Amazon is offering flexibility to the employees stuck in India due to the backlog in H-1B visas. Extending support to the employees, Amazon broke its 5-day office mandate to allow some employees to work from India until March 02, 2026, provided they were already in the country as of December 13, 2025, and are still awaiting US visa appointments.
This temporary policy was announced through an internal memo shared on Amazon’s HR portal. According to a handful of employees whose return to the US has been delayed by prolonged consular backlogs.
According to a Business Insider report, this permission comes with the following list of constraints:
- Do not code. This includes troubleshooting, testing, or documentation.
- Do not work from or visit an Amazon building or site. All work must be remote from a residential address or other non-Amazon location.
- Do not give the impression of authority to bind any Amazon entity or appoint an agent authorised to bind any Amazon entity to any contract or agreement.
- Do not undertake any strategic business decisions, business planning, product management/development, and/or business development type activities.
- Do not negotiate any contracts, sign/execute or otherwise conclude any contracts, or secure any orders, either in the approval tools and/or DocuSign (or via any other method).
- Do not render any services to any customer (resident or otherwise) or to any Amazon entity in the country where the employee is remotely working, or otherwise perform any activity that directly benefits an Amazon entity in the country where remote working is taking place.
- Do not perform any activity relating to directing, controlling, supervising or facilitating the day-to-day operations of any Amazon local entity or employee of an Amazon local team in the country where the employee is working remotely.
- Do not make hiring decisions for any Amazon entities in India.
- Do not perform any activity related to managing any customer/partner/vendor relationship, such as discussing specific contract terms, pricing negotiations, placing orders, accepting orders, or soliciting sales.
- All employment-related matters should continue to be decided by the respective legal employing entity, i.e. the Amazon U.S. entity.
- All reviews, final decision-making, and sign-offs should be undertaken outside India.
- AWS employees are expected to adhere to the AWS Operating Guidance whilst working remotely, the same way they would follow the guidance during normal times.
“We continue to monitor developments closely and will provide further updates as more information becomes available,” the memo further read
The report quoted an engineer saying, “Seventy to eighty percent of my job is coding, testing, deploying, and documenting.”
However, Amazon denied any comment on this.
Rather than placing staff on extended unpaid leave, Amazon has opted for a tightly controlled work-from-India arrangement. Under its standard policy, the company permits overseas remote work for no more than 20 business days.
