Deadlines and Extensions

The annual deadline

The FBAR for a calendar year is due on 15 April of the following year. The report always covers a complete calendar year, 1 January to 31 December, whatever accounting period you or your entity use for income tax.

That date is comparatively recent. Until the 2015 reporting year the FBAR was due on 30 June with no extension available at all. Legislation aligned it with the individual income tax deadline from the 2016 filing season onwards and, importantly, introduced an extension.

The automatic extension

FinCEN grants all FBAR filers an automatic six-month extension to 15 October. Three features of it are worth stating plainly:

• No request is needed. There is no extension form, no letter, no box to tick and no need to give a reason. The extension applies to everyone automatically.
• It is not linked to your tax return. You do not need to have extended your Form 1040, and extending your 1040 neither grants nor affects the FBAR extension. They are separate regimes.
• A report filed by 15 October is timely. It is not a late report, and the late-filing explanation field does not need to be completed.

Because the extension is automatic and unconditional, the practical deadline for most filers is 15 October — but treating April as the target leaves room to fix problems, and the IRS foreign-account question on your tax return is easier to answer confidently once the FBAR is already filed.

Weekends and federal holidays

Where a due date falls on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday, the deadline moves to the next business day. This has produced several shifted FBAR deadlines in past years, and it means you should check the actual date each year rather than assuming 15 April is always a working day.

Deadline calendar

The dates below are calculated from the general rule. None of the years shown falls on a weekend, so no shift applies.

Disaster relief

FinCEN has repeatedly issued notices postponing the FBAR deadline for victims of federally declared natural disasters — hurricanes, wildfires, severe storms and flooding — typically for filers in specified counties or areas. These notices are published individually as events occur, generally mirror the relief the IRS grants for tax filings, and each specifies its own postponed date and covered area.

If you were in a disaster area around a filing deadline, check FinCEN’s notices before assuming you are late. Relief of this kind is not automatic in the sense that it does not apply nationwide — you have to fall within the area and period a notice describes.

Signature-authority extensions

A separate and long-running strand of relief applies to certain individuals who have only signature authority over foreign accounts and no financial interest in them — principally officers and employees of entities whose accounts they can sign on, where questions about the scope of the reporting exceptions remain unresolved.

FinCEN first postponed the deadline for this group in notices issued in 2011 and has extended it repeatedly since, in a series of annual notices. The relief applies only to the affected category of filers and only in respect of signature-authority accounts; it does not extend the deadline for accounts in which the individual has a financial interest.

If you missed the date

A missed deadline is a common situation with a well-trodden route out, and the worst response is to do nothing. In outline:

1. File as soon as you can. The BSA E-Filing System accepts reports for prior years, and the form includes a field in which you select or describe the reason for filing late.
2. Consider whether the income was reported. The IRS delinquent FBAR submission procedures are addressed at people who did report and pay tax on the income from their foreign accounts but simply did not file the FBAR.
3. Do not paper over past returns quietly. Where income was also unreported, a broader procedure — the Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures, or voluntary disclosure — may be the correct route, and choosing wrongly has consequences.
4. Get advice if willfulness could be in question. The gap between the non-willful and willful penalty regimes is enormous, and the choice of correction procedure interacts with it.

Each of these routes, and the conditions attached to them, are set out on our late, delinquent and amended FBARs page.

Where to go next

• How to file — the BSA E-Filing walkthrough.
• Late and amended filings — if a deadline has already passed.
• Penalties — what is actually at stake in a missed filing.
• Recordkeeping — what to retain after filing.