Updated August 6, 2026. Quick answer: the order matters more than the list. Two of these steps are close to irreversible and both of them happen before you leave — breaking state domicile, and deciding what to do about Medicare Part B. Nearly everything else can be fixed from abroad at some cost. This page sequences the mechanics and sends each one to the page that works it out.
Before you go: the two that are hard to undo
1. Break state domicile deliberately, and document it. Moving abroad does not end a state’s claim on you by itself. Domicile persists until you establish a new one, and several states are notably reluctant to let go — which is a different problem from moving between states, and it is worked through on the leaving-the-country page. The underlying test, and the evidence standard states actually apply, are on the domicile page. Do this while you still have a US address to change things from; doing it afterwards is a paperwork exercise conducted at a distance.
2. Decide about Medicare Part B before you drop anything. Medicare does not travel — the regulation is one sentence long — so you can pay premiums for years and receive nothing. Dropping it is the obvious move and it is not obviously right, because re-enrolling later carries a permanent penalty. The keep-or-drop decision, and what it turns on, and what the penalty actually costs.
Everything below this line is recoverable. Those two are the ones worth slowing down for.
Making sure the money still arrives
Social Security. For a US citizen, payments generally continue wherever you live; for a non-citizen the rules are different and turn on your country, and there are two countries where delivery stops regardless. All of that is settled on the Social Security and Medicare abroad page, which is where to start if you are not a US citizen.
Your brokerage and bank accounts. This is the step people are most often blindsided by, because it is a decision your provider makes rather than one you make: some US brokers restrict or close accounts once the address on file is foreign. What actually happens to the accounts, and the practical order of operations.
Withdrawals from retirement accounts. They remain US-taxable, and the exclusion most people have heard of does not touch them — the mechanics, and the correction that catches most readers.
The tax picture, in the order it bites
Three separate systems can reach the same dollar, and they are worth keeping apart in your head rather than lumping into “taxes abroad”.
- Federal. US citizens are taxed on worldwide income wherever they live. Filing does not stop when you leave.
- State. Only if the state still considers you domiciled — which is why step 1 is step 1. Details.
- The country you move to. Its own rules, moderated by any tax treaty with the US. Treaty positions are country-by-country and we do not summarise them, because a summary that is wrong for your country is worse than no summary.
Two related corrections the site already owns, both of which come up constantly in this context: the foreign earned income exclusion does not cover investment income, and the foreign tax credit cannot offset the net investment income tax. Whether your capital gains are even foreign-source is its own question.
Reporting is separate from taxing, and missing it is expensive: foreign accounts can trigger two different filings with two different thresholds and two different destinations — FBAR versus Form 8938. And if you were making estimated payments, the safe harbour rules do not change because you moved.
The estate layer, which almost nobody sequences
It belongs on this list because the fix has to happen while you are alive and is awkward to arrange remotely. A US citizen’s estate is taxed on everything they own wherever it is; a will drafted in one country may not reach property in another; and if you marry a non-citizen abroad, the single most valuable rule in US estate tax stops applying to you. The mechanics and the honest boundary, and separately what happens when the surviving spouse is not a US citizen, which is a large enough problem to have its own page.
On getting help
The recurring theme above is that the general answer runs out at the border. Federal rules we can state; state rules we can state; the interaction with your country’s system and its treaty is genuinely specialist work, and it is the part where being wrong costs real money. That is a cross-border tax specialist and, for property, local counsel — not a general adviser, and not necessarily the one you already have, who may not be able to keep you as a client at all.
We do not sell anything on this page and we are not routing you to a matching service, because the help this situation needs is not the help those services supply.
Sources
Every factual claim on this page is carried and cited on the page that owns it, linked in place. This page sequences; it deliberately restates nothing. Read 2026-08-06.
Honest gap: country-specific answers — tax treaty positions, local healthcare systems, residency visas, forced-heirship rules — are out of scope for this wing by design. We cover the US-side mechanics that are true wherever you go, and we will not guess at the other half.
See methodology and corrections. General information about published law, not tax or legal advice. No affiliate links, nothing sold.
Before the international question, the domestic one often bites first: which states tax work-from-home days performed outside them.