Same $800,000, same 10 jobs — the EB-5 wait is zero years or 9.6

The EB-5 program sells green cards for capital: put up enough money, create enough jobs, and Congress has agreed to sell you and your family permanent residence.▸ The price is fixed by regulation. The job requirement is fixed by statute. What isn't fixed — what depends entirely on which of four lines an investor's money stands in — is how long the wait actually is. As of the July 2026 Visa Bulletin, that gap runs from zero to nearly a decade, for identical money and identical jobs.

Congress created the EB-5 category in 1990 to trade capital and job creation for permanent residence.▸ The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 set the current price: $1,050,000 for a standard project, or $800,000 if the project sits in a "targeted employment area" — a rural county, or a census tract with unemployment at least 150% of the national average. Either way, the investor's money must create at least 10 full-time jobs; for projects inside a regional center, up to 90% of those jobs can be indirect, meaning economic-model estimates rather than a paycheck the investor's enterprise issues directly.

The investment amount is the same nationwide.▸ What isn't the same is the queue an investor's petition joins. The worldwide employment-based limit is at least 140,000 visas a year; EB-5 — the "fifth preference" — gets 7.1% of that, roughly 9,940 visas. By statute, 32% of the EB-5 pool is carved into three set-asides — 20% rural, 10% high-unemployment, 2% infrastructure — leaving 68% "unreserved," open to any EB-5 investor regardless of project type.

Those splits look like bookkeeping until they collide with demand.▸ Chinese nationals have filed the majority of EB-5 petitions for over a decade, and almost all of that demand piles into the unreserved lane rather than the smaller, newer set-asides. A per-country cap limits any one nation to roughly 7% of the worldwide preference total in a given year — so when one country's demand for one lane vastly exceeds its share, the excess doesn't move faster. It queues.

This is where the same $800,000 stops behaving like the same $800,000.▸ The State Department's Visa Bulletin publishes a "final action date" for every category and country each month — the cutoff before which a filed petition can now actually receive a visa. In July 2026, all three EB-5 set-asides — rural, high-unemployment, infrastructure — are marked "C," current, for every chargeability area on the chart, China and India included: file today, and there is no numerical backlog to clear. The unreserved category tells a different story. For China-mainland-born investors, the unreserved final action date is December 1, 2016 — meaning only petitions filed before that date are now current, a wait of roughly 9.6 years. India's unreserved category is worse: marked "U," unavailable, for the rest of fiscal year 2026, because Indian demand already exhausted its pro-rated share of that lane for the year.

None of this is new strain — it's an old backlog that predates the current bulletin by years.▸ A 2023 Congressional Research Service report found 12,819 Form I-526/I-526E petitions pending with USCIS as of the second quarter of fiscal year 2023, with average processing running 85 months for Chinese nationals versus 56 months for everyone else, and Chinese nationals accounting for 56.3% of EB-5 admissions in fiscal year 2022. The set-asides — rural, high unemployment, infrastructure — didn't exist as separate lanes until the 2022 reform created them specifically to route new investment away from that jam. They worked, for investors willing to fund a rural or high-unemployment project. They did nothing for the petitions already stuck behind a 2016 priority date in the unreserved line.

Wait-time figures describe the China-mainland-born unreserved and set-aside categories specifically, as published in the July 2026 Visa Bulletin; other countries and categories carry different final action dates, and India's unreserved category is unavailable rather than dated. Visa-pool figures use the 140,000 worldwide employment-based floor set by statute — actual annual totals can run higher when unused family-sponsored numbers fall down into employment-based categories.