Do I need to file an FBAR if each account is small?
The test is not applied account by account. It looks at the aggregate value of all your foreign financial accounts together, each taken at its highest point during the year, so several modest accounts can cross a line that none of them crosses alone. For the 2025 calendar year the aggregate threshold is US$10,000, and it is tested at any time during the year rather than at the year end. Adding up December balances is a common way to conclude, wrongly, that there is nothing to file.
Which balance do I report, the year-end one or the highest?
The highest the account reached at any point in the year. That produces a result which looks wrong the first time people see it: move money from one foreign account to another and both accounts report a peak that includes the same funds, so the total reported can exceed anything you ever actually held. Nothing has been double counted in any meaningful sense, because the report describes accounts rather than wealth. If your bank's statement history does not reach back far enough, ask for statements covering the whole year before you start.
Is the FBAR filed with my tax return?
No. It goes to the US financial-crimes bureau rather than to the revenue, and it is not attached to the return. Two things follow from that. Filing or extending your return does nothing about the report, and a preparer who handles only the return may never have asked you the questions the report turns on. Treat them as two separate filings for the same year, with two separate records of what was filed and when. The income from the accounts still belongs on the return, and that is a different exercise again.
Do I report an account I can sign on but do not own?
Usually yes. Ownership and authority are tested separately, and an account you are able to direct without owning the money in it can be within the report's scope. Employees who are signatories on an employer's foreign bank accounts, and family members added to a parent's account for convenience, both tend to discover this late. What matters is what you can do with the account, not what you have taken out of it. Where your connection is authority rather than ownership, the report can say so, and disclosing the relationship is better than leaving the account out.
I have never filed an FBAR, what should I do first?
Establish the years and the figures before deciding anything else. That means listing every foreign account you held or could direct, year by year, and obtaining statements far enough back to find each account's highest point. Older accounts, closed accounts, and accounts opened long before you had any US connection are the ones usually missing from a first list. Only when the picture is complete is it sensible to choose how the late years are brought in, because the route depends on which years are open and on what the returns for them reported.
Does a joint account with my spouse get reported twice?
Each person with a reportable interest reports the account, so one joint account can appear on two reports, and each person's aggregate test is run on their own set of accounts and authorities. Where only one spouse has a US filing obligation, the account still goes on that spouse's report if their interest brings it into scope. The trap is assuming that one report automatically covers both sides of a household. Work out each person's own list of accounts first, then decide how many reports the family actually has to file.
How do I report a foreign pension on a US return?
As pension income, gross, with foreign tax available as a credit. Two extra layers catch people out. A treaty position on the pension may need to be taken and disclosed in its own right. And the plan itself can be a reportable foreign financial asset, sometimes with a further reporting regime if it is treated as a foreign trust — obligations keyed to holding the plan, not to drawing from it. Which layers apply depends on the country and the plan type. See the pensions and annuities article.
What is cross-border tax?
Cross-border tax is what applies when income, assets or people touch more than one tax system at once — someone living in one country and earning in another, a company selling or hiring abroad, a family holding property in a second country. The work is rarely one country's rules applied harder; it is reconciling two sets of rules and claiming the relief that stops the same income being taxed twice at full rates. See what we do.
