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

Like London, Belfast reverses the order most posts use. You submit the evidence electronically after paying the MRV fee, the E-Visa Unit reviews the whole package, and only then are you invited to book. No interview is scheduled until that review is complete.

Once the invitation arrives you have 90 days to attend. Miss it and the company registration must be resubmitted rather than the appointment rescheduled, which returns you to the start of the review.

The package is organised A to G — table of contents and cover letter, forms, applicant information, ownership, investment, real and operating, marginality. The Section A cover letter must explicitly address all nine requirements of 9 FAM 402.9.

There is no published page limit, but the electronic submission is capped at 20 MB. Section C requires evidence of ongoing UK residency — a lease or mortgage for your primary UK home and a recent UK pay stub — which for a Northern Ireland applicant is usually the most straightforward part of the package.

Nothing about the evidence changes, so the decision is about the interview itself. For applicants living in Northern Ireland, Belfast removes a journey without altering how the case is read.

The one measurable difference runs the other way. We score Belfast a 1 for third-country nationals against London’s 2, so an applicant without a UK tie has the better prospect of being scheduled in London. That score describes willingness to schedule an appointment, not eligibility for approval — and Section C requires evidence of ongoing UK residency at either post, so neither is open to someone living outside the UK.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed and published and must be paid before the E-Visa Unit opens the case. Preparation costs — business plan, financial projections, document assembly, attorney fees where counsel is involved — vary with the complexity of the enterprise.

The submission is electronic throughout, so there is no printing, binding or courier expense. Check the current published MRV fee before you pay.

Two waits sit end to end. The first is the E-Visa Unit’s review, which happens before any appointment exists and is not covered by the published wait-time table. The second is appointment availability at Belfast, which the Department of State does publish.

The published figure therefore describes only the second half of your timeline. Any post-interview administrative processing sits on top of both.

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 the United Kingdom 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.

The enterprise must be at least 50 percent owned by persons holding the treaty nationality, or controlled by a qualifying national. Irish citizenship is separately a treaty nationality, which is worth checking carefully where a Northern Ireland applicant holds both passports — the ownership test turns on which nationality the owners actually hold.