The FBAR threshold, and the word that trips people up

Aggregate, and at any time

The threshold is $10,000. Two words in the rule do most of the damage when they are skipped.

The first is aggregate. The test is not applied per account. Five accounts holding $3,000 each are $15,000 in aggregate and the requirement is triggered, even though no single account is close to the threshold. People who bank in more than one country routinely believe they are under it because each individual balance is small.

The second is the timing. The test is the maximum value at any point during the year, not the balance on 31 December. A single transfer that moves through an account, a property deposit that sits for a week, a bonus that lands and is moved on: any of those can push the year's maximum over the line while the year-end balance sits comfortably below it. The account you emptied in March still counts.

What the source says

"person, including a citizen, resident, corporation, partnership, limited liability company, trust and estate, must file an FBAR to report: a financial interest in or signature or other authority over at least one financial account located outside the United States if the aggregate value of those foreign financial accounts exceeded $10,000 at any time during the calendar year reported."

That is 31 CFR 1010.350, aggregate value test, from Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR), read on 2026-09-06 and archived with a hash of the text.

What counts as a foreign financial account

The category is wider than a current account. Bank accounts, securities accounts, and certain other financial accounts held outside the United States fall inside it, and so can accounts you do not own but have signature authority over, which catches people who are treasurers of a club or signatories on an employer's account abroad.

This site holds the threshold as a rule and does not hold the full account-type definition, so this page does not enumerate it. That is deliberate. The definition is exactly the sort of thing that gets paraphrased into something subtly wrong, and a reader who needs the boundary needs the instructions rather than somebody's summary of them.

The FBAR is not a tax return, and that matters

The FBAR is filed with FinCEN, not with the IRS, and it reports accounts rather than income. You can owe no tax at all and still be required to file one. Excluding all your income under the foreign earned income exclusion does not remove the obligation, because the obligation never depended on tax being owed in the first place.

It is also separate from Form 8938, which is a tax form, has different thresholds, and applies to a wider category of assets. Many people abroad are required to file both, and the fact that the two use different numbers and different tests is the most common source of confusion in expatriate reporting.

Four situations, worked through

The threshold is one number, so the interesting question is never what it is but whether you are over it. These are the cases where people get that wrong.

• Several small accounts. Four accounts holding $3,000 each total $12,000, which is over the $10,000 threshold. No single balance is close to it. This is the commonest way somebody concludes wrongly that they need not file.
• A large transfer passing through. An account that peaked at $40,000 in March while a house purchase completed, and held $200 on 31 December, is over the threshold. The test is the maximum during the year, and the account you emptied still counts at its peak.
• An account you do not own. Signature authority over an employer's or a club's foreign account can bring it into scope even though the money is not yours. People who are treasurers of something abroad are caught by this regularly and never expect it.
• Owing no tax at all. Somebody whose entire income is excluded still files if their accounts exceed $10,000. The FBAR reports accounts, not income, and it goes to FinCEN rather than the IRS. Tax owed has never been part of the test.

The aggregate test, in a table

Because the test sums every account and takes the highest point in the year, whether you are over it is rarely obvious from any single balance. These combinations all describe somebody who is required to file, and none of them has an account anywhere near $10,000.

• The fourth row is the one people argue with. The test is the maximum value of each account during the year, summed, not the maximum of the sum on any single day. Two accounts that were never both full at the same moment still aggregate to their individual peaks.
• The fifth row is the only one under the line, and it is under by five hundred dollars on a single account. Any second account at all would put it over.

Why this page states so little, so precisely

The threshold is one number and it has not changed in a long time, which makes it an easy thing to state and a tempting thing to surround with confident detail. Most pages that rank for this term do exactly that, and the detail is where the errors live.

Every figure on this site is a rule with a source document, a locator, an archived quote and the date it was read. Where no rule exists, no figure is stated. That constraint makes this page shorter on assertions than its competitors and considerably more reliable on the ones it does make.

How to check a figure you found somewhere else

The reason this subject is unreliable online is not that writers are careless. It is that the figures change annually, they are published in documents nobody reads for pleasure, and a page that was right when it was written stays online long after it stops being right. A page with no date on the figure is not making a claim you can check.

Three questions settle almost every case. First, which tax year does this apply to, and is that the year the income was earned or the year the return is filed? Second, what document set it, and does the page name the section rather than the website? Third, when was it read, and does the page say?

Applied to the FBAR threshold, those three questions are answerable from this page: every figure names its tax year, its source document and section, and the date it was read, and the sentence it came from is archived with a hash so a change at source shows up rather than being absorbed silently.

That standard is not a courtesy. A calculator or a guide that quietly serves last year's figure produces an answer no reader can distinguish from the right one, which is worse than an obvious error and far harder to notice.

Where this sits alongside the calculators

Reporting obligations and tax liability are different questions and they are answered by different parts of this site. This page is about the FBAR threshold: a threshold or an amount set by a document, which either applies to you or does not.

The calculators answer the other question. They take a gross salary in one of the jurisdictions this site models and compute what is actually deducted from it, band by band, with each rate carrying the rule behind it. Every one of those jurisdictions has been checked against the average tax rates the OECD publishes for a single person at three different incomes, and any jurisdiction that missed by more than half a percentage point is not published at all.

Somebody working abroad usually needs both. The domestic calculation tells you what the country you live in takes. Pages like this one tell you what your home country still wants to know about. Neither substitutes for the other, and a page that blurs them is the reason so many people abroad discover a reporting obligation years late.

What this site does not do

It does not give advice, and it does not model your situation. Everything here assumes a single person on employment income with no dependants and no reliefs beyond those stated, because that is the only shape that can be computed identically across jurisdictions and compared honestly.

It does not model treaty relief, foreign tax credits, remittance rules, self-employment, or the interaction between two countries taxing the same income. Those are real and they change answers, and each of them requires facts about you that a page cannot know.

What it does do is state the underlying figures accurately, with their sources, and compute the domestic position in each jurisdiction it covers. That is the input every adviser asks for first, and it is the part most often wrong on the pages that rank above this one.