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I am about to start working remotely for a U.S. company while residing in Spain, my home country within the EU. I anticipate needing to travel to the U.S. 3-4 times a year for conferences or training sessions, with each visit lasting no more than a week.

Should I use a business-related (B-1) visitor visa or the ESTA for these trips, or is there another type of visa I should consider applying for?

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    B-1 and ESTA are equivalent in terms of what you can do. But what is going to be your relationship exactly? I suppose you will be invoicing them rather than be salaried? Or do they have a branch in Spain or are they using an umbrella company? For training, your are going to be trained rather than training others, right?
    – jcaron
    Commented Oct 2 at 19:31

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The important point is that you are not going there to work (which you are not allowed to do on a B-1 or ESTA), but do to business:

  • Meet your client (as you are probably going to be a contractor and not a salaried employee, the company is your customer, not your employer)
  • Meet colleagues (if you are an employee of a local branch of the company)
  • Go to conferences
  • Receive training

As long as you stick to that, an ESTA is the simplest way to go. A B-1 visa is unnecessary and does not provide anything more (unless you plan to stay more than 3 months at a time, which would probably not quite match the stated purpose of the visit, or you had previous issues in the US).

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    Is there a good rule of thumb on what differentiates “work” and “business”? I see that you’ve got a list of allowed things, but am curious if there’s somewhere to see a more thorough definition of what the distinction is.
    – fyrepenguin
    Commented Oct 3 at 4:03
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    @fyrepenguin Not a lawyer, but I think "work" in a visa context usually is defined by who pays your salary. Basically, if I am employed by a European entity and I go to the US to talk to clients or colleagues I am "doing business", if I go to the US to do a three-months paid internship at Google I am "working in the US".
    – xLeitix
    Commented Oct 3 at 7:14
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    This all assumes that it's basically impossible for the US company that JoP works for to be the legal employer. This accords with everything I've heard: a US company isn't equipped to legally employ anyone in Spain for regulatory and tax reasons. I'd expect JoP to either be a contractor, or to be employed by an EU subsidiary of the US company. But I don't know if this rule of thumb is strict. If JoP somehow is employed by the US company then there's lots of admin to keep straight in both countries, and visiting the US perhaps then would be "work"?
    – Steve Jessop
    Commented Oct 3 at 12:54
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    @SteveJessop: I don't think it's impossible for the US company to be the direct employer, but I suspect that JoP would then be considered to be "doing work in the US" even when working from Spain, and need long-term employment authorization. If that's the case, then the same authorization would cover him while visiting inside the US physically... but also explains why a company would virtually never choose this path. US company directly employing an EU resident is surely more common when the employee originally worked in the US and moved to the EU during employment.
    – Ben Voigt
    Commented Oct 3 at 15:10

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