Citizenship is the most misunderstood point in SBIR eligibility, and the confusion runs in a predictable direction. People believe the program requires US citizens to do the work. In the general case it does not. The citizenship condition attaches to who owns the company, not to who is employed by it or who leads the research.
The rule that actually exists
The default ownership test requires the applicant to be more than half owned and controlled by individuals who are US citizens or permanent residents, or by other small businesses that are themselves majority owned that way. A separate authorized path exists at some agencies for companies majority owned by multiple investment funds. That is where citizenship lives in the SBIR rules — at the cap table.
A founder on a temporary work visa can therefore hit a genuine obstacle to majority ownership, while a company owned by two US citizens can hire whoever it likes, subject to ordinary employment law and to the exceptions below.
The principal investigator and the team
As a general matter SBIR imposes no citizenship requirement on the principal investigator. A permanent resident, or a non-citizen lawfully authorized to work in the United States, can normally lead an SBIR project at most agencies. The same is true of engineers, technicians and postdocs on the team. Founders routinely disqualify themselves in their own heads over a rule that does not apply to them, and the fix is simply to read the eligibility section of the solicitation rather than the folklore.
What agencies do require is disclosure. Expect to identify key personnel, their affiliations, and in some programs their foreign relationships and support. That is a transparency obligation, not a bar.
Where the exceptions are real
The exceptions are concentrated in national security work and are not trivial. A topic involving classified information, controlled unclassified information, access to a military facility, or export-controlled technical data can require US citizenship, a security clearance, or both — and those conditions are written into the specific topic rather than into the program-wide rules. Export control regimes restrict what technical data a foreign national may see even inside your own building, which can constrain team composition regardless of what the solicitation says about eligibility. If your work touches dual-use technology, the same considerations as export controls on a dual-use design apply here.
Health, science and energy topics rarely carry those conditions. Defense topics frequently do. This is exactly the kind of difference that makes agency selection a technical decision rather than a preference, and it is worth checking topic by topic rather than agency by agency.
The practical approach: verify the ownership math first, read the topic's personnel and access requirements second, and ask the program contact if anything is ambiguous. Related eligibility questions are collected in the SBIR and STTR guide.
This is general information and not legal or immigration advice. Citizenship, residency and access requirements are determined by the funding agency against its current solicitation and by applicable export control law; a company or a key person near any of these lines should confirm with the agency and with qualified counsel before committing to a proposal.
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