IN THIS GUIDE · A farmland sale that has to be traced parcel by parcel before it becomes qualifying capital
Start with the EB-5 eligibility and application overview
Which threshold applies, and when the numbers move
The standard qualifying investment is one million and fifty thousand United States dollars. Eight hundred thousand applies where the new commercial enterprise is principally doing business in a targeted employment area or is an infrastructure project, and the statute provides for those amounts to be adjusted from the first of January, twenty twenty-seven, which means anyone planning across that date should confirm the current figures rather than the remembered ones. A targeted employment area is either a rural area or one of high unemployment, with rural defined by being outside a metropolitan statistical area and outside any city or town of twenty thousand or more people. Rural cases also carry a statutory reservation of visas and priority processing, which is a practical advantage rather than a legal one. The designation belongs to the project and must be evidenced by the project, not assumed because a county feels rural.
Ten jobs, and who is counted as filling them
Each investor must create at least ten full-time positions for qualifying United States workers, which means employees rather than contractors, and thirty-five hours a week or more. Full-time equivalents assembled from part-time roles do not count. In a direct investment the ten must be employees of the new commercial enterprise itself, which is a demanding standard for a small business and the reason most individual investors use a regional centre instead. Through a regional centre, indirect and induced jobs generated by the project's expenditure and revenue may be counted under a reasonable economic methodology, and the ten attributed to Gurpreet are his share of a much larger modelled total. Two cautions follow. The jobs must exist or be reasonably expected to exist within the required period, and a project whose model depends heavily on construction jobs lasting under two years counts them differently from permanent operational positions.
The investor has to be involved, and the residence arrives conditionally
EB-5 is not a passive purchase of status. The investor must engage in the management of the enterprise or in policy formulation, and for regional centre cases the ordinary rights of a limited partner or of a member in a member-managed limited liability company are accepted as satisfying that requirement, which is why the partnership agreement is a document worth reading rather than signing. On approval and admission, Gurpreet, his wife and any unmarried children under twenty-one receive permanent residence on a conditional basis for two years. In the ninety days before the second anniversary he files Form I-829 to remove the conditions, showing that the capital was invested and sustained for the required period and that the jobs were created. Failure at that stage terminates the residence of everyone who obtained it through him, which is why the project's reporting obligations matter more than its projected return.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.