The accommodation was approved two years ago. Your manager said yes in an email thread, the arrangement worked, your reviews were strong, and nobody raised it again. Then a new vice president announces a four-day in-office policy, HR pulls your file and finds nothing about remote work, and the manager who approved it left the company last spring.

Remote-work accommodations tend to come apart here rather than at the request stage. The employee won the argument and never got a record of winning it. Rebuilding that record after a policy change is harder than building it during a quiet year, and the difference between those two positions is mostly paperwork.

An Approved Arrangement Is Not Always an Accommodation

There are two ways an employer can let you work from home, and they carry completely different obligations.

The first is managerial discretion. A supervisor decided your setup was fine and never routed it anywhere, so nothing in that arrangement binds the company, and the next supervisor can reverse it on a Monday without violating anything.

The second is a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. You disclosed a disability, described a functional limitation, requested remote work as the fix, and the employer engaged in the interactive process and granted it. That arrangement attaches to the employer rather than the person who signed off on it, and changing it means going back through the process that created it.

Many long-term remote workers with disabilities are in the first category and believe they are in the second. If you have never used the phrase "reasonable accommodation" in writing to someone in HR, you are probably one of them. The good news is that converting one into the other is a smaller task than starting from zero, because you are no longer arguing about whether the arrangement can work. You have years of performance data showing that it does.

What "Permanent" Means Here

The ADA does not create permanent accommodations, and no letter your employer signs will make one. A durable accommodation in practice has no scheduled end date and no automatic review, which is a meaningfully different thing from a guarantee.

An employer can revisit a granted accommodation if the essential functions of your job genuinely change, or if the accommodation later creates an undue hardship it did not create before. What an employer cannot do is unilaterally end one because a new policy or a new executive prefers something else. Withdrawing an accommodation reopens the interactive process, and skipping that step is how a routine policy rollout turns into a failure-to-accommodate claim. So the goal is a documented accommodation with no expiration date rather than permanence itself, which means any attempt to change it starts from your existing rights rather than from a blank page.

Converting the Arrangement Into a Record

Send a written request to HR, not to your manager alone. Managers change jobs, and HR files persist.

The request needs four things. Name the disability as a disability without necessarily naming the diagnosis. Describe the functional limitation it creates in an in-person setting, which is the part employers evaluate. State that you are requesting remote work as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA, using those words. Note that the arrangement has been in place since a specific date and ask that it be formally documented as an accommodation going forward.

That last sentence does a lot of work. You are not asking permission for something new, you are asking the company to record something it has already been doing, which clears internal approval faster than a fresh request and quietly establishes that remote work has never interfered with your essential functions.

If your employer disputes that remote work addresses your limitation, start with the underlying legal standard in your rights to remote work under the ADA. If you are still deciding how much to disclose and to whom, requesting accommodations without risking your job walks through the disclosure decision itself.

What the Written Confirmation Should Say

Ask HR to confirm the accommodation in writing, and read what comes back before you file it away. A useful confirmation identifies the accommodation as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA, gives an effective date, and states no end date. It should also describe how either party initiates a change, and name the office responsible for accommodations rather than an individual.

Watch for two things that weaken the document. Language calling the arrangement a "pilot," a "trial," or "subject to business needs" converts your accommodation back into managerial discretion with better vocabulary. A defined review date does the same thing more politely, since it schedules the fight instead of resolving it. If either appears, respond in writing asking that the accommodation be documented as ongoing, and cite your performance record over the period it has been in effect.

Annual Recertification Requests

Some employers ask disabled employees to resubmit medical documentation every year. An employer may request documentation when the need for accommodation is not apparent, and it may ask for updated information when circumstances change. Routine annual recertification for a condition that will not improve is a different thing, and for a stable, permanent condition it is usually unnecessary.

When the request arrives, a short written reply stating that the condition and the functional limitation are unchanged since your original documentation is often enough. If your employer insists, provide a brief letter from your provider confirming the condition is permanent and the limitation is ongoing, and ask that it stand for future years. Employees who negotiated a modified work schedule face the same recurring paperwork, and the approach transfers directly.

When the Return-to-Office Memo Lands

A company-wide attendance policy does not extinguish an individual accommodation. The ADA requires an individualized assessment, and a blanket rule is the opposite of one. If the memo goes out and yours is a documented accommodation, reply in writing, reference the accommodation by its effective date, and ask how the company intends to reconcile the new policy with it.

Most HR departments will resolve this without a dispute once the file is in front of them, because the file makes the legal exposure visible. If the accommodation is revoked without an interactive process, the withdrawal itself becomes the violation, and the clock on filing an EEOC charge runs 180 days from that adverse action, or 300 days in states with a fair employment agency. Note the date the accommodation ended, because that is the date everything else is measured from.

Staying Visible From Home

The legal position is only half the problem. Managers tend to weigh the work they see, and an employee who is never in the room can be overlooked at promotion time for reasons nobody would put in writing.

Ask your manager for performance criteria written in terms of outcomes rather than presence, and revisit them at each review cycle. Keep your own record of deliverables and dates, since a remote worker's contributions are easier to overlook and harder to reconstruct after the fact. When a project needs someone visible, volunteer for it. None of this is a legal requirement, and all of it is what keeps an accommodation from quietly becoming a career ceiling.

The strongest position you can hold is not a legal argument you have rehearsed. It is a folder: the dated request, the written confirmation, the performance reviews spanning the period you worked from home. Build it during a year when nothing is happening. When the next reorganization arrives and someone asks whether you have anything on file, you will be answering from a record instead of a memory.