USCIS has sent the final version of its EB-5 fee rule to the White House for review, the last procedural step before publication in the Federal Register. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs logged the rule (RIN 1615-AC93) as received on August 19, 2026, according to reginfo.gov. That matters to anyone watching the immigrant investor program, because the proposed version of this rule would cut most EB-5 filing fees rather than raise them.
That makes it an outlier. Nearly every immigration fee action of the past year has moved in one direction: the $100,000 H-1B entry fee, the proposed jump in naturalization fees to $1,330, the annual asylum fee, and the inflation escalator Congress attached to immigration court filings. The EB-5 rule runs the other way.
What the proposal would change
DHS published the proposed rule on October 23, 2025, and the comment period closed December 22, 2025. Under that proposal, the headline investor filings drop:
- Form I-526 and I-526E, initial petition by a standalone or regional center investor: $11,160 to $9,625, a 14 percent cut, and that figure already includes a new $95 technology fee
- Form I-526E amendment: $11,160 to $9,530, down 15 percent
- Form I-829, petition to remove conditions on permanent resident status: $9,525 to $7,860, down 17 percent
Regional center fees fall much harder, in some cases by more than half:
- Form I-956, initial regional center designation: $47,695 to $28,895, down 39 percent
- Form I-956, designation amendment: $47,695 to $18,480, down 61 percent
- Form I-956F, approval of an investment in a commercial enterprise: $47,695 to $29,935, down 37 percent
- Form I-956G, regional center annual statement: $4,470 to $2,740, down 39 percent
Three new charges appear alongside the cuts. Form I-527, a new amendment form for legacy I-526 petitions, would carry an $8,000 fee. Form I-956H, covering the bona fides of people involved with a regional center, would cost $55. Form I-956K, registration for direct and third-party promoters, would cost $2,740.
Beyond the fee schedule, the rule codifies pieces of the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022, including the Integrity Fund. That fund is financed by an annual assessment on designated regional centers of either $10,000 or $20,000 depending on how many investors they carry, plus $1,000 collected from every regional center petitioner filing a Form I-526E. The rule also proposes penalties for late or missed Integrity Fund payments, and clarifies how an investor’s spouse and children file separate I-829 petitions when they are not included in the investor’s own filing.
What is still unsettled
Two cautions apply. First, the numbers above come from the October 2025 proposal, not the final rule. Agencies routinely revise fee tables in response to comments, and the version now sitting at OMB has not been made public. Second, OMB review has no fixed deadline. Reviews of this kind commonly run several weeks to a few months, and the rule only becomes real when it publishes in the Federal Register with an effective date attached.
Why EB-2 and EB-1 applicants should care
EB-5 is not a first choice for most researchers and specialty workers, but it has become a serious fallback for people trapped in the employment-based backlogs. EB-2 India remains severely retrogressed, and USCIS has signaled that India EB-2 cases will not see new visa numbers until the fiscal year turns over in October. For applicants with the capital and a long enough backlog ahead of them, the arithmetic of switching categories depends partly on cost. A roughly $1,500 reduction on the initial petition and a $1,665 reduction at the removal-of-conditions stage does not change that math dramatically, but it moves in the applicant’s favor at a moment when almost nothing else does.
Anyone considering an EB-5 filing in the next few months should watch for the final rule’s effective date before deciding whether to file now or wait.
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Source: Federal Register / reginfo.gov - U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services