Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Map responsibility across the vendors
Identify the essential function or organizational component, the applicant’s authority and the people who perform operational tasks. Contracts can help explain execution capacity but do not automatically establish that the applicant’s own duties are primarily managerial or executive. Describe time spent performing hands-on work honestly. Take a representative service obligation and trace it from the customer request to completed delivery. Identify the vendor’s contracted output, the applicant’s decision authority and any work the applicant performs personally. Compare the contract with the actual practice: a vendor described as responsible for implementation may in fact provide only occasional advice. Record that difference without converting the vendor’s personnel into company employees. Explain how the manager allocates resources, evaluates performance or directs the relevant function where those are real duties. If a supplier fails, identify who actually takes over the operational tasks. That contingency helps test whether the proposed managerial account depends on execution capacity the business does not have.
Establish the transfer conditions
Establish a qualifying parent, subsidiary, affiliate or branch relationship, continuing regular business in the United States and at least one other country, and one continuous full-time qualifying foreign year within the relevant preceding three years. Ordinary foreign work may be managerial, executive or specialized knowledge; the U.S. role must meet the requested classification. U.S. visit days do not count toward the foreign year, although brief visits do not automatically break continuity.
Apply the U.S. category and new-office branch
For L-1A, the U.S. duties must be primarily managerial or executive. A new office means less than one year of qualifying U.S. business activity: the foreign year must specifically be managerial or executive, sufficient premises are needed and the U.S. operation must support that role within one year of approval. Initial new-office approval is at most one year. Owner or major-stockholder cases also need temporary U.S. services and subsequent foreign-assignment evidence.
Describe management of a function, not a title
An executive directs the management of the organization, sets goals and policies, exercises wide discretion and receives only general supervision from a board or shareholders. The US subsidiary must be a parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate of the Canadian employer, shown by share certificates, articles and, if there are holding companies in between, a chart with percentages at each level. The general maximum for managerial or executive L stay is seven years, subject to the applicable rules and individual facts. If the transferee is the only layer, describe instead the essential function managed and the professional or supervisory staff relieved of routine duties. A managerial or executive position is a defined description rather than a level of seniority, so the redrawn chart should show what the person will actually direct: functions, subordinates or a component of the organisation. Counting heads is not the test, but a manager with no subordinate professionals or supervisors and a day spent doing installations personally is a technician with a title. A function manager operates at a senior level over an essential function, rather than chiefly doing that function’s work; first-line supervision of nonprofessional staff alone is insufficient. A new-office L-1A case, however, needs the required year of foreign managerial or executive employment rather than an assumption that a recent acting appointment lasted throughout it.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-08. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.