FBAR vs Form 8938: Which One You File, and on What

Your account abroad is reportable. The apartment above it is not. The two reports are less alike than they sound.

By the Namup team, Updated September 2026

Two reports, two thresholds. If your foreign accounts together passed $10,000 at any point in the year, you file the FBAR, with the Treasury, not with your return. Above $50,000 of foreign financial assets at year end, living in the US, you also file Form 8938. A property held in your own name goes on neither. Reporting is not taxing.

You are a US citizen or a green-card holder, and part of your money sits in the country you or your parents came from. Maybe a current account someone opened for you there. Maybe savings holding the price of a plot. Maybe an apartment that pays for itself in rent. Somewhere behind all of it sits a question you have never quite dared to look up: does Washington need to know?

The answer is yes for some of it and no for the rest, and the line between them is not where most people put it. Nothing below depends on which country you are talking about. The two reports treat an account in Casablanca, Beirut, Cairo, Dubai or Tunis exactly alike. Only the last section changes with the country, and it changes in a way almost nobody tells you.

Two reports, and they are not the same report

The first is the FBAR, the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, filed on FinCEN Form 114. You owe it if "the aggregate value of those foreign financial accounts exceeded $10,000 at any time during the calendar year reported"¹. Read that twice, because two words do most of the damage. Aggregate means all your foreign accounts added together, not each one on its own: three Moroccan accounts holding $4,000, $6,000 and $5,100 put you over the line, even though not one of them is close to it². At any time means a single day counts. Money that landed in June and left in July still counted in June.

The FBAR does not go to the IRS and it is not attached to your tax return. It is filed electronically with the Treasury, through FinCEN's own system¹. It is due April 15, with an automatic extension to October 15 that you do not have to ask for¹.

The second report is Form 8938, which does go with your return. It exists under FATCA and its thresholds are much higher, and they move depending on where you sleep³.

A Moroccan-American in Chicago crosses the line at fifty thousand dollars. The same person, same money, living in Casablanca, crosses it at two hundred thousand. Where you live changes the threshold by a factor of four.

The property question, answered plainly

Here is the part almost every conversation gets wrong, and the correction is worth the whole article.

A property you hold in your own name is not reportable on either form. The tax authority says so in its own words: "Foreign real estate is not a specified foreign financial asset required to be reported on Form 8938. For example, a personal residence or a rental property does not have to be reported."⁴ Its comparison table between the two forms puts the same answer in both columns, one word long: No⁵.

So the riad is not the problem. But two neighbouring cases are.

If the property sits inside a company, the company sits on the form. Where a local company holds the building and you hold shares in it, you report the shares, and "the value of the real estate held by the entity is taken into account in determining the value of the interest in the entity"⁴. The building comes back in through the ownership structure, valued, just not named. This catches more families than people expect: a Moroccan SARL, a Lebanese holding, an Egyptian company set up so several siblings could own one house together.

And the rent has to land somewhere. Foreign banknotes in a drawer are not reportable⁴. The same money in a foreign bank account is. A property that pays rent into a local account has quietly created the very thing the property itself was exempt from.

What forgetting costs

The numbers here are large, and they are large on purpose.

For the FBAR, the ceilings are set in statute and adjusted for inflation every year, which is why the figure you find on a law firm's website is usually the un-adjusted one from the original text. For penalties assessed on or after 17 January 2025, the adjusted maximum for a non-willful violation is $16,536, and for a willful violation it is the greater of $165,353 or half the balance in the account at the time of the violation⁶. One sentence from the official guidance deserves to be quoted flat, because it defeats the intuition everyone has: "It's possible to assert civil penalties for FBAR violations in amounts that exceed the balance in the foreign financial account."⁷ The penalty is not capped by the money.

Form 8938 carries its own set, and there are three, not one: $10,000 for the failure to file, up to $50,000 more if the failure continues after notice, and a 40 percent penalty on any tax understatement traced to the undisclosed assets³.

Now the other half of the picture, which is rarely quoted alongside. A late report filed for the right reason carries no penalty at all. Where the account is properly reported on a late-filed FBAR and the violation "was due to reasonable cause, no penalty will be imposed"⁷. The system is built to punish concealment, not confusion.

Whether your bank reports you depends on your country, and the map is uneven

The United States has signed intergovernmental agreements under FATCA with 113 jurisdictions, and they are how foreign banks report American account holders automatically. Whether your country is on that list is not something most people have ever checked, and the answer is not the one they assume.

All figures above are read from the Treasury's own published table⁸.

Two readers take opposite lessons from that table, and both are wrong.

If your country is on the list, you may conclude the reporting is handled for you. It is not: the agreement governs what the bank sends, never what you owe. You still file.

If your country is absent, as Morocco is, it is tempting to read that as safety. That is the more expensive mistake. The obligation was never on the bank. It is on you. The absence changes nothing about the threshold, the form or the penalty. It changes only how the information would reach anyone, and an absence of automatic reporting is a fact about plumbing, not a grant of permission.

There is usually a tax treaty between the two countries as well, and for Morocco it dates from 1977⁹. Treaties do real work: they stop the same income being taxed twice. They do nothing here. The official guidance closes that door in six words: "Tax treaties with the U.S. do not affect FBAR filing obligations."¹⁰ A treaty settles who taxes what. It never settles who reports.

If you are already years behind

Most people who read this far are not planning their first year. They are counting backwards.

There is a route, and its name is the Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures. It is open to people whose failure was "non-willful", which the guidance defines as "conduct that is due to negligence, inadvertence, or mistake or conduct that is the result of a good faith misunderstanding of the requirements of the law"¹¹. It closes the moment the tax authority opens an examination, so the timing is not neutral.

The price depends on where you live, and the gap is wide enough to be worth stating as a number.

Living outside the United States, and physically outside it for at least 330 full days, you "will not be subject to failure-to-file and failure-to-pay penalties, accuracy-related penalties, information return penalties, or FBAR penalties"¹². The tax and the interest, and nothing else.

Living in the United States, you pay a "miscellaneous offshore penalty equal to 5 percent of the highest aggregate balance/value" of the foreign assets across the covered years¹³, and in exchange the accuracy, information-return and FBAR penalties fall away. Five percent of a peak balance, once, instead of a per-year ceiling of sixteen thousand.

Same person, same forgetting, two prices, decided by an address.

And for a late FBAR on its own, the mechanism is simpler than the anxiety around it: you file the missing year electronically through the same system, select the reason for filing late, and explain it in the box provided⁷.

What this has to do with a budget

An account you have not reported is not a tax problem yet. It is a visibility problem, and it behaves like every other invisible commitment: it does not appear anywhere until the year it appears everywhere.

The arithmetic that governs the rest of this library governs this too. What is left to spend in a month is what came in, minus what is already owed. A reporting deadline you have not looked at is not a cost this month. It is a cost you have not dated. The whole point of writing down a two-country life is that a thing you can name in April stops being a thing that surprises you in October.

These accounts already exist. The report only names them. Here is what you actually own, on both sides. See my wealth →

Frequently asked questions

Does reporting the account make me pay tax on it?

No. The FBAR reports that the account exists. Form 8938 reports what it holds. Neither taxes the balance. You pay US tax on the income the account produces, interest or rent, like any other income, with any tax treaty between the two countries preventing the same income being taxed twice.

I have a joint account with my mother back home. Does it count?

Yes. A financial interest in the account, or signature authority over it, brings it inside the FBAR¹. Each US person who holds it reports it. If you only have signing power and no interest, that is precisely the borderline worth putting to a professional.

My apartment back home is worth more than $50,000. Do I file Form 8938?

Not because of the apartment. Held in your own name, it is on neither form⁴⁵. Count your accounts, your shares in any company there, and the financial assets, and see whether those cross the line.

My country has no agreement with the US. Why would I file?

Because the obligation is yours, not your bank's. The absence of an agreement changes who transmits, and changes nothing about who owes. And a report filed late for an honest reason carries no penalty⁷, while one filed after an examination opens has lost every route that made it cheap.

1. "A U.S. 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." Filing: "You must file the FBAR electronically through FinCEN's BSA E-Filing System. You don't file the FBAR with your federal tax return." Deadline: "due April 15 following the calendar year reported. You're allowed an automatic extension to October 15." IRS, Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR), page last reviewed or updated 30 July 2026. ↩
2. "Craig must file an FBAR because the aggregate value of the accounts is $15,100. Craig must report foreign financial accounts X, Y, and Z on the FBAR even though accounts X and Z have maximum account values below $10,000." IRS Publication 5569, Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) Reference Guide (Rev. 3-2022), page 3. ↩
3. Thresholds and penalties, verbatim, including "a $10,000 failure to file penalty, an additional penalty of up to $50,000 for continued failure to file after IRS notification, and a 40 percent penalty on an understatement of tax attributable to non-disclosed assets". IRS, Summary of FATCA reporting for U.S. taxpayers, page last reviewed or updated 18 September 2025. ↩
4. "Foreign real estate is not a specified foreign financial asset required to be reported on Form 8938. For example, a personal residence or a rental property does not have to be reported." On entities: "The value of the real estate held by the entity is taken into account in determining the value of the interest in the entity to be reported on Form 8938, but the real estate itself is not separately reported on Form 8938." On cash: "Foreign currency is not a specified foreign financial asset and is not reportable on Form 8938." IRS, Basic questions and answers on Form 8938, page last reviewed or updated 17 August 2026. ↩
5. Row "Foreign real estate held directly": No in the Form 8938 column and No in the FBAR column. IRS, Comparison of Form 8938 and FBAR requirements, page last reviewed or updated 18 September 2025. ↩
6. Penalty Adjustment Table, "maximum penalty amounts for penalties assessed on or after January 17, 2025": non-willful violation of 31 U.S.C. 5321(a)(5)(B)(i), statutory $10,000, adjusted $16,536; willful violation of 31 U.S.C. 5321(a)(5)(C)(i)(I), statutory $100,000, adjusted $165,353. The willful ceiling is the greater of that amount or "50% of the amount in the account at the time of the violation" (Publication 5569, page 8). 31 CFR 1010.821, 31 CFR Ch. X, 1 July 2025 edition. These ceilings are adjusted for inflation each year; the figures above are the last published values verified, in September 2026. ↩
7. "It's possible to assert civil penalties for FBAR violations in amounts that exceed the balance in the foreign financial account." And: "If they properly report the foreign financial account on a late-filed FBAR, and the IRS determines the FBAR violation was due to reasonable cause, no penalty will be imposed." Late filing mechanism: "they should electronically file the late FBAR using the BSA E-Filing System […] 'explain a late filing' or select 'Other'". IRS Publication 5569 (Rev. 3-2022), pages 8 and 9. ↩
8. Table "FATCA Agreements and Understandings by Jurisdiction", 113 jurisdictions listed, alphabetical, running from Montserrat directly to the Netherlands: Morocco does not appear, under any status. Algeria: "In Force (1-18-2017)". Tunisia: "In Force (9-9-2019)". US Department of the Treasury, Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, consulted September 2026. The page displays no last-updated date; the absence of Morocco is verified, the age of the table is not. ↩
9. Income tax treaty between the United States and Morocco, listed by the IRS under the year 1977. IRS, Morocco, tax treaty documents, page last reviewed or updated 13 August 2026. The year is the one the IRS displays on its listing page; the treaty PDF itself was not opened to confirm the signature date. ↩
10. "Tax treaties with the U.S. do not affect FBAR filing obligations." IRS Publication 5569 (Rev. 3-2022), page 4. ↩
11. Non-willful conduct is "conduct that is due to negligence, inadvertence, or mistake or conduct that is the result of a good faith misunderstanding of the requirements of the law". IRS, Streamlined filing compliance procedures, page last reviewed or updated 11 July 2026. ↩
12. Non-residency condition: "did not have a U.S. abode and the individual was physically outside the United States for at least 330 full days". Outcome: "will not be subject to failure-to-file and failure-to-pay penalties, accuracy-related penalties, information return penalties, or FBAR penalties". IRS, U.S. taxpayers residing outside the United States, page last reviewed or updated 11 July 2026. ↩
13. "The Title 26 miscellaneous offshore penalty is equal to 5 percent of the highest aggregate balance/value of the taxpayer's foreign financial assets that are subject to the miscellaneous offshore penalty during the years in the covered tax return period and the covered FBAR period." IRS, U.S. taxpayers residing in the United States, page last reviewed or updated 10 July 2026. ↩