Work permits and employment authorization

An Employment Authorization Document, or EAD, lets a non-citizen work lawfully in the United States. It comes from some underlying category that makes you eligible, and it does not give you immigration status.

Who may be eligible

Categories include people with pending adjustment of status applications, asylum applicants after a required waiting period, people granted asylum or withholding, certain students, spouses of some visa holders, U visa and VAWA petitioners, DACA recipients, and others.

Which category applies determines everything: whether you can file at all, what the timing is, and whether the permit can be renewed.

Renewals and gaps

The main practical risk is a gap. If a permit expires before the renewal is approved, work authorization stops, and employers are required to act on that.

Rules on how early you can file and whether any automatic extension applies have changed several times and vary by category. Rather than publish a number here that may be wrong by the time you read it, ask us. We check the current rule for your specific category.

A note for employers

Employers who verify work authorization face real penalties for getting it wrong in either direction. Firing someone because of their immigration status or national origin is itself unlawful. If you are an employer with questions about reverification, we can help.