FBAR vs Form 8938: which one must a US retiree in Spain file?

Open a Spanish bank account after you retire to the coast and, sooner or later, an American accountant will ask whether you have "done your FBAR" and whether you also need "the 8938." To most people they sound like the same form with two names. They are not. The FBAR and Form 8938 are two separate US foreign-account reports, born of two different laws, filed with two different parts of the government, under two different sets of thresholds.

The confusion matters because the two are not a menu you pick from. A US retiree in Spain very often has to file both, for the very same Spanish accounts, and filing one does nothing to satisfy the other. Skip the wrong one and the penalties are among the harshest in the US tax code, even though neither form, in itself, charges a cent of tax.

This page sets the two side by side: what each one is, who has to file it, what it counts, and the traps that catch retirees, joint accounts with a Spanish spouse, signature authority over a relative's account, and the first-year threshold surprise. It sits alongside the broader picture of banking in Spain as a US person, which walks through opening and using the account itself, and the mirror-image Spanish report, the Modelo 720 for US retirees, which reports the same accounts in the opposite direction, to Madrid instead of Washington.

"Clients arrive convinced these are two names for one form, and relax when they hear they filed 'the foreign account thing.' Then we find they lodged the FBAR and never attached the 8938, or the other way round. The fix is almost always simple if you catch it early; the expensive version is the letter that arrives years later. Treat them as two separate boxes that both have to be ticked."

The short answer

The FBAR (Foreign Bank Account Report, filed on FinCEN Form 114) goes to the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, electronically and separately from your tax return, whenever the combined value of all your foreign financial accounts tops US$10,000 at any moment in the year. Form 8938 (Statement of Specified Foreign Financial Assets) is the FATCA report; it is attached to your Form 1040 and goes to the IRS, but only once your foreign assets exceed much higher thresholds that depend on your filing status and whether you count as living abroad.

Because the FBAR threshold is low and the 8938 thresholds are high, the typical retiree pattern is this: you cross the US$10,000 line almost immediately and file an FBAR every year, and in the years your balances are larger, you also cross the 8938 line and file that too. When both apply, the same Spanish current account or brokerage appears on both reports. The two do not cancel out; they stack.

The FBAR: FinCEN Form 114

The FBAR is the older and blunter of the two. It is not a tax form at all: it is filed with FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, through the online BSA E-Filing System, entirely separately from your income tax return. You can owe no tax whatsoever and still have to file it. The trigger is deliberately low: if the aggregate maximum value of all your foreign financial accounts, added together, exceeds US$10,000 at any single point during the calendar year, every one of those accounts must be reported.

Two features of that rule trip people up. First, it is an aggregate, not a per-account, test: five modest accounts of US$2,500 each cross the line even though none is large on its own. Second, you report the highest balance each account reached during the year, converted to US dollars using the Treasury's year-end rate, not the balance on 31 December. A single day when a pension lump sum or a property-sale deposit passed through the account can pull an otherwise small account over the threshold.

Timing is friendlier than the tax return. The FBAR is due on 15 April, but there is an automatic extension to 15 October with nothing to file to claim it. The penalties, however, are severe: a non-willful failure can draw a penalty into the tens of thousands per report (the figure is inflation-adjusted each year), and a willful failure can reach the greater of roughly six figures or 50% of the account balance. Since the 2023 Bittner decision, the non-willful penalty is generally applied per annual report rather than per account, but the exposure is still real, which is why the FBAR is not a form to leave to guesswork.

Form 8938: the FATCA statement on your 1040

Form 8938 is the younger form, created by the FATCA legislation. Unlike the FBAR, it is an IRS form and it travels with your Form 1040: you attach it to the annual return you were already filing as a US citizen or green-card holder, which you must do wherever in the world you live, as covered in US filing obligations for American retirees in Spain. If you have no obligation to file a 1040 for the year, you have no 8938 either; the two rise and fall together.

Its thresholds are far higher than the FBAR's and, crucially, they are higher again for taxpayers who live abroad. A retiree who has genuinely settled in Spain, meeting the tax-home-abroad and presence or bona-fide-residence test, enjoys the elevated overseas thresholds rather than the low US-resident ones. Form 8938 also reaches more than just accounts: it captures "specified foreign financial assets," which include foreign stock or securities you hold directly (not inside a brokerage account), interests in foreign entities, and foreign-issued financial instruments, alongside the accounts the FBAR already covers.

The penalty structure is different too. A failure to file Form 8938 starts at US$10,000, rising by up to a further US$50,000 if you ignore an IRS notice, and understatements of tax tied to undisclosed foreign assets can attract a 40% accuracy penalty. Because 8938 lives inside the income-tax system, its failures feed straight into the tax-assessment machinery in a way the standalone FBAR does not.

The thresholds that decide who files what

The single most useful thing to fix in your mind is the gap between the two triggers. The FBAR line is a flat US$10,000 aggregate, the same for everyone. Form 8938 has four different figures depending on filing status and residence. For a US retiree who meets the living-abroad test, a single filer (or married filing separately) files 8938 if specified foreign assets exceed US$200,000 on the last day of the year or US$300,000 at any time; a married couple filing jointly uses US$400,000 and US$600,000.

Those overseas thresholds are four times the US-resident figures, which sit at US$50,000 / US$75,000 for a single filer and US$100,000 / US$150,000 for a joint return. That difference is exactly why the first year is a trap: a retiree who moves to Spain partway through a year may not yet satisfy the abroad test for that year and can fall back onto the lower US-resident thresholds, meaning 8938 can bite sooner than expected in the year of the move. The FBAR, with its unchanging US$10,000 line, does not care where you live or when you moved.

What counts, and what surprises retirees

Both forms centre on financial accounts: Spanish current and savings accounts, brokerage and securities accounts, and, importantly, Spanish investment and pension products such as fondos de inversión, planes de pensiones and unit-linked policies. Many of those Spanish funds are also PFICs for US tax, a separate and painful complication, but for reporting purposes they are simply accounts or assets to be listed.

The reliable surprise is what is not reportable. Directly-held foreign real estate, a Spanish flat in your own name, is not a financial account and appears on neither form. Nor does the physical cash in your wallet or a gold bar in a drawer. But the moment property is wrapped in a foreign company, your interest in that company becomes a specified asset on Form 8938 even though the underlying house never was. Foreign stock or bonds you hold directly, outside any account, similarly land on 8938 but not on the FBAR, one of the few places the two forms genuinely diverge in scope.

The retiree traps: joint accounts, signature authority, year one

Three fact patterns catch retirees more than any others. The first is the joint account with a Spanish, non-US spouse. As the US person, you generally report the entire account, its full balance, not just your half, while your non-US spouse typically has no US filing at all. Splitting the account "50/50" on the form is a common and incorrect instinct.

The second is signature authority. You can be required to report an account you do not own but merely control, for instance where you hold a power of attorney over a relative's Spanish account, help an elderly parent manage their money, or sit as treasurer of a comunidad de propietarios. The FBAR reaches accounts over which you have signature or other authority, not only accounts you own.

The third is the first-year threshold already flagged: in the calendar year you actually move, you may not yet meet the living-abroad test, so Form 8938 can apply at the lower US-resident thresholds for that year even though your money is now in Spain. Read together with the low FBAR line, the practical result is that the year of the move is often the year with the most reporting, not the least.

After a CLN or I-407: the final-year check

Giving up US citizenship or formally abandoning a green card changes the reporting picture, but only from the point where you stop being a US person. A completed CLN, or a formal I-407 for a green-card holder, can end the future FBAR and Form 8938 cycle; it does not make old US-person years disappear. The calendar year that contains the expatriation date still needs to be reviewed carefully, especially if Spanish accounts were open, balances spiked, or a power of attorney existed before the status change.

That is why this page should be read next to renouncing US citizenship after retiring to Spain and Form 1040-NR after giving up US status. The forward-looking rule may be "no more US-person foreign-account reporting"; the practical file is "clean through the last US-person year, then switch to the nonresident-alien analysis for any remaining US-source income." If there are missed pre-expatriation FBARs or Form 8938 attachments, handle the catch-up route before treating expatriation as a clean break.

The Spanish mirror: Modelo 720 and 721

None of this replaces the Spanish side. Once you are a Spanish tax resident, Spain runs its own foreign-asset declaration, the Modelo 720, for accounts, securities and property held outside Spain above a €50,000 band, with the newer Modelo 721 covering foreign crypto. The direction is the exact opposite of the US forms: the 720 tells Spain about your US accounts, while the FBAR and 8938 tell the US about your Spanish accounts. The mechanics and penalties of the Spanish report are set out in the Modelo 720 guide for US retirees.

Seen together, the two systems mean a US retiree in Spain reports foreign accounts to both governments, each about the other's country. Keeping a single master list of every account, its highest balance and its year-end value, in dollars and euros, is the simplest way to feed the FBAR, Form 8938 and the Modelo 720 from one source without contradicting yourself, a point that connects to how your US-Spain tax position hangs together overall.

If you are already behind

Many retirees discover these forms only after several years abroad, when a Spanish bank passes their details to the IRS under FATCA and a letter follows. If your failure to file was non-willful, the usual route back is the IRS Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures, which let a US person living abroad file amended returns and back FBARs, certify non-willfulness, and generally avoid the harsher penalties. It is closely related to the way a foreign gift or inheritance is caught up through a late Form 3520, another information return with its own severe penalties.

The one thing not to do is file a pile of late forms without first understanding whether your case is non-willful and which procedure fits. Willfulness is a legal question, not a feeling, and the choice of clean-up path shapes the penalty exposure. This is the point to bring in a US tax adviser rather than self-file into a corner.

At a glance

	FBAR (FinCEN Form 114)	Form 8938 (FATCA)
Filed with	FinCEN (Treasury), via the BSA E-Filing System	The IRS, attached to Form 1040
Threshold	Over US$10,000 aggregate, any time in the year	Living abroad: US$200k/US$300k single, US$400k/US$600k joint
What it covers	Foreign financial accounts (bank, brokerage, funds)	Accounts plus directly-held foreign securities and entity interests
Foreign real estate in your own name	Not reported	Not reported (but a foreign company holding it is)
Deadline	15 April, automatic extension to 15 October	With your 1040, including any extension
Value to report	Highest balance during the year	Value per the form's instructions, often year-end
Signature authority over another's account	Can trigger a filing even without ownership	Generally only assets you have an interest in
Non-filing penalty	Non-willful into the tens of thousands; willful up to 50% of the balance	US$10,000, up to +US$50,000, plus 40% accuracy penalty
Do the two overlap?	Yes, the same account is often on both; filing one never satisfies the other

Sources reviewed July 2026: FinCEN and IRS guidance on the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR / FinCEN Form 114), including the US$10,000 aggregate threshold, the BSA E-Filing requirement, the 15 April deadline with automatic extension to 15 October, and the non-willful and willful penalty framework as affected by Bittner v. United States (2023); IRS materials on Form 8938 (Statement of Specified Foreign Financial Assets under FATCA), the "Do I need to file Form 8938?" thresholds for taxpayers living abroad (US$200,000 / US$300,000 single and US$400,000 / US$600,000 joint) versus US-resident thresholds, the definition of specified foreign financial assets, and the failure-to-file and accuracy-related penalties; the IRS "Comparison of Form 8938 and FBAR requirements"; IRS Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures; and, on the Spanish side, the Agencia Tributaria rules on the Modelo 720 and Modelo 721 foreign-asset declarations. Thresholds, penalty figures, forms and procedures change and individual facts vary widely. This is general information only, not legal, tax, financial or immigration advice, and no lawyer-client relationship is created. Confirm your specific reporting with a qualified US tax adviser and, for the Spanish side, a Spanish tax adviser before you act.