Applying for an E-2 visa in Frankfurt

Frankfurt splits the application across numbered tabs and treats the administrative ones differently from the evidence. Tabs 1a to 1d carry your forms, the cover letter and your background, and none of them count toward the page limit:

The 30-page limit covers the evidence tabs — 2a through 3b — and has been in force since 4 July 2024. Two formatting rules come with it, and both exist to stop applicants buying pages back:

Pages may not be printed double-sided, and several miniature pages may not be pasted onto a single sheet. A thirty-page limit means thirty readable pages, not thirty sheets carrying sixty pages of shrunken content.

One useful exception sits inside Tab 2a: tax returns and profit-and-loss statements filed there do not count toward the five-page business plan limit. They are financial evidence, not plan narrative.

Frankfurt publishes the tightest plan budget in our registry: five pages maximum, including Appendix A and Appendix B. The post states the inclusion explicitly, so there is no reading under which the appendices sit outside the count.

Five pages carrying a five-year forecast, a staffing plan and the narrative case is a genuine editing problem. It is not, however, a licence to drop evidence — see the legal basis below. What comes out is repetition, market-research padding and anything that does not directly support one of the elements the officer has to find.

Both channels are required, not alternatives. Submit the PDF electronically, keeping the whole submission under 5 MB, then post a printed paper copy to the consulate:

Frankfurt runs a separate renewal flow for companies at or above 25 employees. If your enterprise has grown past that threshold since your first filing, confirm which route applies before assembling to the rules on this page — the new-case package and the larger-company renewal package are not the same document set.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed and published, tied to your DS-160, and paid before you can schedule an interview. Everything else varies: business plan and financial projection preparation, binder formatting and printing, courier costs for the paper copy Frankfurt requires by mail, and attorney fees if you use counsel.

Complexity drives the spread. A single-owner service company with clean funds documentation costs far less to prepare than a multi-investor acquisition with layered ownership. Check the current published fee before you pay.

The Department of State publishes current nonimmigrant visa appointment wait times by post on travel.state.gov, and that is the figure to check rather than any fixed estimate. Total timing is appointment availability plus any post-interview administrative processing, and neither part is uniform across applicants.

If you have no residence or business tie to Germany, confirm the broader third-country national E-2 eligibility rules, and your own country's treaty status, before assuming Frankfurt is your correct post. A friendly score describes willingness to schedule an appointment, not eligibility for approval.

Frankfurt's tab structure and its five-page cap are local formatting rules. The substantive test sits in federal policy: 9 FAM 402.9, the Department of State standard consular officers apply when judging whether an investment is substantial, at-risk, and more than marginal.

That gap matters. A plan trimmed to fit the page count still has to satisfy the substantial and at-risk investment standard on every point, so compression is an editing problem rather than a licence to drop proof of source of funds, irrevocable commitment or job creation. Current FAM-based guidance also indicates a dedicated physical office is not strictly required, though evidence of a genuinely operating business still helps your case.

The E-2 is a nonimmigrant treaty investor visa available to nationals of countries holding a qualifying treaty of commerce with the United States, and Germany is one of those treaty countries. To qualify, 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 investment must be irrevocably committed, not merely promised.

The point applicants most often miss is the nationality of the business, not the nationality of the person. USCIS states the enterprise must be at least 50 percent owned by persons holding the same treaty nationality, or controlled by a qualifying national through management or another corporate device. German treaty investor eligibility collapses quickly if a non-treaty partner holds the majority stake, however strong the applicant's own passport position looks.

One distinction to fix early: the E-2 is investment-based but offers no green card path, unlike EB-5, and it carries no prior corporate employment requirement the way L-1 does.