The arrangement must be genuine and the spouse must have appropriate work permission.
Keep the staffing evidence accurate
Qualifying L spouses may work incident to appropriate status with required evidence. Pending plans or a paper role do not establish actual support.
The spouse's position is comparatively clear: once in L-2 status, employment is permitted without a separate application for authorization, although the spouse should carry the documentation that evidences that status and should confirm what a particular employer will accept. Build a dated review file around each family member's status record, relationship proof, age, education plan, and any separate employment arrangement. The spouse may therefore take a job, contract or run a business without first obtaining a separate employment authorization document, though some spouses still request one for convenience. Dependent children in L-2 status may attend school; they do not receive the same employment authorisation as the spouse, and a child who turns twenty-one during the stay leaves dependent status and needs a route of their own. Where a spouse has professional qualifications, it is still worth asking whether an independent route would give the household more security than a derivative status that ends when the principal's does. Spousal employment authorization is documented, and that documentation has its own issuance timeline; a spouse counting on income from a fixed date should know when the underlying evidence can realistically exist.