IN THIS GUIDE · L-1A for Guelph/Eramosa companies: the manager who would end up doing the work, and the year that was not continuous
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
A manager who does the work is not an L-1A manager
L-1A requires that the US position be primarily managerial or executive. Managerial capacity means managing the organization or a department, supervising and controlling the work of other supervisory, professional or managerial employees, or managing an essential function, with authority over hiring and firing or the equivalent, and exercising discretion over day-to-day operations. A transferee who will personally commission ventilation controls at customer barns most days is a technician with a title. Look at the subsidiary's staff list: if there are installers and a service coordinator to supervise, and the transferee will plan work, hire, set pricing and manage the customer relationships, the role is managerial. If the plan is that he does the technical work until the subsidiary grows, the petition is premature.
Count the qualifying year from the records
The transferee must have worked for the Canadian company, or another qualifying organization in the group, for one continuous year within the three years before the petition. The year must be as an employee in a managerial, executive or specialized-knowledge capacity. Here the operations manager was a self-employed consultant to the company for eight months before being hired, and payroll shows only twenty months of employment. The consulting period does not count. Check the T4 and payroll history, not the résumé, and if the continuous employee year is short, fix the timeline rather than the description. Time spent working in the United States for the same group is not counted toward the year, though it does not break continuity.
Prove the relationship and that both entities are active
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. Both companies must be doing business, meaning regular, systematic and continuous provision of goods or services, for the whole period of the transferee's stay. Installation contracts, payroll, invoices and the subsidiary's tax filings show that. A subsidiary that has been dormant since the founder fell ill may fail the doing-business requirement. It should not simply be relabelled a new office: that classification applies when the US organization has been doing business for less than one year and requires evidence of sufficient premises and capacity to support a managerial or executive role within that year.
Plan the seven-year ceiling and the family
L-1A status is granted initially for up to three years for an established office and can be extended to a maximum of seven years. A transferee who intends to lead the US business permanently should understand that the category is temporary and that a longer-term plan, such as an employment-based immigrant petition for a multinational manager, is a separate process with its own requirements. His spouse in L-2 status is employment-authorized incident to status, so she can work without a separate route, and children under twenty-one may study but not work.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.