Every EB-5 business plan gets measured against one precedent decision: Matter of Ho, 22 I&N Dec. 206 (Assoc. Comm'r 1998). It doesn't set a page count or a template — it sets a standard of specificity. Ho requires a plan detailed enough that a reasonable adjudicator can independently conclude your job creation projections are realistic, not merely asserted. That single sentence is why generic EB-5 templates fail: specificity cannot be templated.
Current Investment Thresholds
Under the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA), the minimum investment is:
- $800,000 if the new commercial enterprise is in a Targeted Employment Area (TEA) — a rural area or an area of high unemployment
- $1,050,000 for investments outside a TEA
The RIA also created reserved visa set-asides for rural, high-unemployment, and infrastructure projects — if your investment qualifies for one of these categories, your plan should say so explicitly, since it affects visa processing priority.
What Matter of Ho Actually Demands
A Ho-compliant plan is not simply "detailed" in a general sense. It specifically needs:
- A market analysis with real reasoning behind demand projections — not just an assertion that a market is large
- A staffing plan with job titles, duties, timing, and salaries specific enough that a reader could evaluate whether the projected headcount is achievable
- Financial projections that connect directly to the staffing and market analysis — if you're projecting revenue that requires 20 employees, your financials and your job creation table need to show the same 20 employees, at consistent salaries
Vague plans — "the company will hire as needed" or "revenue will grow steadily" — are exactly what Ho was written to reject.
The Job Creation Requirement
Every EB-5 investment must create at least 10 full-time jobs for qualifying US workers within two years of admission. How those jobs are counted depends on your investment structure:
Direct investment (a New Commercial Enterprise you personally manage): only W-2 employees on that enterprise's own payroll count. This is the simpler, more conservative, and more defensible methodology — it's what a self-drafted or AI-assisted business plan should default to, since it doesn't require specialized economic modeling.
Regional Center investment: may additionally count indirect and induced jobs through recognized economic methodologies (such as RIMS II input-output modeling), but this requires a specialized econometric report — a business plan narrative alone cannot substitute for that analysis.
If you're investing directly rather than through a Regional Center, make sure your plan states clearly that it's using the direct-jobs-only methodology, and that every position in your job creation table is a genuine W-2 role on your own enterprise's payroll.
What a Complete EB-5 Plan Contains
A Ho-compliant plan typically runs 45-60 pages: executive summary, business concept and entity structure, a capital deployment schedule broken down by category and timing, a lawful source of funds narrative (framework only — the actual evidence is a separate, attorney-managed compliance workstream), market and competitive analysis, marketing plan, organizational structure, the job creation plan (the centerpiece section), five-year financials tied directly to that job creation plan, a month-by-month 24-month timeline, risk factors with real mitigation strategies, and a conclusion.
As with any visa business plan, this is a draft for attorney review — not a legal filing, and never a guarantee of any specific immigration outcome.