Updated August 6, 2026. Quick answer: your US estate tax exposure does not shrink when you leave — the statute reaches property “wherever situated”. What does change is that a second country’s law now governs anything you own there, and a US will is not the instrument that moves foreign real estate. This page marks the boundary between what we can tell you and what needs a lawyer where the property is.
The reach of the US estate tax
IRC §2001(a) imposes the tax “on the transfer of the taxable estate of every decedent who is a citizen or resident of the United States”, and §2031(a) builds the gross estate from “all property, real or personal, tangible or intangible, wherever situated.”
Two words do the work. Citizen means residence is irrelevant — there is no expatriate rate and no foreign discount. Wherever situated means the apartment in Lisbon, the local bank account and the share in a foreign company are all in the US gross estate. For most people this is a filing question rather than a tax bill, because the exclusion is large; for anyone near it, moving abroad has not reduced the exposure by a dollar.
Where a foreign country taxes the same property at death, IRC §2014(a) gives a credit for “estate, inheritance, legacy, or succession taxes actually paid to any foreign country in respect of any property situated within such foreign country and included in the gross estate”. It is a proportionate credit with more than one limitation, so treat it as relief from double taxation rather than a guarantee against it.
The United States also has death tax treaties with a limited set of countries — fifteen, per the IRS’s own Form 706-NA instructions: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Where one exists it can change which country may tax what. We do not summarise individual treaties. Whether one applies to you, and what it does, is the first question for a cross-border adviser and the last thing to take from a website.
Why your US will may not reach the house
The general principle is that property is governed by the law of the place it sits. The domestic version is familiar: because “each state has different property laws, a probate proceeding must be made in each state where property is located” — which is why a second, ancillary probate is needed for an out-of-state house.
Across a border the same logic applies with much more force, because the second jurisdiction may not merely require its own proceeding but may apply its own rules about who inherits — including forced-heirship rules that give children a fixed share regardless of what any will says. Being honest about our limits: we have verified the principle domestically and we cannot verify a general international rule, because it is not one rule. It is as many rules as there are countries.
What follows practically is stable even though the law is not: if you own real property abroad, get a will drawn where the property is, and have whoever drafts it coordinate with your US will so the two do not revoke each other. The standard boilerplate clause revoking all prior wills is the classic way a foreign will accidentally destroys a US one, and vice versa — each document should say in terms which property it governs.
One real mechanism, if you are in Europe
Americans in the EU have an option that is genuinely useful and not widely known. Under the EU Succession Regulation, Article 22(1): “A person may choose as the law to govern his succession as a whole the law of the State whose nationality he possesses at the time of making the choice or at the time of death.”
So a US citizen resident in a participating EU country can generally elect US law to govern their succession as a whole — which is the standard way to avoid a forced-heirship regime overriding an American estate plan. It has to be done, expressly, in the will. It is not automatic, it is not retroactive, and not every EU member state participates in the Regulation. This is precisely the sort of thing to raise with local counsel by name rather than hope they mention.
If you marry a non-citizen
A great many Americans who retire abroad do. It matters more than almost anything else on this page, because the single most valuable rule in US estate tax — the unlimited marital deduction — is denied where the surviving spouse is not a US citizen. Not reduced. Denied, with a trust mechanism as the workaround.
That problem is large enough to have its own page, which covers the denial, the qualified domestic trust, and the citizenship route with their deadlines. If this describes you, read it before anything else in this wing.
What happens administratively if you die there
Worth knowing so a family is not improvising. When a US citizen dies abroad, a consular officer — defined in the regulations as an employee designated “to perform consular services relating to the deaths and estates abroad of United States nationals” — reports the death and notifies next of kin, and a Consular Report of Death Abroad is produced. That document is what US institutions will generally want: banks, insurers and transfer agents ask for it in the way they would ask for a domestic death certificate.
The practical instruction is short. Tell whoever will handle your estate where you actually are, and leave them the nearest embassy or consulate, a list of local accounts and property, and the name of any local lawyer who holds a will for you. The administrative failure mode abroad is not usually legal — it is a family in another country who does not know what exists or whom to call.
Sources
IRC §§2001(a), 2031(a) and 2014 at the Legal Information Institute; the death tax treaty list from the IRS Instructions for Form 706-NA (Rev. 08-2025); Regulation (EU) 650/2012, Article 22(1) at EUR-Lex; 22 C.F.R. §§72.1, 72.2 and 72.5 at the Legal Information Institute; and the Cornell LII Wex entries for situs and ancillary probate. All read 2026-08-06.
Honest gaps. The statement that a US will cannot dispose of foreign real property is one we could not verify as a general rule at a source we trust — the domestic ancillary-probate principle is solid, the international extension is an inference, and it varies by country. We have written it as a reason to take local advice rather than as a rule. We also could not reach any State Department page: every attempt at travel.state.gov, state.gov and several embassies failed, so the consular description above comes from the governing regulation instead of the department’s own words. And country-specific succession law — forced heirship, local wills, local estate taxes — is out of scope for this wing by design.
See methodology and corrections. General information about published law, not tax or legal advice. No affiliate links, nothing sold.