Form 8938 thresholds, all ten of them

The whole table, in one place

Most pages on this subject quote one or two of these numbers and leave the reader to work out which one applies to them. The threshold is a cross of three conditions, so there are ten values and the difference between the largest and the smallest is substantial. Here they all are.

Why living abroad changes the number so much

A single filer living abroad reports at $200,000 on the last-day test. The same person living in the United States reports at $50,000. The abroad thresholds are far higher because holding assets where you live is ordinary rather than exceptional, and the reporting regime is aimed at concealment rather than at residence.

The consequence for somebody who moves during a year is that the threshold that applies to them is not obvious, and it is precisely the sort of question that a table quoting one number cannot answer.

The two measurement dates are not alternatives

Each row has two thresholds and you are over the requirement if you exceed either. The last-day test looks at the total value of your specified foreign financial assets on 31 December. The any-time test looks at the highest total at any point in the year.

Somebody who sold a foreign property in June and moved the proceeds before year end can be comfortably under the last-day threshold and far over the any-time one. Reading only the first column is the commonest way to conclude wrongly that no filing is needed.

Form 8938 is not the FBAR

They are different obligations with different thresholds, different scope and different destinations. Form 8938 goes with your tax return to the IRS and covers specified foreign financial assets, a broader category than accounts. The FBAR goes to FinCEN and covers foreign financial accounts, with a single aggregate threshold measured at any time in the year.

Many people abroad are required to file both, and filing one does not satisfy the other. Assets can appear on both forms, which feels like duplication and is not optional.

Three situations, worked through

Ten thresholds means the answer depends on facts about you, so here is what the cross looks like in practice.

• Single, living abroad, assets peaking mid-year. Assets that reached $350,000 in July and sat at $150,000 on 31 December are under the last-day threshold of $200,000 and over the any-time threshold of $300,000. Exceeding either is enough, so this person reports.
• Married filing jointly, living in the United States. The thresholds are $100,000 and $150,000, four times the figures that apply to somebody filing separately in the same country. Filing status changes the answer as much as residence does.
• Moving abroad during the year. The abroad thresholds are several times the domestic ones, and which set applies is a question about the year as a whole rather than about where you sleep in December. This is exactly the case a page quoting one number cannot answer, and it is common among the people most likely to be searching for it.

How these ten numbers are stored

Each threshold is a separate rule with its own scope: whether you live abroad, which filing statuses it applies to, and which measurement it belongs to. That means the calculation of which one applies to you is a lookup against those conditions rather than a paragraph of prose that a reader has to apply to themselves.

Storing it that way makes the cross explicit and makes an incomplete answer impossible: there is no single "the 8938 threshold" figure in the store to quote by accident. It is the most misstated fact in this niche and it is modelled as a scope rather than as text for exactly that reason.

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 Form 8938 thresholds, 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 Form 8938 thresholds: 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.