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

Submit one PDF per tab, named in the form "Tab A – Introduction/Summary". The seven tabs for an E-2 are:

The package must not exceed 70 pages or 20 MB, and both figures exclude Tab A. That exclusion is worth understanding rather than ignoring: your cover letter, summary and appointment confirmation are free, so there is no reason to compress the document that frames the whole case.

Everything else competes for the 70 pages. Tab G alone can consume a large share of it — Seoul asks for IRS Forms 1120 or 1065 for the last three years and Form 941 for the last four quarters, which is seven filings before you have argued anything.

The embassy states you must submit the documentation by email no later than two weeks before your interview date. Unlike London or Dublin, Seoul does not review your package before scheduling — you book the interview first, then send the evidence into a fixed window.

That inverts where the risk sits. There is no waiting for an invitation, but there is a hard date, and a package that misses it or arrives malformed puts the appointment itself at risk.

Send everything to SeoulNIVEVisa@state.gov. The subject line must carry three things: the interview date, the applicant name exactly as it appears in the passport, and the date of birth.

This is how the E-visa unit matches an inbound package to a booked appointment. A subject line missing one of the three is the same class of error as a misnamed file, and the published consequence is the same.

Seoul reviews your application to decide whether the U.S. enterprise qualifies for its company registration programme, then notifies you of the decision. Once a company is registered, later applicants from that company no longer submit the company-specific information — the ownership, investment and operating evidence has already been accepted.

The first application from a business therefore carries the cost for every application after it. If you expect to send employees to the United States, the registration is the asset you are building, not just this visa. Registered companies are subject to periodic information updates, so it is not permanent.

Where dependents apply, Seoul requires the Korean civil documents — family relation certificate, marriage relation certificate, a basic certificate for each child, and an adoption certificate where relevant, all in the detailed form.

These must have been issued within three months of the visa interview date. Documents pulled early, while assembling the rest of the package, can expire before the interview arrives. Order them against the interview date, not against the day you start work.

We score Seoul a 1 for third-country nationals, the low end of our scale. The practical reading is that Seoul is built around applicants with a Korean tie — the tab structure includes a dedicated Korean parent company section, and the civil documents it asks for are Korean ones.

The score describes willingness to schedule an appointment, not eligibility for approval. An applicant with no Korean connection should look hard at their country of residence before choosing Seoul.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed and published and tied to your DS-160. Everything after it varies with the case: business plan preparation, the three years of tax filings and four quarters of payroll returns Tab G expects, certified translations, and attorney fees where counsel is involved.

Seoul is an email post, so there is no printing, binding or courier cost. Check the current published MRV fee before you pay.

The Department of State publishes current nonimmigrant visa appointment wait times by post, and that is the figure to check rather than any fixed estimate. Because Seoul schedules the interview before it reads the package, appointment availability sets your timeline directly — there is no separate document-review queue ahead of it 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 South Korea 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 commitment must be irrevocable rather than intended.

The requirement applicants most often miss concerns the business rather than the person: the enterprise must be at least 50 percent owned by persons holding the treaty nationality, or controlled by a qualifying national. A Korean applicant’s own eligibility does not survive a non-treaty partner holding the majority stake.

Seoul’s Tab G is where the marginality test bites hardest. An enterprise that has existed less than a year submits sales invoices and contracts in place of the tax filings — evidence that it trades, not merely that it exists.