Mortgage on a Work Visa: What Agency Programs Require for Foreign-Paid Income

For conventional financing, generally yes. Fannie Mae purchases mortgages made to non–U.S. citizens who are lawful permanent or non-permanent residents, on the same terms available to U.S. citizens. FHA is the exception: HUD removed non-permanent-resident eligibility entirely. Your status is one test. Your income is a separate one.

The most common way a visa file stalls is collapsing those two questions into one. Borrower eligibility asks whether the program permits your residency status at all. Income eligibility asks whether what you earn is documented, stable, and reasonably likely to continue.

Keep them apart and the file moves in a straight line. Blend them and you get weeks of circular conditions that never had a chance of resolving.

The short answer, by program

This table is the summary version of everything below. Program eligibility is the one part of a mortgage file that cannot be argued or documented around, so treat every row as general — confirm current with your lender before you shop.

Program	Non-permanent resident (work visa)	Where the rule lives
Fannie Mae (conventional)	Permitted — lawful permanent and non-permanent residents, on the same terms available to U.S. citizens	Selling Guide B2-2-02
Freddie Mac (conventional)	Broadly similar treatment for non-U.S. citizens lawfully residing in the United States; documentation details differ	Freddie Mac Single-Family Seller/Servicer Guide, borrower eligibility chapter — confirm the current section
FHA	Not eligible as a non-permanent resident. Permanent residents remain eligible, as do citizens of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, or Palau	Mortgagee Letter 2025-09, now superseded in full by HUD Handbook 4000.1
VA	Eligibility runs on the veteran’s service and entitlement, documented on the Certificate of Eligibility — not on visa category	VA Lender’s Handbook (VA Pamphlet 26-7)
USDA	Requires U.S. citizen, U.S. non-citizen national, or qualified alien status	USDA HB-1-3555, Chapter 8 (7 CFR 3555.151)

Our take: the FHA row is the single most important line on this page, because FHA had long been a reflexive suggestion for borrowers with shorter U.S. credit histories. For a non-permanent resident, that door is closed, and no amount of file quality reopens it.

Two separate tests: who you are and what you earn

Test one: borrower eligibility

Borrower eligibility is a status question, and it is binary. Either the program permits the borrower’s residency category or it does not, and the underwriter has no discretion to bridge the gap.

Fannie Mae publishes its non-U.S. citizen borrower rules in Selling Guide B2-2-02, and the text is public. The guide draws its line at lawful residency rather than at a roster of visa names: it does not specify the documentation a lender must obtain, and instead requires the lender to determine status from the circumstances of the individual case using documentation it deems appropriate, then represent and warrant that the borrower is legally present in this country.

Our take: we deliberately do not publish a list of "approved visa types." Categories, and the documents that evidence them, change; a stale list on a mortgage website is worse than no list at all. Your file gets classified from the actual documents you hold, so ask your lender which documents it accepts and how it reads them.

Test two: income eligibility

Income eligibility is a documentation question, and it is a spectrum rather than a switch. Foreign-paid wages are still wages, and the underwriter tests them against the income rules lenders apply to every other source.

That means a verifiable history, a monthly figure a calculator can defend, and a reasonable expectation that the income continues. That is the stability question underwriters ask beyond the paycheck itself.

Why mixing the two tests costs you weeks

A file that fails test one should be re-routed on day one, not conditioned for a month and then denied. A file that passes test one but arrives thin on test two does not get denied — it gets a condition list.

Those are two different problems with two different fixes. Confusing a program-eligibility problem for a paperwork problem is how borrowers end up chasing documents that were never going to matter.

FHA: not eligible as a non-permanent resident

Stated plainly: FHA financing is not available to a non-permanent resident borrower under the current rule. HUD removed the non-permanent-resident sections from FHA’s residency requirements in their entirety, eliminating eligibility for non-permanent resident borrowers across Title II forward and HECM programs.

HUD issued that change as Mortgagee Letter 2025-09, Revisions to Residency Requirements, dated March 26, 2025. Permanent residents remain eligible on the same requirements, terms, and conditions as U.S. citizens, and so do citizens of the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau, in each case with evidence of that status in the file.

What the change did and did not touch

FHA’s underwriting rules live in HUD Handbook 4000.1, and HUD lists that mortgagee letter as superseded in full by the Handbook, which is now the operative source. Confirm the current Handbook text with your lender before relying on any summary, including this one.

The change addresses borrower eligibility by residency status. It does not rewrite how FHA treats income documentation, credit history, or reserves for borrowers who remain eligible. Lawful permanent residents are a different category from non-permanent residents, so confirm which category your own documents place you in before assuming which rule applies.

If a file was already in process

The trigger is the FHA case number assignment date — not the application date, and not the closing date. The mortgagee letter set May 25, 2025 as the date by which lenders had to implement the change for case numbers assigned on or after that date, and permitted lenders to implement it earlier at their option. So on a file that straddled that period, the case number date and the individual lender’s implementation date both matter. Ask the lender when the case number was assigned and get the answer in writing.

Conventional: what Fannie and Freddie ask for

For conventional financing, a non-permanent resident borrower is underwritten to the same standards as any other borrower once the residency test is satisfied. There is no separate "visa loan" with different pricing logic on the agency side.

The documents

• Evidence of lawful residency, in the form the lender determines is appropriate for your circumstances.
• Standard income documentation for your income type — paystubs, W-2s, or signed returns.
• Asset documentation, with sourcing for any funds that arrive from an account abroad.
• Written explanations for anything a reader could misread, including gaps and address history overseas.

Start from the standard document list your loan officer will ask for, then add the cross-border items on top. The base list does not shrink because the file is unusual; it grows.

Where the overlays live

Agency guidance is the floor, not the ceiling. Individual lenders add overlays — their own stricter rules — and because the agency text leaves the documentation call to the lender, overlays are where much of the real decision sits on these files.

This varies by lender; ask yours. Two lenders can both say truthfully that they follow Fannie Mae and still reach opposite conclusions on the identical borrower, because one of them layered an overlay on top.

VA and USDA: different gates entirely

VA

VA eligibility does not start from visa category. It runs on the veteran’s service and entitlement, documented on the Certificate of Eligibility under the VA Lender’s Handbook (VA Pamphlet 26-7). A borrower without entitlement is not eligible for a VA loan. Whether a specific borrower has entitlement is a question for VA or your lender — general, confirm current.

USDA

USDA’s borrower eligibility rules sit in HB-1-3555, Chapter 8, Applicant Characteristics, under 7 CFR 3555.151. The program requires the applicant to be a U.S. citizen, a U.S. non-citizen national, or a qualified alien as defined in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 — and "qualified alien" is a defined legal term, narrower than "lawfully present." Applicants must provide acceptable evidence of that status.

Our take: treat USDA as unlikely on a work-visa file until the qualified-alien question is answered from the documents rather than assumed. It is a fast question to ask and an expensive one to guess at.

Foreign-paid income: what underwriting actually asks for

Foreign-paid income is a documentation problem, not an eligibility problem, and it is where the calendar actually goes. Fannie Mae’s foreign income requirements sit in Selling Guide B3-3.2-02, Standards for Employment-Related Income, which defines foreign income as income earned by a borrower employed by a foreign corporation or a foreign government and paid in foreign currency. These friction points decide how long a foreign-income file sits in conditions.

Currency

Income paid in a foreign currency has to become a U.S. dollar figure before it can enter a debt-to-income calculation, and the agency text is explicit that all income must be translated to U.S. dollars. The guide does not name a conversion source or an as-of date, so those are lender-level decisions — general, confirm current. Ask which rate the lender uses and as of when it is measured.

The U.S. tax return question

For foreign income, the agency documentation standard is copies of signed federal income tax returns for the most recent two years that include the foreign employment-related income. General — confirm current.

Our take: this is where many foreign-income files actually end. If the income never reached a U.S. return, the conventional path narrows fast, and the honest conversation is better had in week one than week six. Anything touching how the income was reported or taxed is a question for a tax professional, not for us.

Translation

The requirement here is an agency requirement, not just a lender preference: all documents of foreign origin must be completed in English, or the lender must provide a translation attached to each document and ensure the translation is complete and accurate. Lenders differ on process and on whose translations they will accept, so confirm at application and order translations the same week — this condition is easy to discover late and expensive in calendar time.

Verifying an employer across borders

A written verification of employment is a common stall point on a cross-border file. Time zone differences shrink the overlapping business hours between the lender and the employer, foreign data-protection rules can restrict what an HR department will confirm, and third-party verification databases may not cover a foreign employer, which pushes the file toward a manual, direct verification.

Our take: the fix that tends to help most is a named human contact at the employer, with a direct line and a stated working window, supplied at application rather than requested at condition time.

Continuance when the assignment ends

Income tied to an assignment with a defined end date puts the likely-to-continue test directly in play. The agency guide addresses lawful residency rather than setting a minimum remaining validity period on work authorization, so how a lender treats a near-term expiration date sits largely in overlay territory. This varies by lender — ask yours before you assume either way.

This is not the same as an ITIN or foreign-national loan

These are two different worlds and they get conflated constantly. Our ITIN and foreign-national loan page covers products that sit outside agency eligibility entirely.

The distinction is worth holding onto:

• This post is about agency financing for a borrower who is lawfully present in the United States.
• ITIN and foreign-national programs are non-agency products, with their own guidelines, their own pricing structures, and their own documentation logic.
• A borrower can be ineligible under one program’s residency rule and still be a strong candidate under a different structure entirely.

Which conversation you are in should be settled in the first meeting, because the document list diverges immediately after that.

The two clocks on a visa or foreign-income file

Underwriting duration is two separate clocks, and they should never be quoted as one number. The first is underwriter turn time — how long a file waits in a lender’s queue for a human to read it. The second is condition-clearing time — how long it takes to satisfy what that human asks for.

On these files, turn time is ordinary. Nothing about a visa or a foreign employer makes an underwriter read slower.

The condition clock is the one that stretches, because it depends on parties outside the country: an HR office abroad, a translator, a foreign bank’s document request process. Each of those is measured in business days in someone else’s time zone. That is why file completeness on day one, not lender selection alone, is the actionable half of the answer here.

What a complete file looks like on day one

Nothing on this list is exotic. All of it is commonly supplied late, which is precisely why it costs time.

1. Your current residency and work-authorization documents, front and back, legible, unexpired.
2. Two years of signed U.S. federal tax returns with all schedules, if foreign income is being used (general — confirm current).
3. English translations of every non-English document, arranged at application.
4. A named employer contact for verification, with direct phone, email, and time zone.
5. Statements for every account being used, including foreign accounts, with sourcing for large deposits.
6. A short written explanation of your employment arrangement: who employs you, where they are, how you are paid, and in what currency.

Underwriters are not trying to catch you. They are trying to write a file a third party can re-read years later and reach the same conclusion.

Where a broker actually changes the outcome

Not on speed, and not on approval — neither is anyone’s to promise. The place a wholesale relationship genuinely matters on these files is submission choice, because the agency text leaves documentation calls to the lender and overlays differ from one lender to the next.

As a Colorado Springs mortgage broker, we submit to multiple wholesale lenders, so the overlay question gets answered before submission rather than after. The second place it matters is a stalled or declined file: a decline for a program-eligibility reason and a decline for a documentation reason call for completely different next moves, and knowing which one you got is the whole decision.

Our take: if a file was declined and nobody can tell you which of the two tests it failed, that is the question to force before doing anything else. Every applicant is entitled to a statement of the specific reasons for an adverse action, and that statement is the starting point.

Frequently asked questions

Can I get a conventional mortgage on a work visa?

Generally yes. Fannie Mae purchases and securitizes mortgages made to non-U.S. citizens who are lawful permanent or non-permanent residents, on the same terms available to U.S. citizens (Selling Guide B2-2-02), with the lender determining status from documentation it deems appropriate. Freddie Mac treats non-U.S. citizens lawfully residing in the United States on broadly similar terms. Individual lender overlays still apply, so agency eligibility is the floor, not a decision. General — confirm current.

Is FHA available to a non-permanent resident?

No. HUD removed the non-permanent-resident sections from FHA’s residency requirements, eliminating eligibility for non-permanent resident borrowers. The change was issued in Mortgagee Letter 2025-09 (March 26, 2025), which lenders had to implement for FHA case numbers assigned on or after May 25, 2025 and could implement earlier at their option; HUD now lists that letter as superseded in full by Handbook 4000.1, which is the operative source. General — confirm current.

Does my work authorization have to be valid for a set number of years?

This varies by lender — ask yours. The agency guide addresses lawful residency rather than setting a minimum remaining validity period, so how a lender treats a near-term expiration date sits largely in overlay territory. Get the specific answer from the specific lender before the file is submitted.

Can I use income paid by a foreign employer in a foreign currency?

Often yes, but the documentation standard is specific. Fannie Mae defines foreign income as income earned by a borrower employed by a foreign corporation or a foreign government and paid in foreign currency, requires copies of signed federal income tax returns for the most recent two years that include that income, and requires all income to be translated to U.S. dollars (Selling Guide B3-3.2-02). The conversion source and as-of date are lender decisions. General — confirm current.

Do my foreign documents need to be translated?

Yes. All documents of foreign origin must be completed in English, or the lender must provide a translation attached to each document and ensure it is complete and accurate (Selling Guide B3-3.2-02). Lenders differ on process and on whose translations they accept, so confirm the requirement at application and arrange translations immediately rather than waiting for the condition. General — confirm current.

Is a work-visa mortgage the same as an ITIN or foreign-national loan?

No. This post covers agency financing for borrowers who are lawfully present in the United States. ITIN and foreign-national programs are separate non-agency products with their own guidelines and their own documentation logic, and the two paths diverge from the first conversation.

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719 Lending Inc. is not affiliated with or endorsed by HUD, FHA, VA, USDA, CHFA, or any government agency.

Program rules, guideline sections, and documentation standards described here are general and change over time — confirm current requirements with your lender before acting on them.

Last updated: August 2026