A total of 5,790 names appeared on the Federal Register’s quarterly list of Americans renouncing citizenship or relinquishing long-term green-card status over the past four quarters — the highest four-quarter total in six years, according to an analysis by Greenback Expat Tax Services reported by Newsweek. The pace picked up sharply in the second quarter of 2026 alone, when 1,781 names were listed, up 68.5% from a year earlier. Across the first half of 2026 as a whole, 3,243 names were recorded, up 38.5% from the first half of 2025.
The current run sits against a longer historical backdrop. Annual renunciations averaged fewer than 500 a year between 2000 and 2008. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), passed in 2010 and effective from 2014 across agreements with more than 190 countries, changed that picture: renunciations hit a then-record 5,409 in 2016, fell back to 2,071 in 2019, then jumped to a modern-history record of 6,705 in 2020.
One likely driver of the recent acceleration, according to Newsweek’s reporting, is a fee cut: the cost of formally renouncing US citizenship, which had stood at $2,350 since 2015, was reduced to $450 on 13 April 2026 — an 80% reduction.
Peter Spiro, a law professor at Temple University, Alexander Marino of Moodys’ renunciation practice, and Melissa Chavin, a US immigration and citizenship lawyer based in London, were quoted pointing to the compliance burden of FATCA-driven double reporting as the primary driver of renunciations, with political and ideological factors under the current US administration cited as a secondary factor for some filers.
For Americans living abroad, the combination of a sharply lower renunciation fee and a rising four-quarter total signals that the administrative barrier to formalizing an existing decision to leave US citizenship behind has eased, even as the underlying tax-compliance pressures the quoted experts describe remain the more consistent long-run driver.
References
Newsweek – Thousands of Americans Renounce Citizenship as Expat Figures Rise
