IN THIS GUIDE · The qualifying year has to have happened outside the United States, and earlier trips can eat it
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Twelve months, continuous, abroad, inside a three-year window
The employment condition is precise. Within the three years immediately before the petition is filed, the transferee must have completed one continuous year of employment with a qualifying organisation outside the United States. Brief trips into the country do not usually destroy continuity, but time spent working in the United States is not counted toward the year, and it lengthens the period over which the year has to be found. For someone who has been shuttling as heavily as Étienne, the exercise is arithmetical rather than rhetorical: lay every entry and exit on a calendar, mark which stretches were genuinely worked from Canada, and see whether any unbroken twelve-month block survives. If none does, the answer is not that the route is closed forever, only that it is not available this month.
The relationship between the companies is a documentary question
Alongside the employment year sits a corporate condition. The Canadian employer and the American entity must stand in a qualifying relationship to one another as parent and subsidiary, as branch, or as affiliates, and both must be actively doing business rather than merely existing on a registry. Doing business means the regular, systematic and continuous provision of goods or services, so a dormant American shell that has been holding land since the purchase will not satisfy it. The evidence lives in documents the company already possesses or can obtain: incorporation records, the share register, the purchase agreement for the Michigan operation, and financial statements showing trading activity on both sides of the border.
Managerial or executive, and the seven-year ceiling beyond it
L-1A requires that the transferee will be employed in a primarily managerial or executive capacity, which is a description of what someone does rather than of what they are called. Managing a function or an essential part of the organisation counts; so does directing personnel with authority over hiring, firing and promotion. Performing the operation's skilled work most of the week does not, however senior the title. Étienne grafts, and how much of his week that work occupies matters. If he is approved, total time in L-1A status is limited to seven years, and any time already spent in other qualifying status counts toward it, which is another reason to know exactly how many days he has already spent working across the border.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.