On January 15, 2025, USCIS issued Policy Alert PA-2025-03, Second Preference Eligibility for National Interest Waiver Petitions, and rewrote the part of its Policy Manual that officers use to decide EB-2 NIW cases. The three-prong framework from Matter of Dhanasar did not change. What changed is the order of the analysis, how much detail a proposed endeavor has to carry, and — the part that matters most if you are assembling a file — what USCIS says it does with recommendation letters and business plans.

The guidance is public, but it is long and written for adjudicators rather than petitioners, which is why most of what circulates about it is a summary of a summary. What follows is the language itself, where it changes what a file has to contain. A file assembled on pre-2025 assumptions is built against a standard that is no longer the operative one — which is not a statement about how any case will be decided, but about which text an officer is reading.

What did the January 2025 update actually change?

Four things changed, each of them documented in the alert itself. The Policy Alert is precise about its own scope: it names the affected section — "Volume 6 > Part F > Chapter 5 > Section D, National Interest Waiver of Job Offer" — and describes four things that moved:

●       Two new subsections at the front of the analysis, on EB-2 classification itself: "Adds new Subsection 1 (Eligibility for Second Preference Classification) and Subsection 2 (Eligibility for the National Interest Waiver)."

●       The three-prong discussion revised throughout, with new examples of what does and does not establish national importance.

●       The entrepreneur guidance rewritten, including the flat statement that not every entrepreneur qualifies.

●       The treatment of letters of support and business plans, spelled out within the second-prong analysis.

It is just as useful to know what the update did not do. USCIS said so in its announcement: "This new guidance builds on a previous Policy Manual update that discussed the unique considerations for persons with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and entrepreneurs." The subsections on STEM fields, on critical and emerging technologies, and on letters from interested government agencies are not among those the alert lists as changed. If you have read that this update introduced a focus on critical and emerging technologies, that framing belongs to the earlier STEM update.

Does the update apply to a petition that is already pending?

Yes, and the guidance is explicit: it "is effective immediately and applies to requests pending or filed on or after the publication date", and it "is controlling and supersedes any related prior guidance on the topic."

So a petition filed before January 15, 2025 and still pending afterward is read against the current text, not the text that existed when it was assembled. If it receives a Request for Evidence or a Notice of Intent to Deny, the response is an opportunity to address the record against the standard as it now reads. The same applies to a file still waiting to be filed: what was drafted under older assumptions is not automatically wrong, but it was written to answer a differently worded question.

Does the update change who is eligible, or only what evidence is expected?

Mostly the second — the statute and the regulations behind EB-2 eligibility did not change. But one structural shift behaves like the first: USCIS now settles the EB-2 classification question before it looks at the waiver at all. The new Subsection 1 opens with the requirement — "a petitioner must first demonstrate the person's qualification for the underlying EB-2 visa classification as either a member of the professions holding an advanced degree or an individual of exceptional ability in the sciences, arts, or business" — and follows it with the consequence:

The EB-2 threshold has often been treated as a formality that a graduate degree disposes of. The guidance says it is not, and what matters is the occupation rather than the person holding the degree:

USCIS illustrates it with a deliberately unglamorous example: someone with a Ph.D. in engineering proposing an engineering endeavor may qualify, while a similarly educated person who "intends to start a bakery may have difficulty establishing that they are an advanced degree professional" — because under 8 CFR 204.5(k)(2) a profession is an occupation for which a bachelor's degree "is the minimum requirement for entry," and baking is not. The point closes in five words: "The occupation underlying the endeavor is determinative."

The same logic governs the two other routes into EB-2. For a bachelor's degree plus "five years of progressive experience in the specialty", the experience has to be "in the same specialty as the degree" and the endeavor related — the counter-example given is chemistry followed by five years as a restaurant manager. And for exceptional ability, the update added a relatedness requirement: the claimed area "must also be directly related to the person's proposed endeavor", measured by whether the two "share skillsets, knowledge, or expertise."

One more sentence here describes an outcome many petitioners do not expect. Where the EB-2 threshold is not met, USCIS "may request additional evidence or issue a Notice of Intent to Deny, as appropriate, or issue a denial without reaching the national interest waiver determination." A file can be decided on the classification question alone, with the three-prong argument never read. On how an incomplete record can now be resolved without an RFE first, see Can a Missing Translation Get Your EB-2 NIW Denied Without an RFE?.

What does USCIS now count as national importance?

It counts what has effects beyond your employer and your field. Policy Alert PA-2025-03 says the update "[p]rovides additional guidance, with examples, about how USCIS evaluates whether a proposed endeavor has national importance." Those examples are mostly negative — they describe what does not clear the bar — and they are unusually specific.

National importance is half of the first prong of the Dhanasar test, alongside substantial merit. The guidance begins by separating the endeavor from the occupation:

In Matter of Dhanasar, 26 I&N Dec. 884 (AAO 2016), the occupation was engineer while the endeavor was research and development in air and space propulsion systems. The items that follow are worth checking a draft against:

●       Classroom teaching, "without broader implications for a field or region, generally does not rise to the level of having national importance."

●       A national shortage in your occupation. "Proposing to work in an occupation with a national shortage or serve in a consulting capacity for others seeking to work in an occupation with a national shortage alone, is also insufficient."

●       Benefit to your employer. "Benefits to a specific employer alone, even an employer with a national footprint, are not sufficiently relevant to the question of whether a person’s endeavor has national importance."

●       Client-by-client work. "[A] software engineer adapting their employer's code for various clients will have difficulty demonstrating the national importance of that endeavor, absent additional broader impacts supported by specific evidence."

What links all four is that each argues at the level of the field rather than the level of the work. Healthcare is important; a national shortage of nurses is real; your employer may be a household name. None of that is an argument about your endeavor. As the guidance puts it, the analysis "focuses on what the person will be doing rather than the specific job title or occupational classification."

The positive examples show the argument that does work. A person developing a drug for a pharmaceutical company can establish national importance "by demonstrating the prospective public health benefits of the drug, instead of solely projecting the profits that will accrue to the employer." A person developing a technology for one company can get there by documenting "widespread interest in adoption or licensing of the technology." The move is the same in both: from what the work produces for one organization to where its effects land — which, and not geographic reach, is what the prong measures.

How does USCIS say it weighs recommendation letters?

Conditionally, and against four requirements it states in a single sentence. This is the passage in the second prong — the test of whether you are well positioned to advance your endeavor — that repays the closest reading:

Taken apart, the sentence asks for a letter that is:

1.    From an expert in your field — not a senior person in an adjacent one.

2.    Written from first-hand knowledge — someone who saw the work, not someone who read your résumé.

3.    Descriptive and specific, tying named achievements to how you are positioned to advance your endeavor, not your profession in general.

4.    Corroborated by other independent evidence in the record.

Note the verb. Letters "may be persuasive when" those conditions hold. The guidance does not say letters are persuasive, or that a given number of them carries weight.

This is why the template letter has lost most of its value. A letter drafted from a common outline and signed by several people tends to fail conditions two, three and four at once: it cannot show first-hand knowledge it does not have, its examples stay generic because the outline was written before the signer was chosen, and it is corroborated only by other letters built the same way.

The governing principle appears at the end of the entrepreneur subsection and applies to every letter in the file: "Claims lacking corroborating evidence are not sufficient to meet the petitioner's burden of proof." In Dhanasar the expert letters worked because they arrived alongside documentation of government grants and of the petitioner's role in funded projects. They interpreted a record; they did not substitute for one.

One practical consequence: a strong letter is hard to obtain late, because the expert needs something specific to say and the record has to already contain what the letter refers to. Gathering letters alongside the evidence they describe generally produces a more coherent file than gathering them at the end.

When does USCIS expect a business plan, and what must it carry?

Business plans appear in the evidence list for the second prong — whether the person is well positioned to advance the proposed endeavor — so the short answer is: whenever the record has to explain what you will actually do going forward — which covers entrepreneurial endeavors and plenty that are not. One sentence governs the topic:

The plan is not the proof. It is the document that organizes the proof and makes the rest of the record legible. A plan that projects revenue with nothing behind the projection is doing what a template letter does.

The evidence list itself is the second place to look, and the comparison against Dhanasar is instructive. In 2016 the AAO listed, among the second-prong factors, "a model or plan for future activities." The current guidance lists "[e]vidence of a detailed proposal or plan that the person developed, or played a significant role in developing, for future activities related to the proposed endeavor."

Three words did work there. The plan should be detailed; it should have been developed by you, or with your significant participation; and it should be tied to this endeavor. A generic plan bought off the shelf satisfies none of the three. The same list shows a parallel shift in third-party interest: Dhanasar referred to "the interest of potential customers, users, investors," while the current text asks for "[t]he interest or support garnered by the person." Interest that exists in the market is not interest you have obtained.

For entrepreneurs the update is blunter still, and USCIS flagged it in the alert's own highlights:

Opening "a consulting firm for those working or seeking to work in a nationally important occupation" does not by itself establish national importance, and neither does evidence about "the importance of the relevant industry overall, such as the car dealership industry" when the endeavor is to open a car dealership. Against that, a strong submission shows "how the person's record of success would translate to a proposed plan or forecast for continued success, and steps they have taken toward those proposed activities", and anticipates the figures the guidance names: "market size and share, job creation, and revenue growth."

None of which is a demand for guaranteed success. USCIS "evaluates all of the evidence in the aggregate", and the standard still carries the acknowledgment from Dhanasar that "many innovations and entrepreneurial endeavors may ultimately fail, in whole or in part, despite an intelligent plan and competent execution." The plan has to be documented and anchored. It does not have to promise that it will work.

All of which is why a business plan written for an immigration filing is a different document from one written for investors. The reader is an adjudicator applying an evidentiary standard, and what that reader wants is corroboration, not persuasion.

Before and after: eight shifts in what a file carries

Comparing the framework as Matter of Dhanasar, 26 I&N Dec. 884 (AAO 2016) left it with the USCIS Policy Manual as it reads today, these are the shifts that change the contents of a petition:

●       Before: the EB-2 threshold was a box a degree checked. Now: it is analyzed first, and a case can be denied there "without reaching the national interest waiver determination."

●       Before: holding an advanced degree was the argument. Now: "the occupation underlying the endeavor is determinative" — it has to require a degree for entry.

●       Before: five years of post-bachelor experience was counted. Now: it has to be "in the same specialty as the degree" and related to the endeavor.

●       Before: exceptional ability stood on its own. Now: it must be "directly related to the person's proposed endeavor", measured by shared "skillsets, knowledge, or expertise."

●       Before: the importance of the field could carry the first prong. Now: field-level arguments are named as insufficient — a national shortage, the value of entrepreneurship, an employer's footprint.

●       Before: letters were treated as weight. Now: they are conditional — persuasive "when" they meet four stated requirements, one of them independent corroboration.

●       Before: "a model or plan for future activities." Now: "a detailed proposal or plan that the person developed, or played a significant role in developing."

●       Before: third-party interest was interest that existed. Now: it is "interest or support garnered by the person."

How do you re-audit a file built on older criteria?

If a draft was assembled before 2025 — or assembled recently from a model that predates it — these are the questions worth running against it first:

5.    Does the file establish EB-2 classification on its own terms, separately from the waiver argument, with evidence that the occupation behind the endeavor requires a degree for entry?

6.    If you rely on five years of experience, does the record show it is in the specialty of the degree and connected to the endeavor?

7.    Is the endeavor described as work, or as a profession? Ask whether someone else in your occupation could sign the endeavor statement unchanged. If they could, it describes a profession.

8.    Does the national importance argument live above the level of your employer or your field? Find the sentence that carries it. If it is about the industry, it is not yet about you.

9.    For each letter: could the signer have written it without knowing you? If yes, it is a template, whatever the letterhead says.

10. For each letter: what independent document corroborates it? If the answer for several letters is "the other letters," the record has a gap.

11. Does the plan name what you will do, with steps already taken, or does it describe a market?

12. Are the figures anticipated and sourced, or asserted?

None of this is about adding volume. The consistent theme across the current guidance is specificity and corroboration, and a shorter record in which every claim is anchored generally reads better than a long one in which claims repeat.

A re-audit is a documentation exercise, and that is the part you can act on. If a petition has already been denied, or the question is whether to appeal or file a motion, that is a different matter and one where an immigration attorney's advice is worth having.

Reading the current text yourself

All of this is public, and worth consulting directly rather than through anyone's summary:

●       USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 6, Part F, Chapter 5 — Section D holds the entire national interest waiver analysis.

●       Policy Alert PA-2025-03 (January 15, 2025) — three pages, and the authoritative statement of what the update did.

●       Matter of Dhanasar, 26 I&N Dec. 884 (AAO 2016) — the precedent that established the three-prong framework.

●       8 CFR 204.5(k) — the regulatory definitions of advanced degree, exceptional ability and profession.

Every passage quoted above was current in Volume 6, Part F, Chapter 5 as of September 2026. The Policy Manual is a living document: USCIS revises it and publishes a policy alert each time it does, so checking the chapter before you file keeps a record aligned with the text an officer will actually apply. For related context, see our guide to EB-2 NIW requirements in 2026 and our discussion of what the EB-2 NIW approval rate does and does not tell you.

At DAL Global Partners, we prepare the documentation these sections describe. On Personal and Endeavor Statements that means articulating a proposed endeavor as specific work rather than as a profession; on Expert & Testimonial Letters, building letters around first-hand knowledge and named achievements tied to evidence already in the record. The adjudication standard is not ours to control. The precision of the file is.

Disclaimer: This post is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice or a recommendation regarding any specific immigration matter.