No topic in the Americans-abroad world generates more hope, more rumor, and more dangerous conclusions than residence-based taxation — the proposal that the US should tax people based on where they live, like nearly every other country, instead of on citizenship (I Moved Abroad — Do I Still Have to File US Taxes? ). This page tracks where the effort actually stands, and it leads with the only sentence that affects your filings:

RBT is not law. Nothing about your current obligations has changed.

Status as of July 7, 2026: Not enacted. No current filing obligations have changed. H.R. 10468 was introduced in the prior Congress and did not complete the legislative process. A revised version has been expected, but this page should be rechecked before relying on it.

The timeline so far

In December 2024, Representative Darin LaHood introduced the Residence-Based Taxation for Americans Abroad Act — one of the most developed legislative versions of the idea in years, building on earlier attempts going back to 2018. The bill would let long-term Americans abroad elect non-resident treatment: US tax on US-source income only, relief from parts of the foreign-account reporting apparatus for qualifying electors holding a certificate of non-residency, depending on the final text, with a compliance-certification requirement to get in and a departure-tax mechanism for wealthier electors.

That bill expired with the last Congress in January 2025 without a vote — expected for a discussion draft. Since then, advocacy and practitioner updates have reported that Rep. LaHood’s office and Senator Todd Young’s office have been involved in reworking a revised version through stakeholder feedback and the Joint Committee on Taxation’s technical review and revenue scoring. Advocacy groups reported through the spring of 2026 that reintroduction was anticipated “as early as possible” in the year; as of this page’s review date, the reintroduced bill had not yet appeared, and no committee vote has occurred in either chamber. The proposal has something its predecessors never had — explicit presidential support for ending double taxation of Americans abroad — and it still has what all its predecessors had: no enacted text.

How to read the news about it

Two failure modes dominate. The optimistic one: treating momentum as law — filing gaps left unfixed, or renunciations deferred, “because RBT is coming.” The advocacy organizations pushing hardest for the bill are themselves explicit on this: keep filing, keep current, make decisions on the law that exists. If anything, the bill raises the value of being compliant now — the electing mechanism, in every drafted version, requires certifying years of tax compliance to get in. The people positioned to benefit from RBT on day one are the ones whose filings are clean the day it passes (Streamlined Filing: What “Non-Willful” Means and Who Actually Qualifies is the standing path for those who aren’t).

The pessimistic failure mode is quieter: dismissing the whole thing as perennial vaporware and tuning out. That’s also miscalibrated — the current effort is materially further along than any predecessor, and if it moves, one plausible path is attachment to a larger tax vehicle, which means status could change faster than casual observers expect.

What this page will update

Reintroduction (bill number, chambers), committee action, scoring outcomes, any enacted change. The honest status on any given day is exactly what the review stamp above says it is — if that date is stale, so is this page, and the underlying question should be re-checked, not assumed.

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