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

Because the case is handled centrally either way, the choice between Ankara and Istanbul is about where you would rather attend in person, and about appointment availability on the day you look. The rules, the tabs, the size caps and the review are identical.

There is no processing advantage to either post, and no separate queue. An applicant in central Anatolia has no reason to travel to Istanbul for the paperwork, because the paperwork never travels with them.

Schedule the interview yourself first. The E-Visa Unit in Istanbul then contacts you and requests the supporting documents. Do not email anything before that request arrives.

Applicants who book in Ankara sometimes assume the local post will contact them, or that documents should go to Ankara. Neither is the case. The request comes from Istanbul, and the package goes back to Istanbul.

Submissions that do not meet these requirements are returned, and the post states this may cause the appointment to be cancelled. At a post where you booked the appointment before anyone read your case, that is the loss worth avoiding.

We score Ankara a 1 for third-country nationals, the same as Istanbul. The score describes willingness to schedule an appointment rather than any view on the merits of a case.

Since both Turkish posts share one E-Visa Unit, there is no version of this where choosing the other post improves a third-country applicant’s position.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed, published and tied to your DS-160; preparation costs vary with the complexity of the case. As an email post, Ankara imposes no printing, binding or courier costs.

Check the current published MRV fee before you pay.

The Department of State publishes appointment wait times by post, and Ankara and Istanbul are listed separately even though one unit reads both. Comparing the two is the one place where choosing between them can genuinely change your timeline.

Any post-interview administrative processing sits on top of the appointment wait, 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 Türkiye 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.

The enterprise must be at least 50 percent owned by persons holding the treaty nationality, or controlled by a qualifying national. This is the requirement that most often defeats an otherwise strong application, because it turns on the ownership table rather than on the applicant.