What Is the EB-5 Set-Aside Category? Rural, HUA, and Infrastructure Explained

The Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 carved out 32 percent of the annual EB-5 visa allocation and reserved it for three project categories. That reservation is the single most important structural change in the program in the last fifteen years. Set-aside categories are not "a faster lane" in the casual sense. They are statutorily-protected pools of visa numbers that exist outside the unreserved 68 percent allocation. A China-born or India-born investor who qualifies for a set-aside project gets access to a visa pool where the seven percent per-country cap has not yet bound, and where Final Action Dates remain Current. That is the entire competitive advantage. Everything else (investment minimum, source-of-funds rules, two-year conditional residence, indirect job creation methodology) is the same as unreserved EB-5. The 32 percent reservation is the lever. This article walks through what each of the three set-aside categories actually requires, how the visa allocation...