FBAR and Form 8938 Threshold Checker

This is the question that sets your Form 8938 threshold, and it is stricter than simply living abroad. Both answers need a tax home in a foreign country. That usually means your main place of work is abroad, and if you have no regular place of business at all, which is common for freelancers who move around, it is instead where you regularly live. Either way it fails if your abode stays in the United States: someone posted overseas who keeps a home and family life back home generally does not have a foreign tax home even when the work plainly is abroad, which puts them on the lower thresholds. Days at sea and days in a US possession are not days in a foreign country. The bona fide residence route is open to US citizens only, so a green card holder generally has to meet the 330 day test instead. And those 330 days have to fall in a 12 month window that ends inside the year you are reporting, which is why moving overseas late in the year usually meets neither test for that year.

The higher joint thresholds are for married people living abroad, so both of you have to qualify. If only one does, this page applies the lower joint figures, which is the cautious reading and the one that does not risk telling you no form is due when one is.

Form 8938 turns on whether a return is required, not on whether one is filed. If none is required, no Form 8938 is required however large the assets, and filing voluntarily does not change that. Answer no only if nothing at all requires a return: low income is not enough on its own, because $400 of net self-employment earnings triggers a filing requirement by itself, and so does owing household employment tax. The FBAR is separate and this answer does not affect it.

Bank, brokerage, most foreign pensions and some insurance policies with a cash value. Take each account's own peak for the year and add those together. This is not the same as your highest balance on any single day: moving $8,000 between two accounts counts once in a one-day snapshot and twice here, and the second figure is the one that governs.

Broader than accounts in one direction and narrower in another. It adds foreign stock or securities you hold directly, interests in foreign entities and foreign partnership interests, and it excludes accounts where you hold only signature authority.

Same method as above, and for the same reason. Two holdings that each peak at $175,000 in different months aggregate to $350,000, not $175,000.

Holding these accounts in another currency? Both filings convert at the Treasury Reporting Rates of Exchange for the last day of the year, not the IRS yearly average used for income. Our exchange rate converter explains which rate belongs to which figure.