IN THIS GUIDE · Checking the qualifying employment chronology when the record includes leave or frequent United States travel
Start with the L-1B eligibility and application overview
Assemble the dates before interpreting them
Build a single chronology covering the whole relevant period: employer entity, role, location, and the exact start and end dates of each arrangement. Include internal transfers between related entities, secondments, changes in the employing company after a reorganisation, and any period of unpaid status. Payroll records, human resources files, and contracts are better sources than recollection. Assemble it as a plain table of facts first, without any attempt to make it fit a requirement. Build the table in a spreadsheet rather than in prose, with one row per arrangement and a column for the source of each date. Prose invites summary, and summary is where errors enter. A table also makes gaps visible as gaps rather than as sentences that happen not to mention a period.
Record each period of leave and what kind it was
Leave is not a single category. Note the dates, whether the employment relationship continued, whether the person remained on payroll, and what the leave was for. Statutory and contractual entitlements vary, and the employment file should show what the arrangement actually was. Do not summarise a year of mixed part-time return and full leave as one block, because that detail is exactly what a chronology review needs to work from. Where an employer's own systems classify leave differently from how people describe it, record both. Human resources categories are built for payroll and entitlement purposes and do not map onto immigration questions, so a period logged internally as unpaid may or may not be what matters. Give counsel the label and the underlying facts, and let the rule be applied to the facts.
Reconstruct the United States travel pattern
Frequent short trips complicate a chronology in two ways: they can affect how a period of employment abroad is counted, and a long pattern of business visits raises its own questions about what activity was actually performed. Collect entry and exit records, expense reports, and calendar history, and record the purpose of each trip. Approximations are risky here, because the underlying records are checkable and inconsistent accounts get noticed. Be precise about what was done on each trip as well as when it happened, since the two questions are related but separate. A visit to attend a meeting, a visit to install equipment and a visit to work alongside a customer's staff are different activities, and a pattern of the last kind may raise questions about whether work was performed without authorization. Records exist for all of these; approximation helps nobody.
Give the facts to counsel and let the rule be applied
The requirement is generally one continuous year of qualifying employment abroad within a defined preceding period, and how leave and travel interact with it is case-specific. Resist the temptation to count months internally and report a conclusion. Present the chronology, flag the periods you are unsure about, and ask for an assessment. If the record falls short, learning that before a filing is a far better outcome than learning it afterwards. Where the chronology does fall short, the useful output is a date rather than a refusal: the point at which the qualifying period would be complete if the person continues in the current role abroad. That converts a disappointing answer into a plan the business can work with, and it lets the receiving operation decide what it will do in the meantime rather than waiting for a case that cannot yet be filed.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.