Continuos residence - 3 months in - 4 months out

[octopus]

What do you need to keep your continuous residence? Is the rule only not to stay out for 6+ months?

Lets say I follow pattern like this:
3months in the U.S. then 4.5 months outside. Doing this all over again, am I keeping my continuous residence for naturalization purposes?

If this is true, then I should be OK with getting U.S. citizenship after 4 years and 1 day or after I collect 30 months of physical presence. Despite spending majority time of a year outside the U.S.

 

[Jackolantern]

What do you need to keep your continuous residence? Is the rule only not to stay out for 6+ months?

Lets say I follow pattern like this:
3months in the U.S. then 4.5 months outside. Doing this all over again, am I keeping my continuous residence for naturalization purposes?

The 6 month rule is not absolute. You can be denied for breaking continuous residence even if no individual trip is over 6 months, and you can be approved even if you have a trip or two of over 6 months.

It depends on the totality of your circumstances. How long did you or will you have that travel pattern? Did you or will you work outside the US for a non-US employer? While away for those 4.5 months stretches, are you keeping a house or apartment in the US? Is your spouse and children (if any) staying in the US while you are abroad?

Also don't forget the physical presence requirement. You have to spend a total of at least 30 months (913 days, to be exact) inside the US within the past 5 years. If you keep traveling with 3 months in 4.5 months out for the entire 5 years, you would accumulate less than 30 months inside the US.

 

[octopus]

1) Say, if I at the point of the 5th year have only 28 months of physical presence. Then I can simply wait 2 more months and apply then no?


2) How long one has to stay for the first trip in the U.S. in order to start counting? As far as I am looking at my records, I stayed 1.5 month for the very first time. Then was 2 months off. After I stayed 6 months before any other "vacation".
Do the clocks start from the first trip or from the second one?

Anywas, thank you very much Jackolantern for answering my questions!

 

[Jackolantern]

1) Say, if I at the point of the 5th year have only 28 months of physical presence. Then I can simply wait 2 more months and apply then no?

Not necessarily. The 5 years is a sliding window. If you wait 2 more months in the US, you would add those 2 months of presence, but the start of the 5-year window would slide forward by 2 months, making you lose whatever days of presence you had just over 5 years ago. As a result, waiting 2 months could result in zero or very little net gain. Some people find themselves having to wait over a year just to gain a month.

But yes, if you fall short of the physical presence requirement, you just have to wait long enough to accumulate the 913 days, whether that is 2 extra months or 20 extra months.

2) How long one has to stay for the first trip in the U.S. in order to start counting?

It depends on how long the second trip is. A 2 month stay inside the US followed by a 7 month trip outside is likely to result in the count starting from the end of the 7 month trip. But a 1 month stay in the US followed by a 1 week trip overseas followed by a 4 months stay in the US is almost surely going to result in the count starting from the beginning of that initial 1 month stay.

But again, remember they only look back 5 years, so the count will never start more than 5 years before your application submission date.

Ultimately, continuous residence is a subjective decision at the discretion of the interviewer (and his/her supervisor), so there is no exact formula* for determining whether you break continuous residence or not. At the end of the day, what they try to do is look at your travel pattern and ties to the US and determine the answer to the question "has the US been your primary residence for the past 5 years?"


*other than obvious extremes like never leaving the US at all, or spending over 12 consecutive months outside the US without N-470