IN THIS GUIDE · Foreign-employment chronology and travel interruptions
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Start with exact employment facts
Identify the employing legal entity, start and end dates, duties and work location. Payroll is useful but should agree with employment letters and other records. When a worker changed titles or group entities, record each change explicitly so counsel can assess which period satisfies the qualifying foreign-employment requirement.
Separate foreign work from U.S. presence
Create a travel chronology using reliable records and identify U.S. trips during the proposed qualifying year. Brief trips may have specific treatment, but time in the United States does not simply become foreign employment. Avoid declaring the year complete from payroll dates alone when the employee was physically elsewhere.
Match the capacity to the office type
For an established U.S. office, qualifying foreign employment may have been managerial, executive or specialized knowledge even if the proposed role is managerial. New-office L-1A requires the foreign year in managerial or executive capacity. This distinction makes a promotion history important rather than a detail to omit from the narrative.
Resolve uncertainty before filing
Mark gaps in records and obtain genuine supporting material; never recreate travel or backdate an employment letter. Time in U.S. status, interruptions and entity changes can affect the relevant calculation. Present the complete chronology to counsel before setting a filing date, particularly when the claimed qualifying period is close to the boundary.
Treat continuous and full-time as two separate tests
The requirement is generally one year of continuous, full-time employment abroad within the three years preceding the filing or admission, and those are distinct conditions that a single payroll record may satisfy neither of nor both. Continuity concerns whether the employment ran without a break that the applicable rules treat as interrupting it. Full-time concerns the nature of the engagement rather than its duration, and part-time work, a reduced-hours arrangement or a period of nominal involvement may not qualify however long it continued. Examine each separately against the records. Where an employee moved to reduced hours for part of the period, or held the role alongside other employment, identify that now and let counsel assess it, since these are the facts most likely to be assumed away by whoever is reconstructing the history from an employment start date.
Reconstruct from records that were not written for this purpose
The most reliable chronology is assembled from documents created for entirely unrelated reasons, because their dates were fixed by something other than a present need. Payroll and tax filings, pension or benefit enrolment records, expense claims, calendar entries, building access logs, issued equipment records and travel bookings all carry dates that nobody adjusted with an immigration question in mind. Use them to establish the frame, then use the narrative documents to explain what was happening within it. Where the frame and the narrative disagree, the frame is generally the more reliable and the discrepancy needs explaining rather than resolving in favour of whichever is convenient. Assemble this before anyone commits to a filing date, since the chronology may move the date rather than confirm it.
Ask the employee before assembling the record
The person whose history is being reconstructed usually knows things the records do not show: a period working from another country, an informal change of role, a stretch of reduced hours, a secondment that was never papered. Interview them properly before the documents are gathered rather than afterwards, and ask open questions rather than confirming an assumption. What they describe can then be checked against the records, and any divergence investigated while there is time. An employee who is asked to confirm a chronology someone else prepared will generally do so, which is exactly why the sequence matters.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.