Total stay in L-1A is capped at seven years. Time spent physically outside the United States during the assignment can generally be recaptured and added back, but a period abroad does not by itself wipe the clock; a full reset requires a substantial continuous period of employment abroad outside L or H status before a new petition.
Recapture and reset are two different remedies
People conflate them, and the difference decides plans. Recapture is arithmetic: days genuinely spent outside the United States during the L period do not consume the seven years, so careful travel records can return real months to an executive who has been crossing the border regularly. A reset is structural, and it depends on the transferee spending a substantial continuous period employed abroad, outside L and H classifications, before the next petition is filed.
Hypothetical example: a transferee from Sainte-Cécile-de-Milton reaches the middle of year six and the American subsidiary wants several more years from him. Two questions follow, and only one of them is a travel-records exercise. Reconstructing his absences may add months.
Deciding whether the group can afford him back in Québec for long enough to begin a new period is a business decision, and it should be taken well before the seventh year rather than in the final quarter of it.