US Tax Residency from a Family-Based Green Card, Even If You Never Move

The green card starts residency, not relocation

Under the green card test, IRC §7701(b)(1)(A)(i), you are a US resident for federal tax purposes if you are a lawful permanent resident of the United States at any time during the calendar year. The IRS states it plainly: residency starts on the first day you are present in the United States as a lawful permanent resident. That day can arrive in two different ways: through adjustment of status, approved through a domestic process (typically including an interview) if you were already in the US on another visa, or through consular processing, where LPR status attaches at admission at the US port of entry on an immigrant visa, with the physical card arriving by mail afterward. Either way, nothing in the test asks whether you stayed, moved your life there, or ever came back.

That means someone can hold a green card, spend a matter of days in the United States for the process itself, and return home permanently the following week, and still be a full-scope US tax resident from that date forward:

• Worldwide income, not just US-source income.
• FBAR (FinCEN Form 114) once foreign accounts aggregate over $10,000 at any point in the year.
• Form 8938 above its own thresholds.
• A US return due every year, regardless of where the income was earned or where the person lives.

Why people acquire status without relocating

The most common paths into this position are not the ones "expat" content usually addresses:

• Marriage-based immigration. A foreign national married to a US citizen becomes eligible for a green card, and in many cases for naturalization after three years under the reduced spousal residency requirement (INA §319(a): three years of continuous residence and at least 18 months of physical presence within them), rather than the standard five-year path, which requires 30 months of physical presence. Roughly a quarter of a million to a third of a million people a year have become permanent residents this way for most of the past decade, a figure that dipped sharply during 2020-2021 consulate closures and pandemic processing backlogs before recovering, according to DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics annual flow data. That requirement governs the path to citizenship itself; it is a separate question from whether a citizen, once naturalized, is required to keep living in the US, which they are not. Note this is a tax discussion, not immigration advice: a green card holder who leaves the US for good, before naturalizing, risks the status being deemed abandoned for immigration purposes even while it continues to create US tax residency until that abandonment is formal.
• A child's future access. A parent pursues their own US status, sometimes so they can accompany or support a child who already has a claim to US citizenship or education there, and sometimes because the parent's own status is what will later let them petition for a child who does not yet have any US claim. Either way, the parent's status is acquired for the child's future, not for the parent's own relocation.
• Family reunification that stalls or reverses. Plans to move change. A green card obtained with a genuine intent to relocate can outlive that intent, and the tax residency it created does not expire when the plan does; it ends only through specific mechanisms (a formal determination of abandonment, certain treaty positions, or formal relinquishment on Form I-407), not through simply not going, and not through an informal, undocumented sense that the plan is off.

Why this population does not think of itself as "expat"

An expat, in the ordinary sense, is someone who built a life in the United States and moved away from it. You may be different: you may never have had a US-based life to leave. You acquired a US legal status for reasons connected to a spouse or a child, kept living where you already lived, and may not think of the United States as a place you have any connection to beyond a document. That does not change what the IRS asks of you. Citizenship-based and residency-based taxation in the United States is not conditioned on identity or intent, only on status.

You are also different from an accidental American in the strict sense: an accidental American acquired citizenship passively, at birth, without ever choosing it. You chose the process, usually for someone else's benefit rather than your own relocation. The tax result, unexpected worldwide filing obligations discovered years later, tends to look the same either way.

Catching up if this was never on your radar

The Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures exist for exactly this kind of non-willful gap: someone who did not know, not someone who chose not to comply. Which track applies turns on a non-residency test, not on citizenship or immigration status. US citizens and lawful permanent residents must have had no US abode and must have been physically present outside the United States for at least 330 full days in at least one of the three most recently covered years to use the Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures, which carry a 0% offshore penalty; the domestic track carries a 5% miscellaneous offshore penalty and different eligibility. Someone who kept living in their home country after receiving a green card is often positioned for the foreign track, but the test is applied on the facts of the specific years involved, not assumed from the general story.

Worked example: Korea

The mechanics above play out with an added layer for Korean nationals specifically. Someone on this path who eventually naturalizes as a US citizen, rather than stopping at the green card, runs into Korean nationality law too: Korea generally does not allow this population to keep both statuses indefinitely once naturalization happens. A full breakdown of the Korean-nationality side of this, and what actually happens if the paperwork is never filed, is covered separately.

Common questions

Next step

Send the date the green card or citizenship was issued and roughly what accounts or property exist in the country you actually live in. A preparer at Capital Tax Limited can tell you what years are actually open, what the real exposure looks like, and whether the foreign or domestic Streamlined track fits, before anything is filed.

Get your situation reviewed Korea: citizenship and taxes