United States Application for Employment Authorization (Form I-765)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow, records a mock-data test run of the field set, and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: verified
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-02

Both the form and the companion Instructions were fetched directly from the live uscis.gov source (HTTP 200, no access block on either) and cross-checked against each other; no unresolved discrepancy remains between the two sources reviewed. status is set to verified on this first authoring pass.

Why this candidate was advanced now

us/uscis/employment-authorization-i765 was assigned as part of the approved federal passport/immigration authoring wave (GOV-664 plan §2, F1.2), alongside Department of State forms. Form I-765 (Application for Employment Authorization) is a very-high-volume USCIS filing, online and paper, whose central complexity is the eligibility-category enumeration (Item Number 27), distinct in shape from the checkbox-driven us/uscis/permanent-resident-card-replacement-i90 already published in this registry.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): us/uscis/employment-authorization-i765 / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
• Primary source URL: https://www.uscis.gov/i-765
• Official form id: Form I-765 (Edition 08/21/25)
• Form PDF: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-765.pdf — fetched directly with a plain curl request; HTTP 200, no access block. Parsed with the pdfjs-dist npm package (per-page getTextContent()); all 7 pages extracted as clean, legible text and transcribed field-by-field.
• Instructions PDF: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-765instr.pdf — fetched directly the same way; HTTP 200, no access block. All 25 pages extracted as clean text. Used specifically for (a) the "Who May File Form I-765" eligibility-category enumeration, which the form itself does not print, and (b) the "Specific Instructions" section (pages 18-20), which restates every Part 2 item number (8 through 31) in linear order and was used to resolve the non-linear column order the form PDF's own text extraction produced.
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-02
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (initial authoring source-review)

Not a time-versioned (edition) form

Form I-765 is filed per triggering employment-authorization event (initial grant, renewal, or replacement/correction), not "for" a recurring period — applying the GSP-0005 §2 coexistence test, there is no scenario where two editions of the I-765 data model need to coexist for the same applicant. This document is therefore authored at the plain (non-edition) registry path, registry/us/uscis/employment-authorization-i765/1.0.0/. A future form revision (the form itself is dated per edition, e.g. "08/21/25") that changes the field set ships as a new version, not an edition.

Scope decisions

The form has 6 numbered parts; this document models Parts 1-5 in full, with the following exclusions and modeling choices:

• Part 6 (Additional Information) is a genuinely open-ended continuation space for overflow answers from any other part (identified by page/part/item number cross-references), out of scope for this flat field set — the same treatment given to equivalent overflow sections in other published documents (e.g. us/uscis/permanent-resident-card-replacement-i90 Part 8).
• The unnumbered attorney/G-28 identification block on page 1 ("Select this box if Form G-28 is attached", Attorney State Bar Number, Attorney or Accredited Representative USCIS Online Account Number) carries no Part/Item number on the form and functions as USCIS-internal representative bookkeeping, not a numbered applicant-facing item — out of scope, the same treatment I-90 gives its unnumbered "Action Block/Fee Stamp".
• eligibilityCategory (Item Number 27) enum values are the literal USCIS category codes (e.g. "(a)(3)", "(c)(3)(A)", "(c)(17)(iii)") rather than invented snake_case labels. This is a deliberate fidelity choice: the Instructions' own worked examples instruct the applicant to "type or print '(a)(3)'" in the box, so the literal code is the value a filer writes and the value USCIS itself uses in cross-references throughout the Instructions (e.g. "the EAD category for a person already granted asylum is category (a)(5)"). A human-readable label for every code is provided in the field's description as a compact key, since GovSchema v0.3 has no labelled-enum construct (GSP-0003 remains a proposal, not adopted into the core spec).
• 53 distinct eligibility-category codes were transcribed from the Instructions' "Who May File Form I-765" section (pages 2-16): 19 (a) codes ((a)(2) through (a)(20); there is no (a)(1)) and 34 (c) codes ((c)(1) through (c)(40), non-contiguous — e.g. (c)(13), (c)(15), (c)(21), (c)(23), (c)(27)-(c)(30), (c)(32), (c)(34), (c)(38)-(c)(39) do not appear in the current Instructions and are omitted). Where the Instructions describe multiple filing scenarios that share one literal code (e.g. (c)(8) covers pre-1995 filers, post-1995 filers, and ABC Settlement Agreement filers; (c)(9) covers ordinary adjustment applicants, National Interest Waiver physician renewals, and T/U adjustment; (c)(14) covers general deferred action and A-3/G-5 civil-action deferred action), those scenarios collapse to a single enum value, since the applicant writes the same code regardless of scenario.
• Other Names Used (Items 2.a-4.c) is modeled as three flat, always-optional name-triplet slots (otherName1*/otherName2*/otherName3*), matching the form's own three fixed instances — not a GSP-0009 repeating-structure gap, since the source itself provides exactly three static slots rather than an open-ended repeating list.
• Item Numbers 28-31 (sub-fields keyed to a specific eligibility category) are modeled with requiredWhen conditions against eligibilityCategory (GSP-0013 §2) rather than prose-only notes, since GovSchema v0.3 (unlike the v0.2 baseline us/uscis/permanent-resident-card-replacement-i90 was authored under) has a conditional-requiredness mechanism. Likewise (c)(35)/(c)(36) share one requiredWhen condition via the in operator, and the mutually exclusive applicantCanReadEnglish/usedInterpreter boxes are encoded as an exclusivityGroups entry (GSP-0013 §5) rather than a prose note.
• U.S.-only mailing/physical addresses. Unlike permanent-resident-card-replacement-i90, Form I-765's own instructions state "You must have a United States address to file this application," so mailingAddress*/physicalAddress* model only U.S. address components (no foreign province/postal-code/country variants); the interpreter and preparer address blocks, by contrast, do include the foreign-address variant fields, matching the form's own layout (their address blocks show Province/Postal Code/Country lines the applicant's own address block does not).
• Constraint patterns (phone E.164, SSN, A-Number digit count, USCIS receipt-number format [A-Z]{3}[0-9]{10} for the I-140/I-129 cross-reference fields) are reasonable encodings consistent with USCIS's published receipt number format, not citations of a published Form I-765-specific validation rule.
• placeOfBirthStateOrProvince is modeled as always-optional since not every country of birth has an equivalent subdivision; the form provides the field but does not state it is conditionally required.

What was confirmed against the source

• Full section-by-section field set (Parts 1-5). Reason for applying (including the item-number reuse quirk between the name fields and the reason checkboxes, both numbered 1.a-1.c), other names used (three slots), U.S. mailing and physical addresses, A-Number/USCIS Online Account Number, sex, marital status, prior-filing history, SSN, citizenship (two country slots), place/date of birth, full travel-and-status history (I-94, passport/ travel document, last arrival, current/last-arrival immigration status, SEVIS number), the eligibility-category field and every one of its 53 values, the four eligibility-category-specific sub-field groups (STEM OPT degree/employer/E-Verify ID; H-4 spouse's I-129 receipt; (c)(8) arrest/ conviction question; (c)(35)/(c)(36) I-140 receipt and arrest/conviction question), the applicant's statement/contact/certification/signature block (including the ABC Settlement Agreement checkbox), and the optional interpreter and preparer sections including each role's full mailing-address block (items 3.a-3.h) and the preparer's attorney/accredited-representative branch with its Form G-28 cross-reference — all transcribed field-by-field from the decoded PDF text of both the form and its Instructions.
• Item-number ordering (Items 8-31). Cross-checked against the Instructions' "Specific Instructions" section, which lists every item number in linear order — this fully resolved the form PDF's own non-linear text-extraction column order, unlike the residual height/weight item-number ambiguity left open in permanent-resident-card-replacement-i90 v1.0.0.
• Eligibility-category completeness. Every code appearing anywhere in the Instructions' "Who May File Form I-765" section (a 15-page enumeration spanning Asylee/Refugee, Nationality, Foreign Students, Diplomatic/ International Organization Dependents, Employment-Based Nonimmigrant, Family-Based Nonimmigrant, Adjustment of Status, and "Other" category groups) was extracted and cross-checked twice: once via a raw-text regex sweep for the (a)(N)/(c)(N) pattern, and once by reading the full 25-page Instructions text section by section to confirm each code's title and grouping.
• Process identity. Confirmed Form I-765 is the correct, current (Edition 08/21/25) USCIS form for requesting an Employment Authorization Document, distinct from status-specific petitions (e.g. Form I-140, I-360, I-485, I-914, I-918) that some eligibility categories reference as prerequisite or companion filings but that remain out of scope here.

Mock-data test run

Per the issue's phase-4 instruction to test-run the schema with valid mock data, two representative applications were authored and checked field-by-field against every type/required/requiredWhen/validation constraint in schema.json (string length, regex pattern, enum membership, date format, boolean type, and the requiredWhen/exclusivityGroups conditional-logic constructs) using a one-off Node script (node:fs + a hand-rolled per-field and per-condition evaluator, not committed to the repo):

``json { "applicantFamilyName": "Okafor", "applicantGivenName": "Ngozi", "reasonForApplying": "initial_permission_to_accept_employment", "mailingAddressLine1": "1400 Independence Avenue SW", "mailingAddressCity": "Washington", "mailingAddressState": "DC", "mailingAddressZipCode": "20024", "physicalAddressSameAsMailing": true, "sex": "female", "maritalStatus": "single", "previouslyFiledForEmploymentAuthorization": false, "citizenshipCountry1": "Nigeria", "placeOfBirthCity": "Lagos", "countryOfBirth": "Nigeria", "dateOfBirth": "1998-04-12", "passportNumber": "A12345678", "passportOrTravelDocumentIssuingCountry": "Nigeria", "passportOrTravelDocumentExpirationDate": "2029-01-01", "dateOfLastArrival": "2025-08-15", "placeOfLastArrival": "Dulles International Airport, VA", "immigrationStatusAtLastArrival": "F-1 student", "currentImmigrationStatusOrCategory": "F-1 student", "sevisNumber": "N0012345678", "eligibilityCategory": "(c)(3)(B)", "applicantCanReadEnglish": true, "usedInterpreter": false, "usedPreparer": false, "applicantDaytimePhoneNumber": "+12025550142", "applicantEmail": "ngozi.okafor@example.com", "applicantSignatureDate": "2026-08-01" } ``

This models Ngozi Okafor, an F-1 student requesting initial post-completion OPT employment authorization ((c)(3)(B)), completing the form herself (no interpreter or preparer), with a physical address identical to her mailing address. Result:

`` PASS — mock I-765 application satisfies schema field-level constraints. ``

A second, negative-control scenario was run to confirm the conditional-logic harness is not vacuous: a (c)(3)(C) (24-month STEM OPT extension) applicant with the stemOpt* sub-fields (Item Numbers 28.a-28.c) deliberately omitted. The harness correctly flagged all three as required:

`` Expected missing (STEM OPT sub-fields): [ 'stemOptDegreeLevelAndMajor', 'stemOptEmployerNameInEVerify', 'stemOptEmployerEVerifyCompanyId' ] ``

Both registry validators were run against the schema document itself (not the mock data) and pass:

``` $ node tools/validate.mjs registry/us/uscis/employment-authorization-i765/1.0.0/schema.json ok registry/us/uscis/employment-authorization-i765/1.0.0/schema.json

$ cd tools && node validate-ajv.mjs ../registry/us/uscis/employment-authorization-i765/1.0.0/schema.json ok registry/us/uscis/employment-authorization-i765/1.0.0/schema.json [v0.3] ```

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-02 (6 months). Re-check the source on or before that date, on any source.url change, or when USCIS publishes a new Form I-765 or Instructions edition (both currently dated "08/21/25") — in particular, re-check the eligibility-category enumeration, which is amended more frequently than the form's other sections as USCIS adds or retires categories by rulemaking.