When Should I Apply for EB-5? The Answer Depends on Your Passport, Your Children, and One Date in September

Short answer. No universal right time. Three things decide it: where you are chargeable, how old your children are, and whether you need regional center grandfathering. Two dates make this year different. September 30, 2026 and January 1, 2027.

Which of these three is you?

The rest of this page is three worked situations. Start with the one that matches.

The two dates on the calendar

September 30, 2026, and what it actually protects

The Regional Center Program is authorized through September 30, 2027. If it is not reauthorized after that, a separate provision protects petitions already filed.

That provision is INA 203(b)(5)(S), “Protection from expired legislation,” codified at 8 U.S.C. 1153(b)(5)(S). It reads:

“Notwithstanding the expiration of legislation authorizing the regional center program under subparagraph (E), the Secretary of Homeland Security, (i) shall continue processing petitions under sections 1154(a)(1)(H) and 1186b of this title based on an investment in a new commercial enterprise associated with a regional center that were filed on or before September 30, 2026; (ii) may not deny a petition described in clause (i) based on the expiration of such legislation; and (iii) may not suspend or terminate the allocation of visas to the beneficiaries of approved petitions described in clause (i).”

Three things in that text are worth reading twice, because most summaries leave them out.

It protects petitions filed, not money committed. “Filed on or before September 30, 2026.” An investor who has selected a project, wired funds into escrow, and not filed is outside it. The filing is the act that counts.

It runs all the way through removal of conditions. The two statutes named are 8 U.S.C. 1154(a)(1)(H), which is the immigrant investor petition, and 8 U.S.C. 1186b, which is removal of conditions. So a protected investor is protected at the I-829 as well as at the I-526E. That is a more complete protection than the one usually described.

The date is one year before the sunset, and nobody has a good explanation for the gap. Authorization runs to September 30, 2027. Protection covers filings through September 30, 2026. Practitioners have flagged that year-long gap since the statute was enacted and there is no clean legislative history accounting for it. Read it as drafted: if you want the protection, the date that matters to you is 2026.

If you intend to file a regional center petition and want this protection, that deadline is roughly five weeks from the date of this post.

January 1, 2027, and the investment amounts

INA 203(b)(5)(C)(iii) requires the minimum investment amounts to be adjusted for inflation every five years, and the first adjustment is January 1, 2027. The statute says the adjustment applies “for petitions filed on or after the effective date of each adjustment,” based on the cumulative change in the unadjusted consumer price index.

Current amounts are $800,000 for a targeted employment area and $1,050,000 otherwise.

Separately, the proposed rule published July 2, 2026 at 91 Fed. Reg. 40676 would add a higher tier for high-employment areas, reported at $1.4 million. That is a proposal and it is not law. The statutory indexation, by contrast, is scheduled and automatic.

What none of this means. It does not mean file something incomplete to beat a date. A petition filed to meet a deadline and denied on source of funds has bought you nothing and cost you the fee. The deadlines change the schedule you should be working on. They do not change the standard.

What actually determines timing

1. Your chargeability.Which country’s per-country limit applies. Usually your country of birth, not your citizenship, with a cross-chargeability rule that lets a spouse borrow the other spouse’s country in some cases.
2. Your children’s ages.A derivative child must be under 21, and the Child Status Protection Act allows the time your petition was pending to be subtracted from the child’s age. The rules on this changed on August 15, 2025 and most published material has not caught up. See Will My Child Age Out?, which is the page to read if a child is anywhere near 21.
3. Which category you can file into.INA 203(b)(5)(B)(i) reserves 20 percent of visas for rural projects, 10 percent for high-unemployment areas, and 2 percent for infrastructure. These set-asides have been Current for every country of chargeability, including China and India, while the unreserved category has not.
4. How fast the category is adjudicated.Not the same question as visa availability, and often the more important one. See below.
5. Whether money needs to move now or later.Source of funds preparation takes months. See EB-5 Source of Funds.

Where the visa numbers stand

As of the September 2026 Visa Bulletin:

Three things follow.

The set-asides are the story. For an investor chargeable to India or China, the difference between a rural or high-unemployment project and an unreserved project is not a preference. It is the difference between a number available now and a number unavailable or nine years back.

India unreserved is not merely slow, it is closed. The Department of State made the category unavailable for the remainder of fiscal 2026, through September 30, 2026. Unavailable is a different thing from a distant date, and it matters most for a child’s age. A Child Status Protection Act calculation needs a date on which a visa became available, and where the chart shows U there is no such date.

Which chart controls, and for what. USCIS moved employment-based adjustment filings to the Final Action Dates chart in mid-2026, which is why the dates-for-filing row above is cold comfort for an India-chargeable unreserved investor. And since August 15, 2025 the Final Action Dates chart is also the chart used for the CSPA age calculation. One chart, two consequences. Confirm which chart USCIS is honoring for the month you intend to file. It is announced monthly.

If a child in your family is within four years of 21, the table above is the most important thing on this page and it changes monthly. [Send us their date of birth] and we will tell you where you actually stand.

Rural is not just a visa category, it is a queue

This is the planning fact most often left out, and for many investors it matters more than the visa bulletin.

INA 203(b)(5)(E)(ii)(I) directs that the Secretary “shall prioritize the processing and adjudication of petitions for rural areas.” That is a statutory direction, not a service aspiration.

It is happening. Data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act covering April 2022 through July 2025, across more than thirteen thousand adjudicated petitions, shows rural petitions making up roughly 81 percent of adjudications against roughly 9 percent for high-unemployment.

Reported adjudication times reflect it. Rural I-526E petitions have been reported in the range of eleven to seventeen months, against roughly three years or more for unreserved petitions. Those are aggregator figures and they move, so treat them as orders of magnitude and see How Long Does EB-5 Take? for the caveats.

The consequence. For an investor whose real constraint is a child’s age, a rural project is faster on two independent axes: the visa number is available, and the petition is adjudicated sooner. Nothing else in EB-5 offers that combination.

Example one: the Indian software executive with a fifteen-year-old

Facts. Forty-four, born in India, in the United States on an H-1B, EB-2 India priority date from 2013 going nowhere useful. Married, children aged fifteen and eleven. Roughly $1.1 million available after selling a property in Bengaluru and taking a documented family loan. He has been told to wait for the EB-2 line to move.

The answer: file now, into a rural project, and treat the fifteen-year-old as the deadline.

Start with the child, because she decides everything else. Under CSPA her age at the point a visa becomes available is reduced by the days the petition was pending. Since August 15, 2025 that availability is measured on the Final Action Dates chart, and for India that chart currently reads: unreserved unavailable, set-asides Current.

So the two routes are not close. An unreserved petition gives her no availability date at all right now, which means no calculation and no protection. A rural or high-unemployment petition puts her in a category that is Current, where a number is available on approval and the pending time works in her favor.

Then add the queue. Rural petitions are adjudicated on the priority track. That shortens the interval between filing and the moment her age is fixed, which is the interval during which everything can go wrong.

What we would do. Start the funds trace immediately, because the family loan and the property sale are both documentation projects. Target a rural project specifically, not merely a set-aside. File the I-526E, and file the I-485s concurrently as soon as a number is available and the funds record supports it. Concurrent filing brings employment authorization and advance parole for the whole family, which for a household living on one H-1B decouples their status from one employer. Do not wait for EB-2.

The eleven-year-old. She is fine. The fifteen-year-old is the constraint, and every date in the plan is built backward from her.

The caution we would give in writing. A category that is Current today can retrogress. A child’s age is not conclusively fixed simply because the family filed while the chart was green. That risk is real, it is not hypothetical, and it is another argument for the faster queue rather than the slower one. See Will My Child Age Out?.

Example two: the Brazilian manufacturer who should slow down

Facts. Fifty-two, Brazilian citizen and Brazilian-born, sold a plastics business eighteen months ago, roughly $2 million liquid. No children under 21. Outside the United States, visiting on a B-1/B-2 a few times a year. He wants to file “before the deadline” because a project promoter told him September 30 is the last chance.

The answer: he is not on either deadline the way he was told, and rushing costs him more than waiting.

Start with the numbers. Brazil is chargeable to “all other countries,” which is Current across the board, unreserved and set-asides alike. Nothing about the queue is pressuring him. He has no child near 21. Two of the three variables that matter are neutral.

Now the deadlines. INA 203(b)(5)(S) protects regional center petitions. If he invests directly, in a business he runs, the September 2026 date does not apply to him at all, because there is no regional center in his structure and no program authorization to expire. If he does want a regional center project, the date is real and the question becomes whether he can build a defensible source of funds file in five weeks. He sold a company. That means purchase agreements, closing statements, corporate records, seven years of Brazilian tax filings, and certified translations of all of it.

The January 1, 2027 indexation is the deadline that actually applies to him, and it is four months out, not five weeks.

What we would do. Take the autumn to build the file properly and decide direct against regional center on the merits rather than on a promoter’s calendar. If regional center wins on the merits and the file is not ready by September 30, weigh the statutory protection against the cost of a thin petition. Section (S) protects a petition from a program lapse. It does not protect a petition from being denied on its own merits.

The general point. A deadline is only your deadline if the thing it governs is the thing you are doing. Ask which program, which date, and whether either applies to your facts. I have had this conversation more times than any other in this practice, and in most of them the honest answer was that the person on the phone had five months rather than five weeks, and had been told otherwise by someone who was paid on the outcome.

Example three: the Chinese investor whose child turns twenty-one in fourteen months

Facts. Chinese national, born in China. Daughter turns 21 in fourteen months. Capital is available but sits partly in a company account and partly with relatives who used their own foreign exchange quotas to move money abroad two years ago. He has been “getting organized” for a year.

The answer: this is an emergency, and the emergency is the funds trace, not the filing.

Unreserved EB-5 for China sits at a December 1, 2016 final action date. That is not a queue you can plan a child’s future around. The set-asides are Current for China, so a rural project is the only realistic structure, and it is also the faster queue.

Now the child. Fourteen months. Her CSPA age is her age when a visa becomes available, on the Final Action Dates chart, reduced by the days the petition was pending. With a set-aside Current, a number is available at approval, so the pending period is the entire cushion. Filing sooner directly lengthens it. Every week spent not filing is a week that does not count in her favor.

But he cannot file until the funds record exists, and his is the hardest kind. Money moved through relatives’ quotas two years ago, which means each relative is a person who transferred funds on his behalf and must be identified under INA 203(b)(5)(L)(ii), and each relative’s own funds must be lawfully sourced. Two years after the fact, with no contemporaneous documentation, that is a reconstruction project. See Source of Funds for Chinese Investors.

What we would do. Everything in parallel and nothing in sequence. Funds trace, relative-by-relative documentation, certified translations, and project selection all start the same week. Where a relative’s records are unrecoverable, restructure the contribution rather than paper over it.

What we would tell him plainly. The year he spent getting organized was the expensive year. Not because a deadline passed, but because his daughter got a year older while the file did not get built.

So when should you apply?

Apply now if a child is within a few years of 21; you are chargeable to India or China and can use a set-aside; your funds are documented or documentable in weeks; you want a regional center project and want the protection of section (S); or you would rather invest at $800,000 than at whatever the indexed figure turns out to be.

Apply later if your source of funds record is genuinely not ready, no child is near 21, and you are chargeable to a country where the category is Current. The cost of waiting is the indexation. The cost of rushing is a denial.

Do not apply at all yet if you have not decided between direct and regional center, or you have not had the cross-border tax conversation, or the capital is not actually yours to invest.

The thing nobody tells you. The filing date is not the variable you control. The readiness date is. Almost every EB-5 case I have handled that ran late ran late for the same reason, and it was never project selection.

The cheapest hour in an investor visa case is the first one.

Send us three things and we will tell you your date: your country of birth, your children’s dates of birth, and a one-paragraph description of where the money came from. That is enough for a first read.

Schedule a call · Send us your situation · Call or text 512.761.8479

Read next: Will My Child Age Out? · The EB-5 Document Checklist · EB-5 Source of Funds

Client scenarios in this post are composites drawn from multiple matters, with identifying facts changed. They are illustrations, not predictions. No outcome is typical and none is promised.

This post is general information about immigration law. It is not investment advice, securities advice, or tax advice, and we are not your tax advisors. Bring in independent financial and cross-border tax counsel before money moves.

Kyle M. Kinzy is the principal of Kinzy Law, in West Lake Hills, Texas. He has practiced immigration law since 1998 and is licensed in Texas and Illinois. His practice combines immigration with business and transactional work, which is the combination most investor visa cases actually require: the visa question and the deal question are usually the same question, and they are usually answered by the same document.

Not certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.

This page is reviewed monthly on release of the Visa Bulletin. Last reviewed August 25, 2026.