Dependent status in your workforce - when a spouse's change ends your employee's work authorization

Some of the people on your payroll work on authorization that came from a spouse's immigration status at another company. When that spouse changes jobs, gets laid off, changes status, or the marriage ends, your employee's right to work can end with it. The first anyone hears about it is usually the week a document expires.

The arrangement has a name. Derivative status is nonimmigrant status granted to the spouse or child of someone else's approved petition, along with the work authorization that sometimes rides on it. H-4, L-2 and the E dependent classifications are the ones that turn up most often on a U.S. payroll. Your employee does the job for you, and the expiration date comes out of a petition your company never filed and has no standing to read.

This is written for whoever owns immigration inside the company, whether that's an HR generalist who inherited the file or a global mobility lead running a formal program. It covers:

• Which dependent statuses hold up and which break easily
• The four events that end them
• The sequencing mistake that makes a family pay for the same filings twice
• What you can reasonably ask an employee
• What belongs in a tracker
• How to move someone onto a petition you control

The individual side of these questions sits in our guides to spouse work authorization visa options and the H-1B spouse work permit.

H-4 EAD and L-2 EAD: which dependent spouses need a work permit

An H-4 is the spouse or unmarried child under 21 of an H-1B worker. An L-2 is the spouse or child of an L-1 intracompany transferee. E-1S, E-2S and E-3S are the spouses of E-1, E-2 and E-3 treaty workers. All of them hold status because of somebody else's petition, and that is where the similarity stops.

An L-2 or E dependent spouse is authorized to work incident to status, meaning the status itself carries the right to work and no separate application is needed. An H-4 spouse has to apply for an Employment Authorization Document, and only a minority of H-4 spouses qualify to apply at all. Two people hired the same week into the same role can be sitting on completely different footing.

Which H-4 spouses qualify for a work permit

H-4 eligibility is the narrow one. An H-4 spouse can apply for a work permit only if the H-1B principal meets one of two conditions:

• The principal is the principal beneficiary of an approved Form I-140.
• The principal has been granted H-1B status past the six-year limit under sections 106(a) and (b) of the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act.

Both of those conditions live entirely inside another employer's green card process. The card USCIS issues expires on the same date as the H-4 spouse's most recent Form I-94. Its useful life is set by the principal's petition validity rather than by anything your company controls.

How L-2 and E dependent spouses prove work authorization

L-2 and E dependent spouses have had it easier since 30 January 2022. USCIS and Customs and Border Protection began issuing Forms I-94 that carry the L-2S, E-1S, E-2S and E-3S admission codes.

An unexpired I-94 with one of those codes is evidence of employment authorization on its own. There is still an expiration date on it, and it still tracks the principal's status. The exposure has the same shape even though the paperwork is lighter.

Our guide to Form I-94 covers how to read one.

The automatic EAD extension ended on 30 October 2025

This is the change most likely to catch an HR team that last looked at dependent work authorization in 2024. A timely filed renewal used to carry an expiring EAD forward automatically for up to 540 days while USCIS worked through the application.

Effective 30 October 2025, that stopped. Unless a law or a Federal Register notice says otherwise, filing Form I-765 on time no longer extends anything. Renewals filed before 30 October 2025 keep the automatic extension they already had.

For an employee on an H-4 EAD, the bridge is gone and the date printed on the card is the date. USCIS advises filing a renewal up to 180 days before expiration for exactly that reason. A renewal filed 30 days out will almost certainly leave a gap.

Current processing times sit on the USCIS case processing times tool, which is worth checking before you decide how early is early enough. Our guide to H-4 EAD processing time tracks what the wait has been running.

Everything about the L-1A visa in one placeWho qualifies, what the petition has to show, and what it means for the family who comes along.

Read the L-1A visa guide

Four events that end a dependent employee's work authorization

Each of these starts at the other employer, and none of them reaches your HR system on its own.

The spouse changes employer

A change of employer brings a new petition and a new validity period, and the dependent has to extend H-4 or L-2 status to match it. The existing work permit keeps the expiration date it was issued with, so an H-4 EAD can lapse while the extension is still pending. USCIS accepts Form I-765 filed alongside Form I-539, and decides the work permit only after it has adjudicated the underlying status.

The spouse is laid off

The regulation at 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2) covers workers in E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, O-1 and TN classification, along with their dependents. It gives them up to 60 consecutive days of authorized stay after employment ends, or the end of the authorized validity period if that comes sooner.

Those 60 days preserve the dependent's status, which is what an unexpired H-4 EAD or an annotated I-94 rests on. It is a short window and it runs once per validity period.

That cushion is under review right now. DHS published a proposed rule on 11 September 2026, docket USCIS-2026-0364, that would eliminate the discretionary 60-day grace period at 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2) for those classifications and their dependents. Comments close on 10 November 2026. It is a proposal, so the 60 days still apply today. The rulemaking is worth watching if your workforce leans on that window.

Our post on the H-1B 60-day grace period covers the mechanics.

The spouse changes to a different status

If the spouse moves to F-1, to another work classification, or becomes a permanent resident, the derivative status that supported your employee goes with it. A change that reads as good news on the other side of the household can put your employee out of work the same month.

The marriage ends

Derivative status depends on the relationship. The card in the employee's wallet may still show a future date, and that date stops meaning anything on the day the marriage does.

Renewing an H-4 EAD without paying for the same filings twice

This is the sequencing mistake that costs the most money and the most goodwill, and it comes up often enough to write into the process.

H-4 status and the H-4 EAD both expire with the H-1B principal's validity period. Renew the dependent side on its own, then watch the principal extend H-1B three months later, and the family files all over again to match the new dates. Two rounds of the same filings inside a year, with a second wait stacked on the first. Here is what each round costs.

Filing the dependents' I-539 and I-765 together with the principal's H-1B extension avoids the repeat. The dependent documents are then issued against the new validity period instead of one that is about to end. That takes coordination across two employers, which is the reason to ask the employee early rather than react to a card.

There is also no way to buy the time back. An H-4 extension and an H-4 work permit cannot be upgraded at any price, so the filing date is the only lever anyone has.

What HR can ask about a spouse's status, and what it can't see

The document the employee presented for Form I-9, and the date printed on it, is the whole of what your company gets to see. The spouse's case file sits with another employer and another attorney, and asking for it puts you in an awkward position for no gain. The good news is that the printed date is also the only thing that governs your obligation.

That makes the reasonable ask a narrow one.

1. At hire, ask what document the employee will present and when it expires. That is a standard Form I-9 question and it applies to every new hire.
2. Inside 180 days of expiration, ask the employee to confirm whether a renewal has been filed, and whether the principal's status is being extended at the same time.
3. Say it plainly. A job change, a layoff or a status change on the other side of the household is something you want to hear about early. A gap is far easier to prevent than to close.
4. Give them somewhere to take the question. At Tukki, the affected employee gets a direct line to the attorneys handling the case, so the answer comes from someone who can read the file.

What to track for employees on dependent status

Nine columns hold everything above. Keep them per employee rather than per case, and put a named person in the last one rather than a team.

1. Employee and employee ID, so the row joins to your HRIS.
2. Basis of work authorization: H-4 EAD, L-2S incident to status, or E-1S, E-2S or E-3S incident to status.
3. Document presented on Form I-9: Form I-766, or Form I-94 with its annotation.
4. Document expiration date, copied from the document itself rather than from an offer letter or an email.
5. Source of that date, meaning the card or the I-94, so anyone auditing the row can go back to it.
6. Earliest renewal filing date, which for an H-4 EAD is 180 days before expiration.
7. Renewal filed date and receipt number, blank until it is filed.
8. Form I-9 reverification due date, which is the document expiration date and not a day later.
9. Reminder owner, a named person.

Where this belongs is a written program rather than someone's personal calendar, and building a company immigration policy covers how to put it there. The Form I-9 side sits in our guide to I-9 compliance, and onboarding international employees covers what to capture on day one so the row exists before it matters.

When a dependent employee's work authorization has already lapsed

A date passed and nothing was filed. Two separate clocks are running now, and they have different answers.

The first is your obligation under Form I-9, and it is fixed. An employer has to reverify no later than the date employment authorization expires, and cannot keep employing someone who cannot show current authorization. That obligation holds for a sympathetic case, a pending filing and a ten-year employee alike.

The second is the employee's underlying status, which may well still be valid. A lapsed work permit and a lapsed status are different problems with different fixes, and which one you have decides whether this is a filing delay or a departure date.

Work them in this order.

1. Stop the work, keep the job. Unpaid leave, where your policy allows it, holds the position open while the company stays compliant.
2. Establish whether H-4 or L-2 status is still valid. An unexpired Form I-94 means you have a permit gap. An expired one means the family has a status problem that a work permit alone will not solve.
3. Get the filing in the same week. Every day of delay is another day of leave, and there is no premium processing available to shorten it.
4. Get the employee to an attorney that same week. The answer turns on facts inside the spouse's case, and those facts are not in your files.
5. Write the next expiration into the tracker before the employee returns, so the following renewal is a calendar entry rather than a repeat of this week.

Moving an employee from dependent status onto a petition you control

The structural fix, where the role supports it, is sponsoring the employee in their own right. An H-4 spouse doing specialty occupation work may qualify for H-1B on their own, which means a March cap registration and everything that follows it. A dependent spouse with the right record may fit another classification entirely, including O-1.

Either route turns a date you cannot see into a date you file. Both take lead time measured in months, and the H-1B route takes a lottery on top. This belongs in a quiet quarter rather than in the week a card expires.

Our guide to how to sponsor a foreign worker covers what the company takes on. E-Verify for employers covers the enrollment that several of these routes assume.

Building dependent status into your immigration program

Derivative status is the exposure that never appears on your own filing calendar. No petition of yours expires, no receipt notice arrives in your inbox, and the employee often has not heard that the rules changed under them either. Finding out late costs a working employee for months. Finding out early costs a column in a spreadsheet and one conversation a year.

Tukki gives HR one view of every work authorization date across the workforce, including the ones that come from someone else's petition. The renewal window and the reverification date are already calculated.

Immigration attorneys handle the filings and the judgment calls, including when to extend the dependents alongside the principal so the family files once. Sponsored employees and their families get a direct line to those attorneys, so the questions that need a case file behind them go to someone holding it.

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