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

The steps below are the mission’s published order. Skipping ahead does not accelerate anything, because the E-Visa Unit will not open a case out of sequence:

The invitation to book carries a 90-day life. Attend inside it and the registration stands. Miss it and the post states you can be asked to resubmit the registration from the beginning — not merely reschedule — which would put you back at the start of a review that runs over 90 working days.

Treat the invitation as the deadline that matters. It is the only date in the London process you control and can lose.

London organises the package into seven named sections rather than numbered tabs. Each one answers a different part of the treaty investor test, which is also the order an officer reads them in:

London asks that the Section A cover letter explicitly address every one of the nine requirements in 9 FAM 402.9. This is a real drafting instruction, not a formality: the letter is the index the reviewing officer works from, and a requirement the letter does not name is a requirement the officer has to hunt for.

Note that other posts want the opposite emphasis. The Canadian posts ask applicants not to quote the FAM or CFR at length, and to state instead how the enterprise and applicant qualify. The two instructions are compatible — name all nine requirements, answer each one from your own facts — but a letter drafted to a Canadian house style will usually need the nine headings added before it serves at London.

London publishes no maximum page count, which makes it one of the more forgiving posts in Europe on length — Frankfurt caps its evidence at 30 pages and Lisbon caps the whole package at 50. The constraint at London is file size instead: the electronic submission must stay under 20 MB.

Four items in Section B are administrative rather than evidentiary — the DS-160 confirmation page, the MRV fee receipt, the DS-156E and the G-28 — and there is nothing to gain by compressing them. Scan quality is where the 20 MB is usually lost. Flatten image-heavy exhibits such as photographs of premises and scanned bank statements before you cut anything of substance.

If the enterprise has already been registered with the E-Visa Unit, an employee applying as E-2 staff books an interview directly and submits nothing in advance. The registration belongs to the company, not to the individual, and it carries across to later applicants.

This is worth confirming before you assemble anything. Preparing a full seven-section package for an employee of a registered company is work the post did not ask for.

Both UK posts run the same mission-wide instructions, the same seven sections and the same electronic-first sequence, and the London E-Visa Unit reviews the registration either way. The choice is about the interview location rather than the paperwork.

The difference is third-country flexibility. We score London a 2 for third-country nationals and Belfast a 1, so an applicant without a UK tie has the better prospect of being scheduled in London. Neither score is a statement about approval — it describes willingness to schedule an appointment, nothing more.

There is no single total. The MRV fee is fixed, published, tied to your DS-160, and payable before the E-Visa Unit will open your case. Everything after that varies: business plan and financial projection preparation, document assembly, and attorney fees if you use counsel.

London costs less to file than the posts that require paper. There is no printing, no binding and no courier — the submission is electronic throughout. Check the current published MRV fee before you pay, as it is the one figure that changes without notice.

London publishes the figure most posts leave out. The current initial review time for a case is over 90 working days — roughly four and a half months — and the E-Visa Unit states it is not possible to expedite. Cases are taken first in, first out from the date of acceptance, and the unit will not accept a case for review until the DS-160, the fee and the document submission are all complete.

Appointment availability follows that review, and the Department of State publishes it separately by post on travel.state.gov. Two waits therefore sit end to end, and the published wait-time figure covers only the second and shorter one.

Plan against the review rather than the appointment. Any post-interview administrative processing sits on top of both, and it is not uniform across applicants.

Section C asks for evidence of your ongoing residency in the UK, and the post names two examples: the current lease or mortgage for your primary UK residence, and your most recent UK pay stub. Read that before anything else on this page — it is the constraint that decides whether London is open to you.

Note what that requirement is not. It is not a test of immigration status, so a British passport or a valid UK visa does not answer it on its own — a citizen living abroad cannot produce a current UK lease and a recent UK pay stub. Equally, a treaty national of another country who genuinely lives and works here can. London is open to third-country nationals resident in the UK, and closed to non-residents, whatever passport they hold.

Beyond residency, the enterprise still has to qualify on treaty nationality wherever the application is filed, so confirm your own country’s treaty status before assuming London is your correct post. And because the company is registered before any interview is scheduled, an applicant commits to London earlier here than at a post where the evidence arrives on the interview day.

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. 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 commitment must be irrevocable, not merely intended.

The requirement applicants most often miss concerns the nationality of 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 British 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 carries none of the prior corporate employment the L-1 requires.