# Fannie Mae Approved Visa List: It Does Not Exist

> There is no Fannie Mae approved visa list. Selling Guide B2-2-02 leaves documentation to the lender. Read the verbatim text and what it means for you.

Canonical: https://www.masalaloans.com/blog/fannie-mae-no-approved-visa-list
Author: Apurva Sanghavi
Published: 2026-09-18T17:28:44.034Z
Tags: mortgage, immigration, green card, conventional loan, home buying

Your loan officer called back and said your O-1 "isn't on the approved list."

Ask him to send you the list.

He will not send it, because it does not exist. Fannie Mae has never published a roster of acceptable visa types. There is no schedule of approved classifications, no minimum remaining validity, no tier system separating H-1B from L-1 from E-3. What exists is one paragraph in the Selling Guide, and almost every argument you will have with a lender about your status traces back to a misreading of it.

## The paragraph

Fannie Mae Selling Guide **B2-2-02**, effective 07/28/2015, in full:

"Fannie Mae purchases and securitizes mortgages made to non-U.S. citizens who are lawful permanent or non-permanent residents of the United States under the same terms that are available to U.S. citizens. Fannie Mae does not specify the precise documentation the lender must obtain to verify that a non-U.S. citizen borrower is legally present in the United States. The lender must make a determination of the non-U.S. citizen's status based on the circumstances of the individual case, using documentation it deems appropriate. By delivering the mortgage to Fannie Mae, the lender represents and warrants that the non-U.S. citizen borrower is legally present in this country."

Four sentences. Eleven years old and still current. Here is what each one does.

### "under the same terms that are available to U.S. citizens"

This is the load-bearing clause and it is unconditional. Same down payment minimums. Same credit score tiers. Same debt-to-income limits. Same loan-level pricing. Same 2026 conforming limits — **$832,750** baseline on a one-unit property, **$1,249,125** in high-cost counties.

There is no visa-holder surcharge in the Fannie Mae rate sheet because there is no visa-holder category in the Fannie Mae rate sheet. If a lender quotes you worse pricing because of your status, that is that lender's decision about its own risk, not an agency requirement.

### "does not specify the precise documentation"

Fannie declines to write the document list. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the origin of most of the confusion. Borrowers hear "Fannie requires X" when what happened is that a particular lender decided X.

### "using documentation it deems appropriate"

The word is *deems*. Fannie hands the underwriting judgment to the lender and steps back. Two lenders looking at identical files can reasonably reach different conclusions about what they need to see, and both are following the guideline.

### "represents and warrants that the non-U.S. citizen borrower is legally present"

Here is the pressure point. A rep and warrant is a promise the lender makes to Fannie Mae. If it turns out to be wrong, Fannie can require the lender to buy the loan back — at par, off the secondary market, onto its own balance sheet. A repurchase demand on a $600,000 loan is a six-figure problem for a mid-sized lender. That exposure, not any rule about visas, is what makes some lenders cautious. We work through the consequences in [Lender Overlays: Why One Lender Declines Your Visa and the Next One Approves It](https://masalaloans.com/blog/mortgage-lender-overlays-visa-holders).

### What the paragraph does not contain

Read it again and inventory the absences. No visa classification is named. No minimum remaining validity appears. No I-140 is mentioned. No separate credit score floor for non-citizens exists. No maximum loan-to-value carve-out exists. No requirement that your status outlast the loan term exists, which would be a strange standard in any case — nobody asks a US citizen to guarantee thirty years of employment.

Those six absences are the entire substance of most declined non-permanent resident files. Something that is not in the guideline got treated as if it were.

## What "legally present" turns into at the document level

The guideline gives a standard. Underwriters turn it into paper. In practice a clean non-permanent resident file establishes three things: who you are, that you are lawfully in the country, and that you are authorized to work for the employer whose income you are using.

| **What the underwriter is testing** | **Documents that usually satisfy it** |
| --- | --- |
| Identity | Unexpired foreign passport; state driver's license |
| Lawful presence | **I-94** arrival/departure record; visa stamp; **I-797** approval notice |
| Work authorization | **I-797A** or **I-797B** for H-1B and L-1; **EAD (Form I-766)** for H-4, L-2, OPT, pending I-485; TN approval or I-94 annotation |
| Employment and income | Employer verification, pay stubs, W-2s, and the letter confirming continued employment |
| Green card holders | Permanent Resident Card, front and back |

Note what is not on that list: a Social Security card. HUD made the point explicitly in Mortgagee Letter 2025-09 — "A Social Security card is not sufficient to prove immigration or work status" — and while that letter governs FHA, the instinct is correct for conventional underwriting too. An SSN proves you were issued a number. It proves nothing about your current status. See [Your I-797, I-94 and Green Card](https://masalaloans.com/blog/immigration-documents-mortgage-underwriting) for the full document walkthrough.

Freddie Mac's treatment of non-permanent residents runs broadly parallel to Fannie's. We are not going to quote a section number we could not verify.

## If you are on an O-1, TN, E-2 or E-3

You are the borrower this post was written for, because you are the one who keeps hearing "we don't do that visa."

Nothing in B2-2-02 distinguishes among classifications. The guideline says "non-permanent residents" and stops. An O-1 researcher in Houston, a TN physiotherapist in Atlanta and an E-2 owner-operator in Tampa are all non-permanent residents under the same four sentences that cover the H-1B software engineer in Frisco.

What differs is the documentation path. An O-1 has an I-797 like an H-1B. A TN may hold a CBP admission record and an employer support letter rather than a petition approval. An E-2 principal is tied to a business the underwriter will also want to understand. None of that is an eligibility question. All of it is a document question.

Take Priya, a composite of the files we see in Alpharetta: TN status, hospital employer, 762 score, four years of US credit. Her first lender declined the file in nine days, citing "non-approved visa category." Her second underwrote it against B2-2-02 and closed it. Same borrower, same paperwork, two different credit boxes.

## The math does not know your status

Run the qualifying calculation for a $185,000 salary in Austin. Monthly qualifying income is **$15,417**. At a 45% debt-to-income ratio, total monthly obligations can reach **$6,938**. Subtract a $620 car payment and a $310 student loan payment and you have **$6,008** available for principal, interest, taxes, insurance, HOA and mortgage insurance.

Now find the line in that calculation that references a visa. There isn't one. The Austin-Round Rock median listing price in August 2026 was **$450,000** (Realtor.com via FRED), and a borrower with $6,008 of housing capacity is not remotely constrained by it. If your file is being declined, the constraint is somewhere other than your ability to repay.

## What not to do

Do not argue the Selling Guide with a loan officer who has already told you no. You will be right and you will still be declined, because he is quoting an internal credit policy he cannot override and probably did not write.

Ask one question instead, in writing: *"Is that a Fannie Mae requirement or your company's overlay? Please cite the Selling Guide section."* If the answer names B2-2-02, ask which sentence. If the answer is "it's our policy," you have what you needed — that file belongs somewhere else. [The "Two Years Left on Your Visa" Rule Is Not a Rule](https://masalaloans.com/blog/visa-expiration-mortgage-requirement-myth) covers the single most common version of this conversation.

And before you fill anything out, read [How to Answer the Citizenship and Residency Questions on Form 1003](https://masalaloans.com/blog/form-1003-citizenship-residency-questions). A surprising number of these files get tangled at the application stage, by borrowers checking the wrong box on a form they were trying to answer honestly. The terms themselves are slippery — we sort them out in [Non-Citizen, Non-Resident Alien, Non-Permanent Resident](https://masalaloans.com/blog/non-permanent-resident-vs-non-resident-alien-mortgage).

## Frequently Asked Questions

**Q: Does Fannie Mae have a list of approved visa types for mortgages?**<br />A: No. Selling Guide B2-2-02 addresses non-permanent residents as a single group and never enumerates visa classifications. It states that Fannie "does not specify the precise documentation the lender must obtain" and leaves the determination to the lender. Any list you are shown was written by a lender, not by Fannie Mae.

**Q: What does "legally present in the United States" mean for a mortgage?**<br />A: It means the lender has satisfied itself, on documents it considers appropriate, that you are lawfully in the country and authorized to work if you are using employment income. Typically that is an unexpired passport, an I-94, and an I-797 approval notice or EAD card. The lender then represents and warrants that conclusion to Fannie Mae at delivery.

**Q: Can I get a conventional loan on an O-1 or TN visa?**<br />A: Yes, under the same B2-2-02 language that covers H-1B borrowers. The guideline does not rank or exclude classifications. Individual lenders sometimes restrict categories through their own overlays, which is why the same file can be declined at one lender and approved at another with identical documentation.

**Q: Do I need a minimum number of years left on my visa?**<br />A: Not under Fannie Mae's guideline. B2-2-02 contains no remaining-validity requirement of any length. Minimums such as "two years left" or "one year left" are lender overlays. They are real rules at the lenders that have them, and they simply do not apply at lenders that do not.

**Q: Why did one lender approve me after another declined me?**<br />A: Because Fannie Mae sets a floor and lenders build on top of it. Each lender writes its own credit policy to manage repurchase risk and investor appetite, so minimum scores, visa restrictions and documentation demands vary. Nothing about your file changed between the two decisions — the credit box did.

**Ready to get started?** Masala Loans by Matador Lending specializes in exactly this. Call **713-366-4668** or get your no-haggle rate at **masalaloans.com**.

*Apna Ghar. Your Dream Home. Your Best Rate. No Haggling.*