A temporary assignment normally keeps you on home payroll and benefits with an agreed return, and often carries allowances that a transfer does not. A permanent transfer moves you onto local payroll, local benefits and local employment law, and there is usually no return right. The distinction decides pension continuity, notice protections and whether the old role still exists.
What actually differs
Payroll and benefits. Assignments generally keep you in the home scheme, which preserves pension and service continuity. Transfers move you to local terms, and local terms can be markedly better or worse.
Allowances. Housing, schooling, home leave and a cost-of-living uplift are common on assignments and rare on transfers, because a transfer treats the new place as simply where you live now.
Return rights. An assignment normally names a return date and sometimes a role. A transfer usually does not, and the old position is typically filled.
Employment law. A transfer puts you under the new jurisdiction’s rules on notice, termination and severance, which in some countries is a substantial upgrade and in others a substantial loss.
The trap in the middle
Assignments that quietly become permanent. Extended once, then again, until the return date is notional and the allowances are the only thing keeping the arrangement viable. Ask what happens at the end of each extension and get it written down each time.
What to establish for an assignment
The return date and what role you return to. Which allowances continue and for how long. What happens if the assignment is cut short. And whether your pension and service continuity are genuinely unbroken.
What to establish for a transfer
Whether accrued service is recognized, what the local notice and severance rules are, what happens to unvested equity granted under the old entity, and whether there is any right to return.
Which to prefer
An assignment is safer and usually better paid in the short term. A transfer commits you and is the honest structure when the move is genuinely permanent. The wrong one is an assignment that everyone privately expects to be permanent, because it leaves the protections vague on both sides.
Common questions
What is the main difference?
An assignment keeps you on home payroll with an agreed return. A transfer moves you to local payroll, local benefits and local employment law, usually with no return right.
Which pays better?
Assignments generally, in the short term, because housing, schooling and cost-of-living allowances are common on assignments and rare on transfers.
What happens to my service and pension?
An assignment normally preserves continuity in the home scheme. On a transfer, ask explicitly whether accrued service is recognized.
What is the risk with an assignment?
Repeated extensions until the return date is notional. Get the position at the end of each extension written down.
What should I check on a transfer?
Local notice and severance rules, recognition of accrued service, and what happens to unvested equity granted under the old entity.