Filing your E-2 visa at the U.S. Embassy Paris

Compile everything into a single PDF and upload it through your usvisaappt.com account when you request the interview. There is no published page limit, so the constraint is purely file size.

That makes scan quality the governing decision at Paris. A package assembled from 300 DPI colour scans will breach 10 MB long before it runs out of substance, while the same evidence rendered as text-based PDFs will not come close.

Paris organises evidence into lettered tabs running A to L — more divisions than the seven-tab posts, which means smaller and more specific sections rather than a longer package.

This is the Paris rule most worth knowing before you start drafting. Tab K carries the five-year business plan, and it is required only for enterprises created within the last two years.

An older enterprise does not submit a business plan at all. It submits the first five pages of its most recent tax returns instead. For an established business that is a substantial saving of both effort and megabytes — and preparing a full five-year plan you were never asked for is the commonest wasted work at this post.

Paris states that additional supporting documents can be brought to the interview rather than added to the upload. This is the release valve on the 10 MB cap, and it should shape what goes where.

Put the evidence the officer needs in order to reach a decision in the PDF. Carry the bulky corroboration — full contract sets, complete bank statement runs, photographs of premises — to the interview. Do not use it to omit anything the tabs actually require.

We score Paris a 2 for third-country nationals, comparatively open for a European post. The score describes willingness to schedule an appointment, not eligibility for approval.

Because the documents are uploaded at the moment of requesting the appointment, an applicant travelling to France commits their package earlier here than at posts that request it afterwards.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed, published and tied to your DS-160. Preparation costs vary with the case, and Paris removes one of them for established companies: an enterprise older than two years is not asked for a business plan.

Submission is electronic, so there is no printing, binding or courier cost. Check the current published MRV fee before you pay.

The Department of State publishes current appointment wait times by post, and that is the figure to check rather than any fixed estimate. Because the package is uploaded with the appointment request, there is no separate document-review queue ahead of scheduling as there is in London.

Any post-interview administrative processing sits on top, and it is not uniform across applicants.

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 France is one of those treaty countries. You must have invested, or be actively investing, a substantial amount of your own at-risk capital in a real and operating U.S. business that you will direct and develop, and the commitment must be irrevocable rather than intended.

The enterprise must be at least 50 percent owned by persons holding the treaty nationality, or controlled by a qualifying national. This turns on the ownership table rather than on the applicant, and it is where otherwise strong French applications most often fail.

One distinction to settle early: the E-2 is investment-based but offers no green card path, unlike EB-5, and it requires none of the prior corporate employment the L-1 does.