The household's stability depends partly on a commercial relationship it does not control. A contract that ends or moves changes the assignment. Eligible spouses and unmarried children under twenty-one may seek dependent status; a spouse in valid L-2S status is employment-authorized incident to that status, while children are not work-authorized.
Plan for a relationship that can change
Discuss what happens if the customer's project is cut short or relocated. That conversation should happen before a partner resigns or a family commits to a school year. Ask whether the employer would place the individual on other work, and whether that would need immigration review first. A household that understands the assignment's commercial dependency can make its own decisions rather than discovering them later.
The spouse and child rules are the same whether the principal transfers as a manager or on specialized knowledge, which surprises people who assume the more limited category carries more limited family rights. The principal’s case separately requires a qualifying organizational relationship, a continuous foreign year within the applicable prior three, and specialized company knowledge used in the US assignment. The principal's authorization flows from the petition; a qualifying spouse's flows from status together with the appropriate documentation, and the two rest on separate records carrying separate expiry dates.