No single internal employment date should be treated as an automatic reset. The relevant immigration rule and actual service history govern.
Calculate from the applicable case facts
Have the chronology reviewed before selecting a filing or transfer date. Do not invent additional qualifying months to meet a business deadline. A new-office case also has its own initial one-year limit and role-support conditions.
Confirm the actual approval and status dates from the government notice, and preserve the originally submitted business plan alongside a record of how staffing, duties, and finances actually developed. Recapture is arithmetic: days genuinely spent outside the United States during the L period do not consume the seven years, so careful travel records can return real months to an executive who has been crossing the border regularly. If the strongest continuous twelve-month stretch occurred before the layoff, delaying the petition risks pushing that period outside the three-year lookback entirely, leaving only the post-rehire period available, and that period may not yet reach a full year. The condition is worth restating without hedging it away: the qualifying year must fall within the three years preceding the request, and time spent working in the United States for the same organization may affect how that window is counted.