Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, tax year by tax year
The foreign earned income exclusion is $132,900 for tax year 2026, $130,000 for 2025 and $126,500 for 2024, each read from the revenue procedure that set it. Which year applies to you is the year you earned the income, not the year you file.
For tax year 2026 the foreign earned income exclusion under IRC §911(b)(2)(D)(i) is $132,900. For tax year 2025 it is $130,000 and for 2024 it is $126,500.
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 2026 rule supersedes the 2025 one rather than replacing it. Both stay in the file, and the newer one names the older, so a figure printed last year can still be reconstructed exactly.
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.
The three amounts on this page differ by $6,400 across three years. Getting the year wrong is worth more than most reliefs.
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 06 September 2026. 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), from Rev. Proc. 2025-32, annual inflation adjustments, read on 06 September 2026. The sentence above is archived with a hash of its text as it stood that day, so a change at source shows up here rather than being absorbed silently.
The rule also carries a note from the ingest, which is worth reading because it is the sort of thing normally left where only a maintainer would see it: “Applies to the 2026 tax year, filed during 2027. Do not present this as "the 2027 figure": the filing season year and the tax year are different things and conflating them is the most common error on competing pages.”
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.
Foreign earned income
Wages, salary and professional fees for services performed abroad. The income has to be earned, and it has to be earned outside the United States.
Passive income
Interest, dividends, rents and capital gains are outside the exclusion entirely, however far from the United States the asset producing them sits.
Income earned inside the US
Regardless of where you live or who pays you. A remote worker spending part of the year in the United States has earned some income the exclusion cannot reach.
Self-employment tax
A separate charge from income tax. 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, each with the numbers rather than a description of the numbers.
Earning below the cap abroad
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
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.
Which tax year does this apply to?
And is that the year the income was earned or the year the return is filed? The two are different years and most pages do not say which they mean.
What document set it?
Does the page name the section, or does it name the website? A citation to a government home page is not a citation to anything a reader can check.
When was it read?
And does the page say? A figure with no read date is a figure whose staleness cannot be assessed, which is the same as an unsourced one.
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.
Questions about the exclusion
What is the foreign earned income exclusion for 2026?
$132,900 for tax year 2026, set by Rev. Proc. 2025-32 section 3.39, implementing IRC 911(b)(2)(D)(i). That return is filed during 2027.
What was the exclusion for tax year 2025?
$130,000. If you are filing during 2026 for income earned in 2025, this is your figure, not the 2026 one.
Is the exclusion per person or per couple?
It is per qualifying individual. Two spouses who each meet the tests on their own foreign earned income each have their own exclusion, and neither can use the unused part of the other. This page states the per-person amount.
Does the exclusion remove the need to file?
No. The exclusion is claimed on a return, so claiming it requires filing one. Excluding all of your income does not remove the filing obligation, and it does not remove separate reporting obligations such as the FBAR or Form 8938, which turn on account balances rather than on tax owed.
Where does this figure come from?
Directly from Rev. Proc. 2025-32, annual inflation adjustments, Rev. Proc. 2025-32 section 3.39, implementing IRC 911(b)(2)(D)(i), read on 2026-09-06, with the sentence archived and hashed. The IRS overview page for this topic has at times listed only older years, which is why the revenue procedure is the source of record here and the overview page is not.
What if my question is about the FBAR threshold or the Form 8938 thresholds instead?
Each has its own page here, built the same way from its own rules. If the question is what you owe on a salary rather than what you must report, the calculators are the other half of this site. And the exclusion amount carries its tax year on every figure, because the year a rule applies to is not the year you file it.
Related, and built the same way
These come up in the same conversation as the exclusion, and for the same reason: the obligations in this subject overlap, and meeting one of them says nothing about whether another applies.
The FBAR threshold, and the word that trips people up
The FBAR threshold is $10,000 in aggregate across all foreign financial accounts, tested at any point in the year rather than at year end. Both halves of that sentence catch people out.
Form 8938 thresholds, all ten of them
Form 8938 has ten thresholds, not one: filing status crossed with whether you live abroad crossed with whether the test is the last day of the year or any time during it. A single filer abroad reports at $200,000 on the last day; the same person living in the US reports at $50,000.
Ruleset sha256:fe993d9d072cbcac. This guide turns on 3 rules, all at ingested status. Method on methodology, full provenance on the source of record, every reading on the changelog, and anything we got wrong on corrections.
Written by Usain Olivard, who is not a qualified tax adviser. The most recent figure on this page was read from its source on 06 September 2026, which is the same date this page reports as its last modification.