IN THIS GUIDE · Read an EB-5 hiring report without treating every open role as a created job
Start with the EB-5 eligibility and application overview
Identify what the dashboard counts
Ask whether a number means budgeted roles, advertised positions, signed offers or actual employment. Record relevant dates and changes. A recruitment target can support planning without being presented as completed job creation. Create a date-stamped table that separates positions planned, posted, filled, started, and retained. For each line, retain the underlying payroll, offer, or project record rather than a screen total. The concrete decision is whether the number answers a projected-jobs question, an actual-employment question, or neither.
Use the applicable job methodology
For a direct employment analysis, evaluate qualifying employees and full-time positions rather than counting every contact in a recruiting system. Regional-center cases may use an applicable economic methodology instead; do not substitute a raw hiring dashboard for that analysis or assume every contractor is a qualifying direct employee. Select the evidence only after identifying whether the case is direct or regional-center based and what the applicable methodology measures. For direct cases, records should establish qualifying full-time U.S. employment; for regional-center cases, the approved economic approach may address different job categories. A contractor list does not answer both analyses by itself.
Keep the other investment requirements visible
Current general capital thresholds are US$1.05 million or US$800,000 for a qualifying targeted-employment-area or infrastructure investment, with statutory adjustments beginning January 1, 2027 under applicable filing-date rules. The case requires lawful source and path, at-risk capital, ten qualifying full-time jobs per investor and management or policy participation. A hiring forecast does not establish the capital or participation elements. Confirm the capital amount applicable to the actual filing and location, then preserve source documents from the first transaction through the new commercial enterprise. Capital must remain exposed to gain or loss, and the job requirement is ten qualifying full-time jobs for each investor under the applicable rules. A repayment promise needs careful reading, not optimistic relabelling.
Preserve changes as the plan develops
Explain cancelled offers, revised starts and actual staffing against the relevant business plan without rewriting past reports as if every forecast occurred. Conditional residence begins with applicable immigrant admission or adjustment approval, not recruitment. I-829 is generally filed in the 90 days before its second anniversary; evaluate the job evidence required for the actual filing stage. Maintain a chronology of material business changes and compare each update with the filed plan before submitting it. Conditional permanent residence follows the applicable approval or admission, and conditions are later addressed through the proper petition process. Hypothetical example: a commercial-laundry modernization project replaces one planned shift with automated equipment; the decision is whether the revised records still support the job methodology, rather than whether the original hiring dashboard can be left unchanged.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.