EB-5 investors: unreserved numbers, set-asides and the two long queues

Four rows for one preference

Paragraph 5 of the October 2026 bulletin splits the fifth preference. Of its 7.1% of the employment level, 20% is reserved for investors in a rural area, 10% for a high unemployment area and 2% for infrastructure projects; the other 68% is unreserved. Each part gets its own row in both charts. The row labels list the visa classes they cover: the unreserved row includes C5, T5, I5 and R5, the rural row NR and RR, the high-unemployment row NH and RH, and the infrastructure row RI. The calculator above uses the unreserved row, because that is where the cutoffs are.

The set-asides have not had a queue

The three reserved rows first appear in the May 2022 bulletin. On the Final Action chart they have read Current for every country in every bulletin since, 54 bulletins in a row. For an investor born in mainland China or India, that difference is the whole story: the same priority date can be years behind on the unreserved row and current on a set-aside row.

The unreserved row

For investors born outside China and India, the unreserved Final Action Date was Current in 292 of 293 published readings since December 2001; the only step back in the archive came in September 2007. Mexico and the Philippines share that column. Mainland China has had its own date in 96 % of bulletins since October 2015 and now stands at December 1, 2016, with a Date for Filing of March 1, 2021. India, separate in 46 % of them, is at December 1, 2023, with a filing date of May 1, 2024. USCIS accepts the Dates for Filing chart this month for employment-based I-485 applications, which lets an investor already in the United States file once the priority date is earlier than the filing date. The country pages follow each line: EB-5 China and EB-5 India.

The petition before the queue

A regional center investor files Form I-526E with the Immigrant Investor Program Office. The September 2026 USCIS release gives 35 to 38.5 months for that petition, and the G-1055 fee schedule sets its filing fee at $3,675. The priority date is the filing date of the petition, so that long review runs alongside the queue rather than adding to it, for investors whose row has one. Investment amounts, project rules and the choice between rows are legal and financial questions for a licensed immigration attorney or a DOJ-accredited representative; this page only reads the bulletin.

EB-5 in the October 2026 bulletin

Every October since 2002

How our forecast did for this case