We present results for the renormalization of gauge invariant nonlocal fermion operators which contain a Wilson line, to one loop level in lattice perturbation theory. Our calculations have been performed for Wilson/clover fermions and a wide class of Symanzik improved gluon actions. The extended nature of such ‘long-link’ operators results in a nontrivial renormalization, including contributions which diverge linearly as well as logarithmically with the lattice spacing, along with additional finite factors. We present nonperturbative prescriptions to extract the linearly divergent contributions.