The Cheapest Way to Move $200,000 to France, and What the 1% Tax Really Hits
Published Aug 12, 2026·Updated Aug 12, 2026
Key Takeaways
Moving $200,000 to France costs almost nothing in federal tax and a great deal in exchange rate spread. The 1 percent excise tax under Section 4475 applies only to transfers you fund with cash or a similar physical instrument, so a bank-funded wire is exempt, and every 1 percent of hidden spread costs you $2,000.
The tax: 1 percent under Internal Revenue Code Section 4475, on transfers made after 31 December 2025, and only when the sender hands over cash, a money order, a cashier's check or a traveler's check.
The exemption: transfers funded from an account at a financial institution, or with a debit or credit card, fall outside the tax entirely, and the IRS proposed regulations of 13 April 2026 extend the card exemption to cards issued in any country.
The real cost: exchange rate spread is never itemized as a fee, and on $200,000 each 1 percent of spread is $2,000, against an outbound wire fee that is usually a two-figure number.
Your lever: federal law entitles you to a pre-payment disclosure showing the rate, the fees and the exact euro amount your French account will receive, plus 30 minutes to cancel after paying.
Sources: IRS, CFPB, service-public.gouv.fr, ECB
If you are about to transfer money from the US to France in one large block, you have probably read that Washington now taxes money leaving the country. That is true, and it is also almost certainly irrelevant to you. The number that decides what actually lands in your French account is not a tax at all. It sits inside the exchange rate, it is never printed as a fee, and on a six-figure transfer it outweighs every visible charge combined. This article is for informational purposes only and is not tax or legal advice; consult a qualified cross-border tax professional before making any filing decision.
Is the 1 percent remittance tax going to hit your $200,000?
Almost certainly not: Section 4475 of the Internal Revenue Code taxes a remittance transfer at 1 percent only when the sender hands the provider cash, a money order, a cashier's check or a traveler's check, and a wire funded from your US bank account is none of those. The Treasury Department and the IRS said as much in the proposed regulations published on 13 April 2026, where they wrote that banks and credit unions are not expected to be materially affected because the transfers they handle are primarily funded by non-cash instruments.
The tax was built for a different customer. Treasury and the IRS estimated that 30 to 36 percent of remittance transfers made through money services businesses are funded with cash, and that the population paying in cash at a retail counter is largely made up of senders without a bank account. An American retiree wiring the proceeds of a house sale from a Schwab or Chase account is not in that group.
So here is the problem. The 1 percent is the number in the headlines, and for most people reading this it is zero. Meanwhile the number nobody puts in a headline is the gap between the rate you are quoted and the rate the currency is actually trading at. On $200,000, one percentage point of that gap is $2,000. Two points is $4,000. An outbound wire fee, by contrast, is a two-figure charge you will see itemized on your statement, argue about, and then pay. People negotiate the $45 and hand over the $4,000 without noticing, because only one of the two is written down.
The four costs on a $200,000 transfer, and which ones you can see
Every dollar-to-euro transfer carries four separate costs, and only three of them ever appear as a number. They are charged by different parties and they behave differently, which is why a single headline fee tells you almost nothing.
Cost | Who charges it | Hits a bank-funded wire? | Shown as a line item? |
|---|---|---|---|
Section 4475 excise tax | Federal government, collected by the provider | No. Cash-funded transfers only | Yes, when it applies at all |
Outbound transfer fee | Your US bank or transfer provider | Yes | Yes |
Exchange rate spread | Whoever converts the dollars into euros | Yes, and this is the big one | No. It is inside the rate |
Intermediary and receiving fees | Correspondent banks and your French bank | Sometimes, depending on the route | Partly, as covered third-party fees |
Read the third row again. It is the only cost with no number attached to it, and it is the only one that scales with the size of your transfer. That combination is why a $200,000 move is a different problem from a $2,000 move, and why the advice that circulates for small transfers does not translate. Deciding which US accounts to keep, close and move before you leave is a separate exercise from pricing the single transaction that moves the balance.
What Section 4475 actually taxes
The tax was created by section 70604 of Public Law 119-21, signed on 4 July 2025, and it applies to remittance transfers made after 31 December 2025. What matters is not who you are or how much you send. It is what you physically hand over to pay for the transfer.
The four instruments that trigger it
Section 4475(c) names three, and the proposed regulations add a fourth, giving what the IRS describes as the exclusive list:
Cash, meaning US dollars or any foreign currency in physical form issued by a government or central bank
Money orders
Cashier's checks
Traveler's checks, added by the proposed regulations because they are functionally indistinguishable from the other two paper instruments
What is outside the tax
Section 4475(d) exempts funds withdrawn from an account held at a financial institution subject to Bank Secrecy Act requirements, and funds paid with a debit or credit card issued in the United States. The proposed regulations go further than the statute on the second point: because cards are simply absent from the list of triggering instruments, a card-funded transfer is untaxed regardless of which country issued the card. The same logic exempts ACH transfers, personal and business checks handed to the provider, and general-use prepaid cards.
One detail worth holding onto: when the tax does apply, it is charged on the amount that reaches the recipient, not on what you paid. Provider fees, state taxes and the excise tax itself are excluded from the base. Transfers of $15 or less are outside the definition of a remittance transfer altogether.
Two traps that turn an exempt transfer into a taxable one
The first is check cashing. If a transfer provider or its agent cashes a check made out to you and the proceeds fund the transfer, the regulations treat that as two transactions and tax the second one as cash-funded. This holds even if you never touch the banknotes and even if no separate check-cashing fee is charged.
The second is the anti-avoidance rule. The IRS gives the example of a sender paying $500 in cash for a prepaid card and immediately using that card to send $500 abroad. That sequence can be recharacterized as a cash-funded transfer, and the same outcome applies if the card is handed to a relative who sends the money instead. Neither trap is a realistic risk for someone wiring savings from a brokerage account, but both are worth knowing before anyone offers you a clever workaround.
Where the rules stand in August 2026
The statute is in force. The regulations are not final. The IRS published the proposed rules on 13 April 2026 at 91 FR 18797, the comment period closed on 12 June 2026, and until final regulations appear, collectors and taxpayers may rely on the proposed version for transfers made after 31 December 2025, provided they follow it in full and consistently. The IRS also granted transfer providers relief from failure-to-deposit penalties for the first three calendar quarters of 2026 under Notice 2025-55. For a reader funding a transfer from a bank account, none of this changes the answer, but it does mean the detail is still capable of moving.
The disclosure you are entitled to before you pay
Federal law defines a remittance transfer as an electronic transfer of more than $15 sent by a consumer in the United States to a person or company in a foreign country through a remittance transfer provider, and international wires are explicitly included. If your provider is covered, the CFPB says you must receive, before you pay, the fees and taxes collected from you, the exchange rate applied, any fees charged by agents and institutions along the way, and the amount of money expected to be delivered.
The one number that compares providers
That last item is the whole game. It is the only figure that collapses fee, spread and intermediary charges into one comparable number, and it is stated in euros. Two providers quoting the same headline fee can deliver amounts that differ by thousands, and the disclosure is where that becomes visible. Ignore the fee. Compare the euros.
Three conditions attached to it
Three conditions on that right are worth knowing. Providers may give estimates rather than exact figures in certain cases, and an estimate must be labelled as one, so read the wording rather than the number. After paying you have 30 minutes to cancel at no charge, unless the money has already been picked up or deposited. And if something goes wrong you have 180 days to notify the provider, which then generally has 90 days to investigate and must tell you what it found.
The 500-transfer gap that leaves you unprotected
There is also a gap. A company is not a remittance transfer provider if it made 500 or fewer transfers in the previous calendar year and makes 500 or fewer in the current one, and if your institution sits below that line, federal law does not require it to give you any of the above. Small community banks and credit unions are the usual case. Ask the question before you assume the protection, because a wire sent without a pre-payment disclosure gives you nothing to compare and nothing to dispute.
How to price your own transfer against the ECB reference rate
The European Central Bank publishes a euro reference rate for the US dollar at around 16:00 CET on every working day, based on a concertation procedure between European central banks that normally takes place around 14:10 CET. The ECB is explicit that these rates are for information only and discourages their use for transactions, so this is not a rate you can demand. It is a yardstick, and it is free.
Five steps, done in one sitting
Set aside twenty minutes and work through them in order:
Open the ECB euro foreign exchange reference rates page and note the day's USD figure.
Request a pre-payment disclosure from each provider you are considering, for the exact amount you intend to send.
On each disclosure, find the euros your French account will receive. Ignore every other line.
Divide the dollars you are sending by the euros delivered. That is your true all-in rate, fee and spread combined.
Compare that rate to the ECB reference figure. The gap, multiplied by your transfer, is what the transfer costs you.
A worked illustration
The following uses invented numbers purely to show the arithmetic. Suppose the reference rate implies that $200,000 is worth 172,900 euros. Provider A's disclosure says 171,200 euros will be delivered; Provider B's says 168,400 euros. Provider A costs you 1,700 euros, Provider B costs you 4,500 euros, and the difference between them is 2,800 euros for the same wire on the same afternoon. Neither of those numbers appears as a fee on either disclosure.
Two things that break the comparison
Gather the quotes within the same hour, because the underlying rate moves during the day and a comparison across two afternoons compares the market, not the providers. And check whether the delivered figure is exact or an estimate before you treat it as a commitment. If you are also trying to work out what the rest of the first year costs, the Navigator will estimate the all-in cost of your move alongside the transfer itself.
Worth the hour: on a $200,000 transfer, the spread between a good rail and a poor one is routinely larger than a month of French rent. Gathering three disclosures and doing one division is the highest-paid hour of admin in the entire relocation. If you would rather see the whole cost picture in one place, including the transfer, the deposits and the first-year setup, run the numbers with the France Navigator.
Should you carry the cash instead?
No, and French customs law explains why in figures. Anyone physically carrying 10,000 euros or more into France, in cash, checks, gold, prepaid cards or securities, must file a customs declaration, whatever their nationality or reason for travelling. The declaration is free and can be filed online through the Dalia service, by post at least five working days before you cross, or at the customs office on the day.
Above 50,000 euros you must prove where it came from
Above 50,000 euros the rules tighten. You must supply a document proving where the money came from, and service-public.gouv.fr lists what counts: a bank document showing a cash withdrawal or a check being issued, proof of a currency exchange carried out by a professional, evidence of a property sale or a securities disposal, a gift, a loan or an acknowledgement of debt, a contract or invoice, proof of gambling winnings, or a signed declaration from the owner of the funds with a copy of their identity document. For banknotes and coins the supporting document must be dated within the six months before the declaration. For everything else the window is two years.
What a missed declaration costs
Get it wrong and the arithmetic stops being about basis points. Non-declaration or a false declaration exposes you to a fine equal to 50 percent of the sum involved and confiscation of the entire amount by customs. Separately, undeclared money carried across the border is treated as taxable income in France, and the tax authority can raise an assessment carrying late interest of 0.20 percent per month plus a 40 percent surcharge, though the surcharge is not applied on top of the 50 percent fine. Put plainly: to avoid a $2,000 spread you would be accepting a six-figure downside.
Why a wire is not the same thing
The reassuring half of the same rule is that the obligation attaches to physical transport, meaning money on you, in your luggage or in your vehicle. A bank wire is not physical transport and needs no customs declaration. Note also that the United States imposes its own declaration requirement on currency carried out of the country. US Customs and Border Protection is the authority to confirm the current threshold and form with before you fly.
Where the money gets held up
Four things delay a six-figure arrival more often than the wire itself does, and none of them is priced into any disclosure. The transfer is the easy part.
The account is not ready when the money is
The sequence people run is backwards: sell the house, then look for a French bank. In practice a French account can take weeks to move from opened to fully operational, and a wire cannot arrive before there is an IBAN to receive it. Settle which French banks accept American clients before you set a transfer date, not after.
The beneficiary name does not match
French banks generally check the beneficiary name against the account holder exactly as registered. A middle name that appears on the US side and not the French one, or a maiden name on one and a married name on the other, is enough for a wire to be returned. The return trip is converted a second time, so the mismatch costs spread twice.
The bank asks where the money came from
French banks operate under anti-money-laundering obligations, and a large incoming sum can prompt a request for supporting documents before the funds are released. Your bank is the only party that can tell you what it will want, and asking in advance costs nothing. The customs list above is a reasonable guide to the kind of paperwork that satisfies the question: a notarial deed for a property sale, a brokerage statement for a securities disposal, a signed gift declaration.
Splitting the transfer is not a tax strategy
There is no annual threshold in Section 4475 and no minimum above $15, so breaking $200,000 into four transfers changes nothing about the tax. It only changes your exposure to the exchange rate on four different days, which is a currency decision, not a compliance one. Split it if you want to average your rate, not because you think it keeps you under a limit.
Before you press send
Do one thing this week: get a pre-payment disclosure from three providers within the same hour, for the exact amount you intend to move, and compare only the euros delivered.
Most people can handle this alone, and should. It is an hour of arithmetic, the disclosure does the hard work, and no adviser can conjure a better exchange rate than the one you find by comparing three of them. Where it stops being a solo job is when the transfer is load-bearing for something else: a property completion with a fixed date, funds arriving as a gift or an inheritance distribution rather than your own savings, or a move where the transfer has to be sequenced against a visa timeline and a French account that does not exist yet. In those cases the cost of the wire is the small question and the sequencing is the expensive one.
If your transfer is one line in a bigger budget, the Navigator will price your transfer and the rest of your first year in one pass, so you can see what the move costs before you commit to a date. It also helps to know the wider money map for Americans moving to France before you decide how much to bring at all.
FAQ
Does the 1 percent tax apply if I send money to my own French account?
Sending to yourself is still a remittance transfer: a designated recipient is any person you name to receive funds at a location in a foreign country, and that can be you. It makes no difference to the tax, though, because Section 4475 follows the funding instrument. Fund it from your bank account or a card and it is untaxed either way.
Do I have to declare a bank wire to French customs?
No. The French declaration obligation applies to money physically transported across the border, on you, in your baggage or in your vehicle, at 10,000 euros or above. A wire moves through regulated intermediaries rather than in your suitcase, so no customs declaration is required, however large the amount.
Is the money taxable in France when it arrives?
Moving your own already-taxed savings is a movement of capital, not income. Service-public notes that funds arriving in France can be taxable depending on their nature and origin, for example an inheritance or untaxed income, and advises checking with the French tax service. The transfer itself is not the taxable event; what the money is might be.
Does the transfer trigger an FBAR filing?
The transfer does not; the resulting balance does. A US person must file an FBAR if the aggregate value of their foreign financial accounts exceeds $10,000 at any point in the calendar year. It is due 15 April with an automatic extension to 15 October that you do not need to request. Form 8938 may apply separately, on different thresholds published by the IRS.
If my transfer is cancelled, do I get the 1 percent back?
If the tax applied and the transfer is cancelled or expires with the money returned to you, the proposed regulations say the sender may be eligible to claim a refund of the excise tax from the IRS. The tax attaches when the transfer is made, which is the earlier of the provider initiating it or you paying, regardless of whether the recipient is ever paid.
For the filing obligations that follow you once the money is in France, see your ongoing US filing obligations from France.
About the author
Aurelio Maurici
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