IN THIS GUIDE · Borrowed capital and repayment obligations
Start with the EB-5 eligibility and application overview
Identify what is being contributed
Borrowed cash and an investor’s promise to pay are not interchangeable arrangements. Show precisely what the investor will receive and contribute, who owns it and what obligations remain. USCIS rules permit qualifying borrowed funds under conditions, but each structure needs review. Do not rely on a blanket statement that every loan works or that borrowing is always prohibited.
Document the lender and disbursement
Preserve the loan agreement, lender identity, disbursement record and the path into the investment. Depending on the lender and applicable rules, lawful-source evidence for the lending funds may be needed. Give counsel enough information to distinguish institutional lending from private family or business financing. A promissory note without evidence of actual funds does not explain a completed cash investment.
Examine collateral and side terms
Identify assets securing the obligation and every related agreement. The legal treatment may depend on whether the investor contributes cash or indebtedness, so counsel should review the structure rather than infer eligibility from the word loan. Commercial protections, guarantees and capital-return provisions also need scrutiny for their effect on the required at-risk investment. Preserve the full contract, not selected pages.
Plan repayment without immigration assumptions
A lender’s repayment schedule can continue while a petition or visa remains pending. Build a household plan that does not depend on guaranteed project distributions or a promised U.S. start date. Financial affordability and immigration compliance are separate reviews. If repayment requires a sale, refinancing or continued Canadian earnings, identify those dependencies before committing the proposed capital.
Establish what secures the borrowing
The structure of a loan matters more here than its size. Capital may include indebtedness, but the applicable rules generally require that the investor be personally and primarily liable and that the assets of the new commercial enterprise not be used to secure the indebtedness. Work out precisely what stands behind the loan. A borrowing secured on the investor's own property, with the investor personally liable, sits in a different position from one secured on the enterprise the money is going into, and the difference is structural rather than presentational. Where a lender has taken security, obtain the security documents and read what they charge. Where a family member has guaranteed the loan or provided collateral, that arrangement needs documenting and assessing, since it affects who is liable and may raise its own questions about the source of the funds.
Keep the repayment plan independent of the immigration outcome
A loan has a schedule that runs regardless of how any application proceeds, and building the repayment plan on an assumption about immigration is where households get into difficulty. Model the obligation on its own: the instalment amount, the term, the interest basis and whether the rate is fixed, and any event that could accelerate the debt. Then ask what income services it, and whether that income exists independently of the move. Where repayment depends on employment the investor does not yet have, on selling an asset that has not sold, or on distributions the enterprise has not made, identify each of those as a dependency. Consider what happens if the process takes considerably longer than expected, since a maturity date arriving before anything is resolved is a foreseeable outcome that a plan should be able to survive.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.