The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a final rule on September 30 that more than doubles the government filing fees for EB-5 investor petitions.
From November 30, Form I-526E, the petition regional center investors file, will cost $7,850, up from $3,675. Standalone investors filing Form I-526 will pay $7,615.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will apply the new schedule to any filing postmarked on or after that date. Across existing EB-5 forms, fees rise by a weighted average of 70.7%.
The petition increase alone adds $4,175 to a commitment that starts at $800,000, a ratio that leads Mona Shah of Mona Shah & Associates to doubt the rule will dent demand. “In my view, a filing fee increase of a few thousand dollars will not decide whether a family pursues a green card,” she says. Her practical advice is nonetheless simple: “anyone ready to file should file before November 30.”
“The last time USCIS raised EB-5 fees, the industry pushed back hard,” Shah recalls of the April 2024 increases, which a federal court stayed because the agency had skipped the program-specific fee study Congress required.
“This time USCIS did the study, and the numbers came down.” At $7,850, the regional center petition is “still more than double what it is today,” she notes, yet “well below the $11,160 investors were paying under the 2024 schedule.”
What investors will pay
Both initial petition fees include a new $75 technology fee, which the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA) authorizes at up to 1% of the petition fee to fund the agency’s filing systems. Amendments to Form I-526E escape that charge, hence their $7,775 price. Regional center investors also pay the Integrity Fund fee, so their total government bill at filing climbs from $4,675 to $8,950.
For new investors, the final fees landed below the October 2025 proposal. DHS had floated $9,625 for both petitions and $7,860 for Form I-829, then recalculated after commenters asked for newer budget and workload data. Minimum investment amounts stay where they are: $800,000 in a targeted employment area (TEA) or infrastructure project, and $1.05 million elsewhere.
EB-5 grants conditional permanent residence to investors, their spouses, and eligible children when the capital creates at least ten full-time US jobs. Congress allocates roughly 10,000 visas to the category each year.
Regional centers take the steepest increases
Shah expects most regional centers to absorb the increase, particularly once the cost of EB-5 capital is set against “what a developer pays for conventional financing in a high interest rate environment.” Even at $42,675, the project application fee is “a small line item: on a 20-investor raise of $16 million, it is about a quarter of one percent.”
“What developers should notice,” she adds, “is that DHS has built the cost of terminating regional centers into the I-956 and I-956F fees.” The department puts that cost at about $4.8 million a year, down from the $6.8 million it estimated in the proposal. “Compliant sponsors are, in effect, paying for enforcement against non-compliant ones.”
“One change deserves real credit,” in Shah’s view: the Form I-956 amendment fee, which drops to $9,835 after DHS agreed with commenters that amendments should not carry termination costs.
“Under the 2024 schedule, a regional center amendment cost $47,695, the same as a brand-new designation.” Because “capital stacks change, developers change, timelines shift,” she explains, charging nearly $48,000 each time “penalized regional centers for keeping USCIS informed.”
Where she expects the schedule to change behavior is “at the sponsor level.” A regional center project now carries the Form I-956F fee, annual Integrity Fund fees of $11,000 or $22,000, and a $2,165 promoter registration, while “a direct, standalone project carries none of those.” Her forecast follows: “For projects that can create ten direct jobs per investor, I expect to see more standalone I-526 petitions.”
Late Integrity Fund payments now carry codified penalties. Any center that has not paid its annual fee by October 31 owes 10% extra in November and 20% in December, and DHS terminates those still unpaid after December 30. Annual Integrity Fund collections should rise from about $13.9 million to $15.3 million, the department projects.
How a court ruling reset the baseline
DHS first raised EB-5 fees through its agency-wide fee rule, which took the investor petition from $3,675 to $11,160 on April 1, 2024. The American Immigrant Investor Alliance sued, and on November 12, 2025, the US District Court for the District of Colorado stayed the EB-5 increases in Moody v. Noem. USCIS reverted that day to fees first set in 2016.
In the final rule, DHS and USCIS maintain that they “believe the Court’s decision is incorrect but have implemented it.” Investors who paid the higher fees during those 19 months will not see the difference again: the department points out that the ruling ordered no reimbursement, and it declines to issue refunds.
This time the fees rest on the program-specific study the RIA demands. That study projects EB-5 costs of about $105 million a year across fiscal years 2026 and 2027 against $56.6 million in revenue at current fees, a $48.4 million gap the new schedule is built to close. DHS also chose not to load EB-5 fees with the cost of fee-exempt humanitarian filings, a surcharge the RIA permits, “out of an abundance of caution, to reduce litigation risk.”
“Congress required EB-5 fees to cover the program’s full cost, so an increase was coming,” Shah acknowledges. “But inflation alone does not explain a doubling”: the Integrity Fund fee, which DHS did tie to inflation, rose only 10%.
Higher fees, no promise of speed
USCIS says the fees will help it meet the RIA’s processing goals: 180 days for regional center and project applications, and 240 days for investor petitions, with shorter targets for TEA filings. “We live in hope,” Shah remarks. “But in our practice, the 2024 increases produced no real change in processing speed.”
DHS declined commenters’ requests to write those goals into regulation, reasoning that “the better practice is to limit codification to requirements,” and conceded that actual processing times turn on “application volume, staffing, and case complexity.” Its forecast of annual EB-5 filings, meanwhile, climbed from 11,262 in the proposal to 16,604 in the final rule. “More money chasing more cases does not automatically mean faster cases,” Shah warns.
“The bottleneck that concerns me most is the I-956F,” she continues. “Project approvals are taking far too long, and a developer cannot raise capital with confidence while its project application sits in a queue.” She also reports “far more project denials” under the Trump administration, which raises the stakes: “If the higher I-956F fee is justified anywhere, it should be justified by faster project adjudications.”
Legacy investors must pay $10,330 for protection
The rule creates Form I-527 for investors who filed before the RIA became law in March 2022 and whose regional center is later terminated or whose project is debarred. Filing it amends the original petition and preserves the priority date. At $10,330, it costs more than the $8,000 DHS proposed and more than a new Form I-526E.
Commenters called the proposed fee punitive and asked for waivers or a reduced rate where the investor bears no fault. DHS refused, noting that USCIS “does not typically offer fee waivers for employment-based benefit requests,” and attributed the higher final figure partly to a larger agency budget.
“These are the investors Congress set out to protect in 2022,” Shah objects. “Asking them to pay more than $10,000 for that protection is hard to reconcile with that intent.”
Not every legacy investor will need the form. USCIS policy holds that an investor whose project is complete, with enough jobs created and capital sustained through the two-year conditional residence period, may remain eligible despite his regional center’s termination. Only about 10% of investors who answered the first round of termination notices indicated interest in amending, the rule discloses.
The next deadline: January 1, 2027
Shah regards the fee deadline as the lesser of two dates. “The date investors should be watching is January 1, 2027, when the statute requires the minimum investment amounts to be adjusted for inflation for the first time.”
She expects the $800,000 minimum to land between roughly $940,000 and $960,000.
A petition postmarked by November 29 pays today’s fee at today’s investment amount. One filed in December pays the new fee but still qualifies at $800,000; from January 1, both are higher.
DHS has yet to finalize its July proposed rule, which would add a $1.4 million tier for projects in high-employment areas; comments closed on August 31. Congress, for its part, has authorized the regional center program only through September 30, 2027.
