FBAR for US LLC owner abroad: how the $10,000 total is counted

Two foreign accounts holding six thousand dollars each put a US LLC over the FBAR line, even though neither account reaches ten thousand dollars on its own.

The FBAR for US LLC owner rules turn on that addition. The report belongs to the company, because FinCEN counts an LLC formed in the United States as a United States person, whoever owns it and wherever that owner lives.

I read FinCEN’s FBAR pages, its line item instructions, the regulation behind them and the IRS guidance this month, setting each agency’s wording next to the other’s wherever they cover the same point. On the core, the two agencies agree. The total decides, not any single account.

The FBAR itself is a yearly Bank Secrecy Act report to the Treasury Department, filed on FinCEN Form 114, and it goes in separately from any income tax return.

Every FBAR for US LLC owner abroad covering calendar 2026 falls due in April 2027. FinCEN extends that date to October without any request, so an owner who starts listing accounts now has months of slack before anything becomes late.

A missed report can cost up to $16,536 even when nobody meant to hide anything.

Does the FBAR for US LLC owner living abroad fall on the owner or the LLC?

It falls on the LLC, because FinCEN’s definition of a United States person includes limited liability companies created or organized in the United States or under its laws.

An owner’s own status is a separate question. The same definition covers citizens and residents, so an Italian or a Colombian living at home with no US residence sits outside it and has no FBAR of their own.

The LLC’s tax label changes nothing in this test. FinCEN’s note on the definition says: “The federal tax treatment of an entity does not determine whether the entity has an FBAR filing requirement”.

I looked for an LLC example in that note. FinCEN writes, about exactly this case, that “an entity that is disregarded for purposes of Title 26 of the United States Code must file an FBAR, if otherwise required to do so”.

Residence in the United States would change the owner’s personal position. The regulation defines a resident through the tax residency tests of section 7701(b) of Title 26, and a resident owner then has an FBAR duty for personal foreign accounts and for signature authority over the LLC’s accounts abroad.

A non-resident owner should weigh this before any move.

The company’s own report never depends on where the owner lives.

Which FBAR foreign accounts LLC owners must add together?

FBAR foreign accounts LLC owners add together are the company’s financial accounts at institutions located outside the United States, whatever currency they are kept in, US dollars included.

The regulation lists bank accounts, securities accounts and other financial accounts. That last group covers cash-value insurance and annuity policies, commodity futures accounts and shares in mutual funds open to the public.

Location decides, not the nationality of the bank. The line item instructions make the point with branches: an account at a foreign branch of a US bank is foreign, and an account at a US branch of a foreign bank is not.

Income from the account plays no part either. The IRS page says: “Whether the account produced taxable income has no effect on whether the account is a foreign financial account for FBAR purposes”.

Accounts at banks inside the United States stay out of the count.

Control without ownership also counts for US persons. FinCEN defines signature authority as the power to control the assets of an account by direct communication with the bank, alone or together with another person. A bookkeeper living in the United States who can move money in the LLC’s account abroad would therefore have an FBAR duty of their own once those accounts pass the total, separate from the company’s.

Ownership chains extend the reach of the report. If the LLC owns more than half of a foreign company, the instructions treat the LLC as having a financial interest in that company’s foreign accounts, so those accounts join the LLC’s total.

Only a short list of accounts is exempt from the report. Correspondent accounts used by banks for settlements between themselves, accounts of governmental entities and accounts at US military banking facilities abroad are on it.

Why does the $10,000 threshold add every account together?

Because the rule is written about the total, not about any single account. FinCEN’s page says a United States person “must file an FBAR if the aggregate value of the foreign financial accounts exceeds $10,000 at any time during the calendar year”.

Its IRS counterpart spells out the effect: “This is a cumulative balance, meaning if you have 2 accounts with a combined account balance greater than $10,000 at any one time, both accounts would have to be reported”.

Each account is measured at its own peak. FinCEN describes that peak as “a reasonable approximation of the greatest value of currency or nonmonetary assets in the account during the calendar year”, and periodic statements may be used if they fairly reflect it.

Peaks are then added, even when they fell in different months. FinCEN’s page on maximum value states it plainly: “If the maximum account value of a single account or aggregate of the maximum account values of multiple accounts exceeds $10,000, an FBAR must be filed”.

Currency conversion happens once, at the end of the year. Each foreign-currency peak is converted at the Treasury rate for the last day of the calendar year, taken from the Treasury Reporting Rates of Exchange that the Fiscal Service releases every quarter.

That year-end rate for 2026 does not exist yet. In October 2026 the Fiscal Data page shows rates only through the end of September, so the December figure arrives after the year closes.

Amounts are rounded up to the next whole dollar. In FinCEN’s own example, $15,265.25 becomes $15,266.

An account emptied before December still counts with its peak. An overdrawn account goes the other way, and FinCEN tells filers to enter zero when the calculation ends below nothing.

Large groups of accounts get a lighter form. A filer with a financial interest in 25 or more foreign accounts enters only the total number of accounts, keeps the detail in its records and hands it over if FinCEN or the IRS asks.

How do FinCEN Form 114 LLC filers submit the report?

FinCEN Form 114 LLC filers submit the report online through FinCEN’s BSA E-Filing System, and the IRS states that it is not filed with a federal tax return.

The IRS comparison page underlines the split: “Unlike Form 8938, the FBAR (FinCEN Form 114) is not filed with the IRS”.

Paper filing is possible only with an exemption from FinCEN. A filer has to call FinCEN’s Resource Center to ask for one, and the IRS will not accept a printed copy of the electronic form.

FinCEN’s filing page offers two electronic routes for the report itself, a PDF form that can be saved and reused offline and an online form meant for a single sitting. I would pick the PDF route for a first filing, since it can be saved halfway.

An LLC cannot use the shortcut built for people. FinCEN’s e-filing FAQ says “An individual filer is a natural person who owns a reportable foreign financial account”, and the same FAQ requires institutions to register.

The way I read it, the LLC registers as an institution. It then files under its own user ID and password.

The form itself has a box for this case. A disregarded LLC checks the box for other filers and writes its type followed by D.E., and FinCEN’s example reads limited liability company (D.E.).

Company details then go into a few fixed fields. The LLC’s name goes in the organization name field, its EIN in the taxpayer identification field, and its US mailing address in the address block, with a foreign mailing address used only if there is no US one. A foreign ID number appears only without a US one.

Every account then gets its own block on the form. The block asks for the maximum value in dollars, the account type, the full name of the institution, the account number and the institution’s mailing address, so the year’s statements need to show all of them.

Someone other than the owner can file for the company. The owner can authorize a preparer on FinCEN Form 114a, a record of authorization that stays in the company’s files and is not sent to FinCEN. Whoever signs for the LLC also enters a title.

Personal names follow strict rules on the form. The instructions put multiple surnames in the last name field, with a Spanish example in which the father’s and the mother’s surnames both go there.

When is the FBAR due, and what happens if it is late?

The report is due on April 15 of the year after the calendar year it covers, the same date for a company as for a person. FinCEN grants an automatic extension to October 15, and the IRS page says: “You don’t need to request an extension to file the FBAR”.

For calendar 2026, both dates fall on weekdays in 2027. The weekend rule in the instructions does not move them.

Disaster relief has pushed the date further in past years. FinCEN’s FBAR page lists extensions granted after hurricanes and other events in recent years, and the IRS points affected filers to its relief notices before they assume the normal date applies.

A report filed after October 15 counts as late. The form then asks for a reason from a list.

The IRS wording is blunt: “Filing an FBAR late or not at all is a violation and may subject you to penalties”.

Its guidance is to file late reports as soon as possible when no IRS contact or investigation has begun, so that potential penalties stay at a minimum.

Mistakes found later are fixed with a full new report. The filer checks the Amend box and enters the BSA identifier of the earlier report, and FinCEN gives a string of zeros to use when that identifier is lost.

What can a missed FBAR cost an LLC?

A non-willful violation can cost up to $16,536 under the inflation table FinCEN has applied since January 2025, a figure the IRS says moves every year with inflation. The willful maximum in the same table is $165,353.

Behind those figures sit the older statutory amounts. The line item instructions describe the willful penalty as the greater of one hundred thousand dollars or 50 per cent of the account balance at the time of the violation.

Reasonable cause still matters a great deal for honest mistakes. The same instructions say: “If there is reasonable cause for the failure and the balance in the account is properly reported, no penalty will be imposed”.

Willful violations can also bring criminal penalties under federal law.

The Supreme Court limited the non-willful penalty in 2023. In the Bittner case, the government had calculated $2.72 million for five late reports that covered 272 accounts.

The Court held: “The BSA’s $10,000 maximum penalty for the nonwillful failure to file a compliant report accrues on a per-report, not a per-account, basis”.

Its opinion names the people the question touches most: “The answer makes a difference, especially for immigrants who hold accounts abroad and Americans who make their lives outside the country”.

That ruling limits non-willful exposure to one penalty per report.

Records are the other half of FBAR compliance. For each account the LLC keeps the name on the account, its number, the bank’s name and address, the account type and the maximum value, for five years. FinCEN adds that a copy of the filed FBAR can help meet that duty. The IRS notes that the law names no particular type of document, so ordinary bank statements serve when they carry the required details.

What do the FinCEN and IRS pages leave open?

The wording of the threshold does not reconcile neatly across the two agencies. FinCEN adds up the maximum value of each account. The IRS table speaks of a combined balance at any one time.

I take the FinCEN form instructions as the governing text, since the report is FinCEN’s, and under them the peaks are added whatever their dates.

FinCEN’s own page also uses two phrasings for the line. One sentence requires a report when the total exceeds ten thousand dollars, and the next excuses a person who did not have ten thousand dollars, so a total of exactly that amount sits between them. I cannot resolve that edge case from the text alone.

Balances held with payment apps abroad are another open point. The pages I read define bank, securities and other financial accounts, and none of them names an e-money balance or a payment wallet held outside the United States. I cannot tell from them how FinCEN treats such a balance.

Form 8938 raises a separate question for some LLCs. The IRS says it does not replace the FBAR, and its threshold for specified domestic entities starts above fifty thousand dollars at year end or seventy-five thousand during the year.

I could not work out from the comparison page alone whether a foreign-owned LLC counts as such an entity.

A US accountant or the IRS FBAR hotline can confirm a given company’s duty. FinCEN also runs a regulatory helpline for questions on completing the form, with a separate number for callers outside the United States, and its BSA E-Filing help desk handles technical problems.

My view is that an FBAR for US LLC owner abroad comes down to one habit: a running list of every foreign account the company holds, with its peak balance noted month by month. Everything on the form follows from that list.

The next date on the calendar is April 2027, for the accounts the company holds this year.