For decades, international assignments followed a predictable pattern: companies identified high-potential employees, sent them abroad for two to five years to lead offices or develop capabilities, and repatriated them to senior roles at headquarters. These traditional long-term assignments came with generous expatriate packages including housing allowances, cost-of-living adjustments, education support for children, and home leave travel.

But a quiet revolution has been underway in global mobility. Companies are increasingly replacing long-term expatriation with short-term rotations of 90 days to one year. This shift reflects changing business needs, evolving employee preferences, and the economic reality that traditional expatriate packages have become prohibitively expensive for all but the most critical roles.

Why Short-Term Assignments Are Rising

Business agility demands faster deployment than traditional assignments allow. When a product launch in Brazil needs specialized expertise from Germany, waiting six months for a traditional assignment setup isn’t acceptable. A 90-day rotation can deploy that expertise within weeks, address the immediate business need, and return the employee to their permanent role without major life disruption.

Project-based work has become more common in many industries. Rather than permanent office operations requiring ongoing leadership, companies have specific projects with defined timelines—implementing a new system, training local teams on new processes, supporting a client through a critical period. These projects require intensive on-site presence but only for months, not years.

Cost management drives many companies toward shorter assignments. A traditional expatriate package for a family of four easily costs $500,000 to $750,000 annually when you include tax equalization, housing, education, and various allowances. A 90-day business travel arrangement might cost $30,000 to $50,000. Even accounting for multiple rotations, the cost savings are substantial.

Employee preferences have shifted as well. Many talented employees are willing to travel extensively for work but unwilling to uproot their families for multi-year relocations. The dual-career couple with strong community roots might decline a three-year assignment to Singapore but gladly spend three months there if the family can remain at home. Short-term assignments allow companies to tap into talent that’s unavailable for traditional expatriation.

Remote work capabilities enable new models that weren’t previously feasible. An employee can spend three months in-market establishing relationships and understanding local context, then continue supporting that market remotely with periodic return visits. This hybrid approach delivers many benefits of local presence without requiring full relocation.

The Compliance Challenge

Despite their advantages, short-term assignments create significant compliance complexity that many companies underestimate. The tax, immigration, and social security implications of moving employees across borders for 90 days are often more complicated than traditional long-term assignments, not less.

Immigration authorities don’t automatically treat short-term assignments as simple business travel. Many countries require work permits even for 30-day assignments depending on the activities performed. The assumption that anything under 90 or 183 days is automatically permissible is dangerously wrong. Each jurisdiction has specific rules about what constitutes permissible business visitor activity versus work requiring authorization.

Tax compliance becomes particularly tricky. While employees might not establish tax residency in 90 days, they often trigger withholding obligations, filing requirements, or social security contributions. The company must track days across multiple jurisdictions for each employee, ensure proper withholding where required, and file necessary returns. Many companies lack systems to track this automatically and risk compliance violations simply through administrative oversight.

Social security rules vary by country and bilateral agreement. Some jurisdictions require contributions from day one. Others exempt short assignments. Totalization agreements between countries create specific rules, but not all countries have agreements with each other. Getting social security wrong can mean paying twice or leaving employees with coverage gaps affecting long-term benefits.

The cumulative effect across multiple short assignments can also trigger obligations. An employee who makes four 30-day trips to Germany across a year has been present for 120 days, potentially triggering tax residency or other obligations even though no single trip exceeded common thresholds. Companies must track cumulative exposure, not just individual trip duration.

Managing Short-Term Assignments Effectively

Success with short-term assignments requires rethinking traditional mobility processes designed for long-term expatriation.

Clear policy definition matters more than ever. What constitutes a short-term assignment versus business travel in your company? What support do short-term assignees receive? How does compensation work—do they remain on home payroll, receive allowances, or operate under different terms? Without clear policies, managers and employees negotiate one-off arrangements that create administrative chaos and compliance risk.

Pre-assignment assessment should evaluate every short-term assignment for immigration, tax, and social security implications before the employee departs. This requires systems that can quickly assess requirements based on destination, duration, and activities. Waiting until the employee is in-country to address compliance creates unnecessary risk.

Automated tracking becomes essential when managing dozens or hundreds of short-term assignments simultaneously. Manual spreadsheet tracking doesn’t scale and misses cumulative exposure across multiple trips. Platforms that automatically capture travel, track days by jurisdiction, apply country-specific rules, and alert when thresholds approach are no longer nice to have—they’re necessary for compliance.

Vendor coordination must be efficient and cost-effective. The same immigration attorneys and tax advisors who serve long-term assignments often don’t work well for short-term cases. Their processes assume longer timelines and their fees may not make economic sense for brief assignments. Companies need vendors who can deliver fast turnaround at appropriate price points for short-term scenarios.

Employee experience requires attention even for brief assignments. The employee spending 90 days away from family needs clear logistical support—temporary housing, transportation, expense management, communication tools. The assumption that short-term assignees can figure everything out themselves leads to frustrated employees and reduced effectiveness.

Technology Enablement

Modern mobility platforms make short-term assignment management feasible at scale. xpath.global addresses the specific challenges of short-term assignments through features designed for this use case.

Tax calendars automatically track days in each jurisdiction and alert when approaching thresholds that trigger obligations. Rather than relying on employees to report travel or mobility teams to manually track presence, the system maintains accurate records that support both compliance and strategic decision-making.

Workflow automation routes short-term assignments through appropriate approval processes based on duration, destination, and activities. Business travel to London for meetings routes differently than a 60-day project assignment to London involving client work. The system applies correct policies and triggers necessary compliance reviews without manual intervention.

Vendor marketplaces provide access to service providers suited for short-term assignments—immigration firms that can deliver visa support on compressed timelines, temporary housing providers with flexible options, tax advisors who efficiently handle short-term cases. Rather than adapting long-term vendors to short-term needs, companies access specialists in this space.

Cost projection tools model the total cost of short-term assignments including travel, housing, immigration, tax compliance, and administrative overhead. This enables informed decisions about whether short-term assignments make sense relative to alternatives like local hiring, remote support, or traditional long-term assignments.

Employee portals provide short-term assignees with the information and support they need—location guides, housing options, expense submission, tax documentation, and direct connection to support teams. The experience might not require the comprehensive support of multi-year expatriation, but it shouldn’t feel like an afterthought either.

Strategic Implications

The rise of short-term assignments reflects a fundamental shift in how companies think about global work. Rather than binary choices between sending expensive expatriates or relying entirely on local talent, companies now have a spectrum of options ranging from purely remote work to business travel to short-term rotations to traditional long-term assignments.

This flexibility enables more agile talent deployment, but it also creates complexity. Companies must decide which work truly requires in-market presence versus what can be done remotely. They must determine optimal rotation duration—long enough to be effective but short enough to control cost and limit employee disruption. They must develop policies, processes, and systems that accommodate diverse assignment types rather than forcing everything into a one-size-fits-all approach.

The companies that succeed in this new environment treat short-term assignments as a strategic capability rather than an administrative burden. They invest in the technology, processes, and vendor relationships required to manage short-term assignments compliantly and efficiently. They view the flexibility of short-term rotations as competitive advantage in deploying talent quickly to address business needs.

Those that continue operating with systems designed for traditional expatriation struggle. Their processes are too slow, their costs too high, their compliance too inconsistent. They lose the business benefits of short-term assignments while accepting the risks.

Conclusion

Short-term assignments represent the future of global mobility for many companies. They offer business agility, cost efficiency, and access to talent that won’t commit to long-term relocation. But they succeed only when companies build the compliance, operational, and technological infrastructure to support them.

The shift from traditional expatriation to short-term rotations isn’t simply about duration—it’s about fundamentally rethinking global work. Companies making this shift successfully unlock new possibilities for global talent deployment and competitive advantage in international markets.