Last day for protected EB-5 filings; I-526E fee to more than double

A protection written into US law for EB-5 investors through regional centres covers petitions filed on or before 30 September 2026, today. Later petitions can still be filed, because the Regional Center Program is authorised until 30 September 2027, but they fall outside that protection if the programme lapses. The same day, the Department of Homeland Security published a rule that more than doubles the initial investor petition fee and raises the I-829 fee by a third from late November.

What the protection covers

Section 108 of the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 added paragraph (S) to the immigration law. If the legislation authorising the Regional Center Program expires, the Secretary of Homeland Security “shall continue processing” investor petitions and petitions to remove conditions based on a regional-centre investment “that were filed on or before September 30, 2026”, may not deny them because of the expiration, and may not suspend or terminate visa allocation to beneficiaries of approved petitions. The investor petitions covered are today’s Form I-526E and older regional-centre I-526 petitions; the petitions to remove conditions are Form I-829.

Under USCIS regulations, a petition’s receipt date is the day it actually arrives at the designated filing location, not the day it is sent; a petition USCIS rejects, for a missing signature or the wrong fee for example, keeps no filing date.

The paragraph does not name applications to adjust status in the United States (Form I-485), and it refers only to the expiration of the programme’s legislation. The sources read do not settle whether, for an I-829, the date applies to the I-829 itself or to the investor petition behind it. TLT found no guidance on the 30 September 2026 date on USCIS’s EB-5 pages, in the EB-5 part of its Policy Manual or among its alerts as of 30 September.

What does not end today

The programme itself continues. The statute makes regional-centre visas available “through September 30, 2027”, and USCIS repeats that date on its programme page. TLT set out the difference between the two dates in August.

No bill on govinfo.gov in the current Congress would extend either date; congress.gov could not be checked. H.R. 8586, the Americans First Immigration Act introduced in April, would replace the employment-based categories, including EB-5, with a points system; it would bar new EB-5 petitions from enactment and stop the adjudication of pending ones. As of 19 September it had not moved beyond committee referral.

Higher fees from late November

The fee rule published on 30 September raises the I-526E fee from USD 3,675 to 7,850. The 3,675 figure is the fee reinstated on 13 November 2025. The direct-investment I-526 rises from 3,675 to 7,615 and the I-829 from 3,750 to 5,000. A regional centre’s project application (Form I-956F) rises from 17,795 to 42,675. USCIS says the new fees are “designed to go into effect” on 30 November; the rule text says 60 days after publication, which from 30 September is 29 November. The new fees apply to filings postmarked on or after the effective date; the published Federal Register text will fix the day. In a footnote, DHS says its analysis assumes the programme “will be extended and will not sunset”.

Almost all regional-centre investments are made at the lower level: of the 50,766 DHS counts from fiscal 2016 to 2025, 50,703 were at the reduced amount, now USD 800,000 in a targeted employment area or infrastructure project, against USD 1,050,000 elsewhere. Both amounts adjust automatically for petitions filed from 1 January 2027; the statute measures inflation from 1 January 2022, while the USCIS page says 15 March 2022, and no adjusted figures have been published.

For Vietnamese investors

Vietnam is not listed separately in the visa charts. For October 2026, USCIS tells employment-based applicants to use the Dates for Filing chart, where the category covering Vietnam is current in every EB-5 row. That chart governs when applicants already in the United States may file to adjust status. The State Department’s final-action chart for October, which governs visa issuance at consulates, was not available to TLT. In USCIS data TLT reported in September, 161 of 174 petitions by Vietnam-born investors in the first nine months of fiscal 2026 were in the reserved categories.