The process runs in stages measured in years: the investment and petition, then a visa or adjustment of status, then two years of conditional residence, then Form I-829 filed within the ninety days before the second anniversary. Layered over that is the statutory adjustment of the qualifying amounts, which takes effect from 1 January 2027.
Two clocks run at once, and only one of them is yours
The first clock is procedural and largely outside the investor's control. The second is statutory: the qualifying amounts are subject to an adjustment effective from the start of 2027, so the sum required depends on when the petition is actually filed rather than on when the family started planning. Hypothetical example: an investor from Sainte-Cécile-de-Milton begins gathering source-of-funds records in the autumn of 2026, and the exercise turns out to require certified translations of a decade of filings.
If that work pushes the filing past the turn of the year, the amount he must invest may not be the amount he modelled. The sensible response is to fix a realistic filing date first, confirm the figure that will apply on that date, and treat the document-gathering as the critical path it usually turns out to be.