FBAR deadline 15 October 2026 for H-1B holders with NRE and NRO accounts

Is this you? You're in the US on an H-1B or H-4, or switched from F-1 to H-1B during 2025, and hold NRE, NRO, FCNR or other Indian accounts. Green card holders and citizens have the same deadline; only the residency sections won't apply.

This assumes you're a US person for the year: a citizen, a green card holder, or resident under the substantial presence test. Moving back this year? Check your residency status first, because the answer can change.

What’s due on the 15th, and for which year

The Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) is FinCEN Form 114, filed online with FinCEN, the Treasury’s financial-crimes unit, not with the IRS and not with your tax return. It reports the calendar year, January to December, not India’s April-to-March tax year. The one due now covers January 1 to December 31, 2025.

Its normal due date was April 15, 2026. FinCEN gives everyone who misses that date an automatic extension to October 15, 2026, and its own notice says specific requests aren’t required. There’s no extension form and nothing to tick. The 15th falls on a Thursday this year, so no weekend rule moves it.

Three points about timing that matter this week:

• It has to arrive, not be sent. The IRS’s comparison of the two foreign-account reports describes the FBAR as due when “received” by FinCEN. Online filing arrives the moment you submit, as long as the submission goes through.
• There’s no published cut-off time. FinCEN doesn’t say what hour, or which time zone, ends the day. Don’t plan on the last evening.
• No disaster extension yet. On October 11, 2026, FinCEN’s FBAR page listed no disaster-relief extension for 2025 FBARs. In past years FinCEN has published such notices only days before October 15, so check its FBAR page again before Thursday. An IRS disaster postponement for your county’s income tax doesn’t move the FBAR by itself; FinCEN has to say so separately.

A colleague may say they have until 2027: FinCEN extended the date only for certain finance staff with signature authority over their employer’s accounts, never for your own or a parent’s. For what counts as a foreign account and the separate Form 8938 thresholds, see our full guide to FBAR and FATCA reporting.

Are you a US person for the FBAR on an H-1B?

Only “United States persons” file. If you aren’t a citizen or green card holder, that means a resident alien under the tax code’s residency rules. The IRS’s manual is blunt: people here on a work visa who don’t meet the substantial presence test are not US residents for the FBAR.

The substantial presence test. You meet it for 2025 if you were in the US on at least 31 days in 2025, and your days in 2025, plus a third of your days in 2024 and a sixth of your days in 2023, add up to 183 days or more. If you were here on an H-1B for all of 2025, you meet it on 2025’s days alone. The same goes for an H-4 spouse who was here all year: H-1B and H-4 days count in full.

Student days don’t count. Days on an F-1 visa are “exempt” days, left out of the test, as long as you kept to your visa’s terms. Once you’ve been exempt for any part of more than 5 years (any part of a calendar year counts as a whole one), your student days count, unless you can show you don’t intend to live in the US permanently and have kept to your visa’s terms. The exemption lasts only while you hold student status. The day your H-1B status starts, your days begin to count. Time on OPT or STEM OPT is part of F-1 status, so those days are exempt too, as long as you kept to the OPT rules. If you’re not sure you stayed in status, for example after a long gap without work, check it with a CPA.

The year you arrive or switch. If you first met the test in 2025, your US residency for tax started on your first day of non-exempt presence in 2025, not on January 1. FinCEN’s text deals with part-year residence only where someone makes an election (below). For an ordinary part-year resident it is silent on whether the FBAR covers all of 2025 or only the months after your residency start date. This isn’t settled. The cautious course is to report the year’s maximum balances, or at least the balances from your arrival, and to ask a CPA if the answer changes whether you file. Our guide to the H-1B dual-residency year explains how that first year works on the income tax side.

The first-year choice. If you arrived late in 2025 and don’t meet the test for 2025, you can still choose to be treated as a resident from part-way through 2025. You need to have been here for at least 31 days in a row in 2025, present for at least three-quarters of the days from the start of that run to December 31 (up to five days away count as present), and to meet the substantial presence test for 2026. You make the choice on your 2025 return, which can’t be filed until you’ve met the 2026 test, so most people who use it extended that return to October 15, 2026. The IRS’s manual lists this election as one of the ways to become a US person for the FBAR, and FinCEN has said that people who make it should file FBARs for the accounts held during the period the election covers.

That leaves one question no official text answers: what if you plan to make the choice on your return but the FBAR deadline comes first? It isn’t settled. Filing the FBAR by the 15th costs you nothing if you then make the choice; filing it later means it’s late, with a reason to give.

The treaty doesn’t change it. The India–US treaty has a tie-breaker for people both countries treat as resident. The IRS’s manual says treaty provisions don’t affect residency for the FBAR: if you meet a US residency test, you’re a US person for the FBAR even if the treaty lets you file your tax return as a non-resident. Likewise, a spouse who isn’t a resident but joins a joint return by election doesn’t become a US person for the FBAR because of it.

India’s residency rules are separate. To see how India treats you this tax year, use our residency status checker (linked at the top of this page); it doesn’t decide your US status.

Your Indian accounts, account by account

Once you’re a US person and your accounts together passed USD 10,000 at any point in 2025, every foreign account goes on the form, not only the ones that took you over. The form has three places for them: Part II for accounts you own alone, Part III for accounts you own jointly, and Part IV for accounts you can operate but don’t own.

NRE accounts. An NRE account holds money you earned abroad, and India doesn’t tax its interest. None of that matters to the FBAR: there’s no exemption for accounts India doesn’t tax. The US also taxes resident aliens on worldwide income, so the interest goes on your US return.

NRO accounts. An NRO account holds your Indian income: rent, dividends, pension, or money left from before you moved. India taxes its interest, usually through tax the bank deducts, and the account goes on your FBAR on the same footing as the NRE. The Indian side of that interest is in our guide to TDS on NRO interest.

FCNR deposits. These are held in a foreign currency. A dollar FCNR needs no conversion; one in pounds or euros uses the Treasury’s year-end rate for that currency.

Joint accounts with parents. Many H-1B holders are second holder on a parent’s NRO or savings account, on “either or survivor” or “former or survivor” terms. Under FinCEN’s rules, each US person in whose name an account is held has a financial interest in it, and the IRS’s manual says joint accounts are reported at their entire value on each owner’s FBAR, never pro-rated. The FBAR rules never mention the mandate type; being a named holder is what counts. On “former or survivor” accounts, which only the first holder operates, no official text addresses the mandate directly, so it isn’t settled; reporting the account is the cautious course.

Signature authority and powers of attorney. You have signature authority over an account if you can control what happens to the money by instructing the bank directly, alone or with someone else. Authority only to buy and sell investments, without being able to take money out, doesn’t count. If a power of attorney lets you instruct your mother’s bank to pay out or close her account, that’s signature authority, and the account goes in Part IV. If it’s narrower, or the bank hasn’t registered it, no FBAR text says either way; ask a CPA. Being a parent’s son or daughter, by itself, puts nothing on your FBAR: the family attribution rules from income tax don’t apply.

PPF, EPF and NPS. No FinCEN or IRS text names any of them. The FBAR’s exception for retirement plans covers only US plans and IRAs, so it doesn’t help. A PPF sits at a bank or post office, which fits the definition of an account well; EPF and NPS are run by statutory bodies, where the fit is less clear. This isn’t settled. Including them costs a few lines; leaving out an account that should have been there risks a penalty.

If your spouse is on an H-4. An H-4 spouse is tested on her own days, and H-4 isn’t an exempt status, so a spouse who was here all of 2025 is a US person for the FBAR in her own right. Her accounts are tested on their own against the threshold, and an account she holds jointly with you counts in full on hers as well as yours. One spouse can file for both only if every account the other has to report is held jointly with the filing spouse; the filer reports the joint accounts on a timely FBAR, and both complete and sign FinCEN Form 114a, which you keep for 5 years rather than send. If she has even one account in her own name, you each file a separate FBAR. Your income tax filing status, joint or separate, makes no difference.

Working out the numbers

For each account:

1. Find the maximum value in 2025, in the account’s own currency. FinCEN asks for a reasonable approximation of the greatest value during the year, and says periodic statements may be relied on. The IRS’s manual uses the largest amount on any quarterly or more frequent statement. For a fixed deposit, that’s usually the principal plus any interest credited to it.
2. Convert at the Treasury rate for December 31, 2025. That’s 89.854 rupees per US dollar, for every rupee account, whatever day the balance peaked.
3. Round up to the next whole dollar. FinCEN’s instructions say any fraction of a dollar goes up, not to the nearest. Round each account, then add.
4. Enter zero for a negative value, such as an overdrawn account.

At that rate the threshold of USD 10,000 works out to ₹8,98,540 across all your accounts together. Money moved from one foreign account to another during the year counts once for that test: if you broke an NRE savings balance into a fixed deposit, the same rupees aren’t added twice.

If you truly can’t tell an account’s maximum and have fewer than 25 accounts, the form has an “amount unknown” box. Ask the bank first.

Worked example: three households, one Thursday

Each example uses the Treasury rate of 89.854 rupees per dollar, rounds each account up, then adds.

The four-day checklist

If you’re doing it yourself, this is the order that fits three working days. Our step-by-step walkthrough of the online form covers the screens one by one.

1. Gather before you open the formFor each account: the name it’s held in, the number, the bank’s name and address, the type of account and the maximum value. Those five items are exactly what the record-keeping rule asks you to keep. You’ll also need your own name, address and date of birth, your SSN or ITIN (or, if you have neither, as some H-4 spouses don’t, your passport number and the country that issued it), and the name and address of any joint owner or of the owner of an account you only operate.
2. File it yourself, with no account to createIndividuals use the no-registration option on FinCEN’s BSA E-Filing System. Only professionals and institutions filing for others, such as CPAs, Enrolled Agents and attorneys, have to register. The FBAR is never attached to your tax return.
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3. Keep proof that it arrivedThe confirmation screen shows a tracking ID straight away. The later email carries the BSA identifier, a 14-digit number. Keep both: you’ll need the identifier if you ever amend.
4. If you got something wrong after filingFile a complete new FBAR, tick the “amended” box and enter the BSA identifier of the original. Fix a mistake as soon as you find it.

Same day, different rules: the FBAR and your extended return

If you filed Form 4868 by April 15, 2026, your 2025 federal return is also due October 15, 2026. Same day, two separate obligations:

The foreign-account questions on your return. Part III of the interest-and-dividends schedule of your federal return asks two things on line 7a. First, did you at any time in 2025 have a financial interest in, or signature authority over, a foreign account? The IRS’s instructions say to answer “Yes” even if you aren’t required to file the FBAR, so one small NRO account means “Yes”. Second, are you required to file the FBAR? Answer it from this page’s tests. Line 7b asks you to name the countries: India.

The FATCA statement. Form 8938 is attached to your return and due with it, including extensions, so for an extended 2025 return it’s also due on the 15th. Filing it doesn’t replace the FBAR. Its thresholds are much higher, and for a part-year resident it covers only the part of the year you were a resident. Our full FBAR and FATCA guide, linked above, has the thresholds table.

If you didn’t extend your return, it’s already late, but the FBAR isn’t yet. Don’t let one slip because of the other.

If you miss October 15

A late FBAR is a violation, but late beats never. The IRS says that if it hasn’t contacted you and you’re not under investigation, file late FBARs as soon as possible to keep penalties to a minimum.

• File it anyway. Use the same online form. After October 15 it asks why it’s late: pick a reason from the list, or “Other” with a short written explanation of what happened.
• The non-willful maximum is per report. Up to USD 16,536 for the year’s FBAR, not per account, since the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Bittner. The willful maximum is the greater of USD 165,353 or 50% of the balance, per account.
• Reasonable cause means no penalty. The law imposes no non-willful penalty if the violation was due to reasonable cause and the account is properly reported. The IRS’s manual adds that a penalty isn’t asserted where the failure wasn’t willful, was due to reasonable cause, and the account is properly reported on the late FBAR. Examiners can also send a warning letter instead of a penalty, and civil FBAR penalties have no minimum.
• The no-penalty route is gone. The IRS removed its delinquent FBAR submission procedures in mid-2026. They no longer appear on its list of options, so a late FBAR now relies on reasonable cause and the examiner’s discretion.
• If you also left Indian income off your return, such as NRE interest, a late FBAR isn’t the whole fix. The Streamlined procedures cover both; for people living in the US they carry a 5% penalty on the highest year-end value of the accounts involved.

For a 2025 FBAR that misses the extended date, the violation is dated April 15, 2026, the original due date. The IRS then has 6 years from that date to assess a penalty, which is why keeping your records for 5 years matters.