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.
Form 8938 thresholds depend on three things at once: your filing status, whether you live abroad, and whether the value is measured on the last day of the year or at any point in it. A single filer living abroad reports at $200,000 on the last day of the year or $300,000 at any time during it.
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.
| Where you live | Filing status | On the last day of the year | At any time during the year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Living abroad | Single, married filing separately, head of household | $200,000 | $300,000 |
| Living abroad | Married filing jointly | $400,000 | $600,000 |
| Living in the US | Single, head of household | $50,000 | $75,000 |
| Living in the US | Married filing separately | $50,000 | $75,000 |
| Living in the US | Married filing jointly | $100,000 | $150,000 |
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.
Those two are the single filer abroad. Every row of the table has its own pair, and the pair is not a choice.
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, each with the numbers rather than a description of the numbers.
Single, living abroad, assets peaking mid-year
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
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.
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 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.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
Every figure above is a rule in a store, carrying the document it came from, the section that set it, the date it was read and an archived copy of the sentence. Where this site holds no rule for a fact, the fact is not stated. Here is the whole set, so the page can be checked rather than believed.
Questions about the Form 8938 thresholds
What is the Form 8938 threshold if I live abroad?
For a single filer, married filing separately or head of household living abroad: $200,000 on the last day of the year, or $300,000 at any time during it. Married filing jointly abroad: $400,000 and $600,000.
What is the threshold if I live in the United States?
Single or head of household: $50,000 on the last day, $75,000 at any time. Married filing jointly: $100,000 and $150,000.
Do I have to meet both tests to file?
No. Exceeding either one is enough. The last-day test and the any-time test are alternatives, and being under one while over the other still means you report.
Is Form 8938 the same as the FBAR?
No. Different thresholds, different scope, different agency. Form 8938 accompanies your tax return and covers specified foreign financial assets; the FBAR goes to FinCEN and covers foreign financial accounts. Filing one does not satisfy the other and many people abroad file both.
Why do so many pages give only one 8938 number?
Because summarising a three-way cross as a single figure is much easier to write. There are ten thresholds. Any page presenting one of them as the threshold is wrong for at least eight of the ten situations a reader could be in.
What if my question is about the FBAR threshold or the foreign earned income exclusion 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 a Form 8938 threshold 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 Form 8938 thresholds, 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.
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.
Ruleset sha256:fe993d9d072cbcac. This guide turns on 10 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.