Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, tax year by tax year

The amount, for every tax year we hold

The exclusion is set each year by a revenue procedure, indexed for inflation. Below is every year this site has read directly from the source document, with the section that set it. Nothing here is remembered or copied from another page: each figure carries the exact sentence it came from, archived on the day it was read.

The mistake almost every ranking page makes

Search for this figure and you will find pages calling $130,000 "the 2026 figure". It is not. It is the figure for tax year 2025, which is filed during 2026. The tax year and the filing season are different years, and a page that conflates them will tell somebody preparing a return that they may exclude the wrong amount.

This is not a pedantic distinction. If you are filing in 2026 for the 2025 tax year, your exclusion is $130,000, not the $132,900 that applies to income earned in 2026. The difference is $2,900 of income, and the error runs in the direction that gets people into trouble.

That is why every rule on this site carries its tax year as a first-class field and every rule id ends in the year it applies to. It makes the confusion structurally impossible rather than merely discouraged, and it is the single reason this page exists in the shape it does.

What the source actually says

The quote below is the sentence the 2026 figure was read from, stored with a hash of the text as it stood on 2026-09-06. If the document changes, the hash stops matching and the change is surfaced rather than absorbed.

"39 Foreign Earned Income Exclusion. For taxable years beginning in 2026, the foreign earned income exclusion amount under § 911(b)(2)(D)(i) is $132,900."

That is Rev. Proc. 2025-32 section 3.39, implementing IRC 911(b)(2)(D)(i), in Rev. Proc. 2025-32, annual inflation adjustments.

What the exclusion does, and what it does not do

The exclusion removes a capped amount of foreign earned income from US federal income tax. It applies to earned income: wages, salary and professional fees for services performed abroad. It does not apply to passive income, and it does not apply to income earned inside the United States regardless of where you live or who pays you.

It is also not automatic. It is claimed on a return, and claiming it requires meeting one of two tests about your presence abroad. Those tests turn on day counts and on the nature of your residence, and this site has not ingested the statutory day count as a rule, so this page does not state it. A page that quotes a day count from memory is doing the thing that makes this entire subject unreliable, and the honest move is to send you to the instructions rather than to guess in your direction.

Self-employment tax is a separate matter from income tax and the exclusion does not touch it. Excluding income from income tax does not exclude it from the self-employment charge, which surprises people every year.

Three situations, worked through

Figures alone rarely answer the question a reader actually has, which is usually "does this apply to me". These are the three shapes that question takes most often.

• Earning below the cap abroad. Somebody with $79,740 of foreign earned income in tax year 2026 is below the $132,900 exclusion. Meeting one of the presence tests and claiming it on a return can remove that income from US federal income tax entirely, while leaving every reporting obligation untouched: the return is still filed, and account reporting still turns on balances rather than on tax owed.
• Earning above the cap. Somebody with $199,350 in 2026 excludes at most $132,900 and the remaining $66,450 stays in scope. The part that stays is not taxed as though it were the only income: excluded income still counts when working out the rate that applies to what is left, which is why the exclusion is worth less at high income than subtracting it from the total would suggest.
• Filing late for an earlier year. Somebody catching up on tax year 2024 uses $126,500, not the current figure. Every year has its own amount and using the wrong one is the error this page exists to prevent. The three amounts on this page differ by $6,400 across three years.

How the exclusion interacts with the tax you would otherwise pay

Excluded income still counts when working out the rate that applies to the income you do not exclude. In practice that means the exclusion does not simply move you down the ladder as if the excluded income never existed, and somebody with income well above the cap should not assume the remainder is taxed at the bottom rates.

Where you are also paying tax in the country you live in, the exclusion is one of two routes and the foreign tax credit is the other. Which one leaves you better off depends on the rate you face abroad compared with the rate you would face at home. The comparison is arithmetic rather than opinion, and it changes with your income, so it is worth doing rather than assuming.

This site does not model either route. What it gives you is the underlying figures, sourced and dated, and the domestic calculation in each of the jurisdictions it covers, which is the input any adviser will ask for first.

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 foreign earned income exclusion, 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 foreign earned income exclusion: 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.