Only a spouse and unmarried children under 21 count as accompanying family. Each of them adds a further US$15,000 fee and a further US$1 million gift. Hypothetical example: Bastien is a business owner with a spouse and three children aged twenty-three, nineteen and sixteen. Bastien's twenty-three-year-old is not an accompanying child and needs a route of their own.
The arithmetic is per person, and one child is already outside it
Run the household through the definition before running it through a budget. Bastien and his spouse are two people. The sixteen-year-old is an unmarried child under 21 and is a third.
The nineteen-year-old qualifies today, which is a different statement from qualifying at the end of the process, and the twenty-first birthday should be marked against the expected timetable now. The twenty-three-year-old does not qualify as an accompanying child at all, and no fee makes that person eligible; a separate basis has to be found, whether study, employment or an independent immigrant route, and it should be planned as its own project rather than bolted on. The financial consequence is that the framework's cost for this family is a fee for each eligible person plus a gift for each eligible person, not a single figure.
The planning consequence is that a family of five may arrive as a family of four.