Start or Buy a Cleaning Business to Get an E-2 Visa. Here's How.

You probably did not set out to own a cleaning company.

If you are like most people who end up reading something like this, it started somewhere else. You wanted to live in the United States. Somewhere along the way you found the E-2 treaty investor visa, and you learned that the law does not name a minimum amount you have to invest. So you started looking for a business you could afford.

And then you found the lists. Best E-2 businesses under $100k. Small franchise ideas starting at a few thousand dollars. Cleaning sits on those lists somewhere between vending machines and food carts, sorted by what it costs to get in the door.

I understand why you are reading them. When you are trying to move your family to another country, price is the first thing you can measure and compare. But that ranking is going to work against you, because it has almost nothing to do with how your case gets decided.

Sorting by cheapest entry is close to the opposite of how a consular officer reads a case, and some of the businesses on those lists cannot pass at all. Vending is semi-passive by design, and the E-2 requires you to run the company.

From there the trail usually leads to a franchise site with a page announcing that the business is E-2 friendly, or approved for foreign investors. A few of those pages are written carefully. Most are marketing. No franchisor approves anyone for a visa, and the phrase clusters on businesses whose entry cost is low enough that the number itself invites a second look at the window.

Cleaning is a genuinely reasonable business for this. The US janitorial services market reached roughly $112 billion in 2026, and the commercial side alone was valued near $91 billion with growth projected around 6% annually through 2030. Demand exists in every market in the country and holds up in a downturn.

The question is not whether cleaning works. It is which version of it you build, and whether the version you pick survives the four tests that decide these cases.

First check if you qualify for an E-2 visa

The E-2 is a treaty visa, so you have to be a citizen of a country holding a qualifying treaty of commerce and navigation with the United States. The State Department publishes the list, and roughly eighty countries appear under the E-2 classification. If yours is not on it, no franchise and no amount of capital changes the answer.

Two of the largest sources of would-be investors, India and mainland China, are missing from that list. This ends more promising conversations than any other single factor.

Eligibility follows citizenship, not birthplace. If you naturalized into a treaty country, you stand on the same footing as someone born there, which makes acquiring treaty-country citizenship a real long-game option for people currently locked out. Holding two passports, you apply on the treaty one.

Three more things about you have to hold up:

• Ownership. Your business must be at least 50% owned by nationals of your treaty country, documented, not just true in spirit.
• Your role. You have to be coming to develop and direct the company, which rules out writing a check and staying home.
• Intent to depart. You have to intend to leave when your status ends, even though the E-2 renews indefinitely and plenty of people spend decades on it.

The four tests your investment has to pass

Every E-2 case turns on the same four questions, whether you build the company or buy into one. The State Department and USCIS both frame them the same way. And cleaning businesses typically struggle with the first two.

1. Is the investment substantial? There is no dollar floor, which is the part everyone likes hearing and the part that causes the most trouble. Substantial means proportional to what your specific business costs to establish or buy. The scale works against you as the price drops. Buy a $2 million manufacturing operation and investing a fraction of that can be enough. Start a $60,000 cleaning company and an officer expects to see something close to the whole amount committed, because anything less means you have not really bought the business you claim to be running.
2. Is the money at risk? Capital has to be spent or irrevocably committed, not parked in an account labeled for future use. Funds you can withdraw tomorrow are not at risk by definition. Borrowing is fine when the loan is secured against your personal assets. A loan secured by the business itself does not count, since the business is collateralizing its own purchase and you have not put anything of yours on the line.
3. Is the business more than marginal? It has to be capable of generating more than a living for you and your family. Nobody is measuring your current profit at the interview. They are reading your projections and asking whether this company will employ other people or produce meaningful economic contribution within about five years.
4. Will you develop and direct it? You need at least half the ownership and real operational control.

Starting your own cleaning company from scratch

A cleaning business is one of the cheapest companies in America to start. Equipment runs $500 to $1,500, general liability insurance $500 to $1,500 a year, a janitorial bond another $100 to $500. Most people launch for somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000.

None of that is an E-2 investment. You cannot walk into an interview having spent $6,000 and argue you made a substantial commitment to anything.

So the startup path asks you to deliberately build a larger operation than the industry requires. Buy company vehicles instead of using your own car. Commercial-grade equipment for multiple crews working at once. Workers compensation, which becomes mandatory the moment you hire someone and runs $900 to $2,400 per employee annually. Real marketing spend, licensing, software, and enough working capital to make payroll for months before the contracts mature.

Marginality is where this path gets decided. A solo cleaner in the United States earns $30,000 to $60,000 a year, which is the textbook definition of a business that provides only a living for you and your family. A company running several crews grosses $100,000 to $300,000. Your projections have to land in the second category, and every revenue number in your plan needs a specific hire behind it. Officers read projections that grow without anyone being hired as fiction.

There is one choice here that helps more than people expect. If you clean offices instead of homes, you end up with signed contracts. An officer can hold a two-year agreement with an office building and see revenue that already exists. Residential work is mostly a pipeline you describe in a plan, which asks the officer to take your word for it. Same industry, very different file.

Buying a cleaning franchise

A franchise gives you documented history where a startup gives you a forecast.

Every US franchisor must hand you a Franchise Disclosure Document before you sign, and the FTC requires it to cover fees, litigation, and how many franchisees left the system last year. Item 19, when the brand includes it, shows what existing units earn. Your projections stop being numbers you invented.

What the franchisor's website will not tell you is that a low entry cost works against you here. You see, entry costs are lower than most people assume, and that cuts against you. Coverall lists $20,000 in liquid capital with total investment between roughly $18,000 and $63,000. Jan-Pro unit franchises start around $5,000. Those numbers are not automatically substantial, and buying the cheapest package available is close to the worst thing you can do for the visa.

Royalties compress what is left. A franchise taking ten percent off the top makes non-marginality harder to prove, since you need more revenue to reach the same profit. Read the fee schedule carefully, because the effective deduction across some janitorial systems runs well above the headline rate once billing and administrative charges are counted.

A franchise agreement does not disqualify you. You still hire, price within your territory, and run daily operations. What officers will not accept is a package where the franchisor finds your accounts, bills your clients, and passes you the remainder, because at that point you are closer to a subcontractor than an owner.

So which one is right for you?

At the same dollar amount, these two paths are not equally strong, and which one wins depends less on money than on what you can bring to the table.

Put $80,000 into your own company and nearly all of it becomes operating assets. Vehicles, equipment, insurance, payroll, contracts. Put $80,000 into a franchise and a slice of it disappears into the franchise fee, which buys you a system and a name rather than something that shows up on a balance sheet. If you have run a service business before and can sign commercial accounts on your own, the startup route usually produces the stronger file for the same spend.

The franchise earns its cost when you cannot supply that credibility yourself. No management history, no US network, no way to demonstrate that your revenue projections are anything but optimism. The franchisor's operating history fills a hole you cannot fill alone, and an officer reading your file sees a model that has worked hundreds of times.

Timing pulls the other way. A franchise can be operating within a few months because the playbook already exists. Building from nothing takes longer, and much of that work has to happen before you file, since an officer wants to see money already spent and a business close to running.

One warning that applies to both. Do not let the entry price choose for you. The cheapest version of either path is the one most likely to fail on substantiality, and a denial costs far more than the difference between packages.

Why these cases get denied

The money is still sitting in a bank account. People assume showing they have the funds is the same as investing them. It is not. Capital has to be spent or irrevocably committed before the interview, which means the spending happens while you still have no visa and no guarantee of getting one. That feels reckless and it is the requirement anyway.

The loan is secured by the business. Borrowing against your house or your personal savings counts. Borrowing against the company you are buying does not, because you have risked nothing of your own.

The business plan is a template. Officers read these constantly and recognize the software that produced them. Generic market sections and projections that could describe any city in the country signal that nobody thought carefully about this specific business.

The projections have no people in them. Revenue triples by year three and headcount stays at one. This is the most common marginality failure in service businesses, and it is entirely self-inflicted. Tie every jump in revenue to a hire.

The number is simply too small. A $15,000 franchise package with a thin plan behind it is a hard case at any consulate, and some posts read substantiality more strictly than others.

You can do preparatory work in the US on a visitor visa. That means YOU CAN do the research, meet with brokers, sign a lease. But, YOU CANNOT start running the company. People cross that line without realizing it and create a problem that surfaces at the interview.

How to determine where to start

Start with the question you can answer today: can you supply the credibility yourself, or do you need to buy it?

If you have run a service business, managed crews, or can realistically sign commercial accounts on your own, build. Your first task is not the business plan. It is choosing offices or houses, because that decides what evidence you can put in front of an officer. Then work out what a properly staffed version of that business costs, not the version you could scrape together alone. That number becomes your investment figure and everything else follows from it.

If you have no management history and no US network, the franchisor's track record fills a gap you cannot fill yourself. Ask for the FDD before you get attached to a name. Read Item 19 for what units earn, Item 20 for how many franchisees left last year, and the full fee schedule for what leaves your revenue beyond the headline royalty. Then call three or four current franchisees in territories like yours. Item 20 gives you their contact information, and the ones who are struggling tend to say so.

Either way, the sequence matters more than the choice. Confirm treaty eligibility first, since nothing else counts if that fails. Settle the business model second. Spend the money third, documenting where every dollar came from and where it went. Build the plan around a hiring schedule rather than a revenue curve. File last.

The applicants who struggle are usually the ones who did this in reverse, picking the cheapest entry point they could find and then trying to make the visa fit around it.

Talk to us before you spend the money

The order of operations matters more on E-2 cases than almost anything else. Once funds are transferred, a franchise agreement is signed, or a lease is executed, your options narrow considerably. Most of the problems we see are structural decisions made months before anyone thought to call an attorney.

Verdin Law Firm has taken investors from more than 33 countries through the E-2 process. If you are weighing a cleaning business, or you have found a franchise and want the FDD reviewed before you commit, get in touch and we will tell you what your case looks like from the other side of the window.