Book a consultation.
