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

The waiting step is the one to respect. Nothing about the case is helped by emailing before the request arrives, and the post is explicit that documents should not be sent until asked.

The size cap at Istanbul applies to each attachment separately. Every tab may be up to 15 MB — roughly 100 pages — and the limit is not a budget shared across the seven files.

This is unusually generous once you understand it, and unusually easy to misread. An applicant who treats 15 MB as a whole-package figure will compress evidence that did not need compressing. There is no published page limit at Istanbul at all.

The documents must be OCR-readable PDFs. ZIP archives and shared folders are rejected, so cloud links and compressed bundles are not a way around attachment limits.

OCR is the requirement most often missed, because a scan looks fine to the person who made it. A flat image of a page is not searchable text, and a package of image-only scans does not meet the standard even though it opens correctly.

Send seven separate PDFs, each named for its tab in the form "Tab A – Table of Contents". The post states that submissions which do not meet these requirements are returned, and may cause the appointment to be cancelled.

That last consequence is the reason to take the mechanics seriously. At most posts a malformed package costs you a round trip. Here it can cost you the interview slot you scheduled and waited for.

We score Istanbul a 1 for third-country nationals, the low end of our scale. The score describes willingness to schedule an appointment, not eligibility for approval — it is not a judgement on your case.

An applicant with no Turkish tie should compare their country of residence before committing here, particularly given that the package is only requested after the appointment is booked.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed, published and tied to your DS-160. Everything after that varies with the case: business plan preparation, translations, document assembly and attorney fees where counsel is involved.

Istanbul is an email post, so there is no printing, binding or courier cost. Producing genuinely OCR-readable scans is the one preparation expense here that some posts do not impose. 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. Note that the published wait covers scheduling only — at Istanbul the document request and review happen after you have booked, so the interview date you hold is not conditional on that review finishing.

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 Türkiye 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, and the commitment must be irrevocable rather than intended.

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

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.