3.5% tax on takeout from USA

The Big Bad Bullshit tax includes a 3.5% tax on Dollars sent away from the U.S. up from 01.01. 2026.

It is not clear to me if this tax affects clients of IBKR UK. Probably I will take out two or three years of spending in December on credit out of the IBKR account just to be on the sure site.

I hope we get clarification soon.

Source? Because the remittance tax isn’t that.

Hard to find any sources at all. Seems congress reduced to 1%, at least for Indian residents:

What you mean by the remittance tax isn’t that? Does it not apply to financial transfers out of U.S.?

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/even-1-percent-us-remittance-tax-hits-poor-countries-hard

I assume you mean the following part of “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”:

This section establishes a 3.5% excise tax on transfers of payments from one country to another (also known as remittance transfers). (Some exceptions apply).

The PDF says:

The tax imposed under subsection (a) shall apply only to any remittance transfer for which the sender provides cash, a money order, a cashier’s check, or any other similar physical instrument (as determined by the Secretary) to the remittance transfer provider.

It sounds to me as if only Western Union and co. are affected, which explains why I couldn’t find anything about this in the normal media. Which also explains why Trum wants this. Many immigrants (Trump’s number 1 enemy) use such services to send money to their home countries.

I assume (but I don’t know) that we are not affected.

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What a disgusting, petty little man. Wanting to skim off the top out of borderline slave labour…

Many thanks. Seems I was to stupid to type in the word remittance correctly in my search. :angry:

I hope that does not include wires. It seems to me it would be easy to avoid the tax by just sending the money by wire.

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Going after weak & unprotected is easy.
Is it going to make you great? NO

Winning against strong is strength. Winning against weak is lack of real strength

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It doesn’t (the initial version did, but then wouldn’t have impacted non US residents).

The version that passed is:

  • 1% (instead of 3%+ in the initial House version)
  • only applies to physical instruments (not wires like the initial version)
  • people with right to work can claim it back in their taxes

There’s a lot of ways to go around it (esp. with a pro crypto government)

edit: discussion on the initial version: Chronicles of 2025 - #1966 by Abs_max

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