Filing your E-2 visa at the U.S. Consulate General Sydney

The three-day window is the only hard deadline in the process and it runs from payment, not from readiness. Do not pay the fee until you are in a position to complete the form immediately afterwards.

When the appointment scheduling request page appears, it will accept attachments. Do not use it for your E-2 evidence — the consulate is explicit that required documents are emailed separately, following the instructions it sends you at step four.

Documents uploaded in the wrong place are not documents the reviewing officer will see, and there is no error message to tell you so.

The DS-160 number generated by the CEAC website must match the number entered in the online application. A mismatch here is a silent failure of the kind that surfaces late, and it takes seconds to verify.

Every applicant also needs a unique email address on their profile, dependents included. A family sharing one address cannot complete the profile step.

When a company first applies and qualifies for an E-1 or E-2 visa, the consulate automatically registers it for five years. Once registered, later applicants from that company submit substantially less documentation, and Australia publishes a separate, shorter requirement list for them.

Five years is at the generous end — Copenhagen decides between 12, 36 and 60 months case by case. It makes the first Australian filing from a business a long-lived asset rather than a one-off cost.

Both are consulates general working from the same mission-wide instructions, with the same three-day form deadline, the same document-first sequence and the same five-year registration. We score both a 2 for third-country nationals.

Nothing in the published process distinguishes them, so the choice is about travel and appointment availability on the day you look.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed and published, and it starts the three-day clock. Preparation costs vary with the case, and submission is electronic so there is no printing or courier expense.

Check the current published MRV fee before you pay — and be ready to file the form the same week.

Three periods sit end to end. The consulate reviews your documents before you can book, so that review comes first. Appointment availability follows, and the Department of State publishes that figure by post. The mission then gives ten business days after the interview as normal processing.

Only the middle figure is published as a wait time, so it describes less than half the picture. Administrative processing, where it applies, sits outside all three.

The E-2 is a nonimmigrant treaty investor visa open to nationals of countries holding a qualifying treaty of commerce with the United States, and Australia is one of those treaty countries. You must have invested, or be actively in the process of investing, a substantial amount of your own at-risk capital in a real and operating U.S. business that you will direct and develop.

The enterprise must be at least 50 percent owned by persons holding the treaty nationality, or controlled by a qualifying national. An Australian applicant’s own eligibility does not survive a non-treaty partner holding the majority stake.

Australia also has the E-3 visa, available to Australian nationals in specialty occupations, which is a different route with different requirements. If you are being employed rather than investing, that is usually the comparison worth making.