The US Treasury’s latest Quarterly Publication of Individuals Who Have Chosen to Expatriate names 1,781 people who gave up their US citizenship in the second quarter of 2026. Only four quarters since the list began in 1996 have contained more names.
Combined with the 1,462 names published in the first quarter, the half-year total reaches 3,243 published expatriates, the highest first half on record outside pandemic-distorted 2020.
At this pace, 2026 would close at approximately 6,500 names, second only to 2020’s all-time record of 6,707 and comfortably ahead of 2016’s 5,411.
Averaged over the past two years, the lists now run at roughly 1,360 names per quarter, the highest sustained rate on record, and annual totals have climbed almost without interruption since bottoming out at 2,426 in 2021: 3,816 in 2022, 3,260 in 2023, 4,819 in 2024, and 4,892 in 2025.
The published figures trail the actual renunciations by 12 to 18 months on average, sometimes stretching past two years.
The Real Number Is Higher
Even those figures capture only a fraction of the true exodus, argues David Lesperance, founder of Lesperance & Associates, who has handled American expatriations for more than 30 years and tracks the publication in his firm’s quarterly US Expatriation Index.
The names printed each quarter belong exclusively to “covered expatriates”: those with a net worth above $2 million, a five-year average federal tax liability above $190,000 (indexed from 2023), or an inability to certify five years of US tax compliance before departure.
Everyone else leaves unrecorded. “Since the list does not include those who gave up long-term Green Card status or those who are not ‘covered expatriates,’ one can easily estimate that the actual number of individuals giving up US citizenship or long-term residence is multiples of the number of those noted on the list,” he explains.
His paper identifies a further constraint: the State Department restricts the number of renunciation appointments available at any given mission, and not all missions offer them.
“Not My Only Option”
Heidi Finn, Principal of Latitude Group’s Denver office, cautions that she sees the front end of the exit funnel, often speaking with clients “two to five years earlier, when the question is still whether to build another option at all,” while renunciation lawyers meet them at the end.
From that vantage point, the demand she observes is overwhelmingly for insurance rather than exit.
Very few of her clients want to “abandon America tomorrow,” she explains; more and more say they simply “want to make sure America is not my only option.”
The typical sequence, she says, runs from second citizenship or residency to optionality, with renunciation reserved for a much smaller group at the very end; most families never reach that last step.
Finn ranks tax, compliance, and banking friction first among the motives she hears: Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) reporting, mortgage refusals, and banks closing or restricting the accounts of US persons abroad.
The political climate does push some of her clients to consider renunciation, she adds, but practical burden, not ideology, is what fills her pipeline. For many Americans abroad, the question isn’t whether they hate America, but “why is being an American making my life harder than it needs to be?”
The Wealthy Are Staying Put?
Among the high-net-worth individual (HNWI) clientele of Nuri Katz, founder of Apex Capital Partners, the rise barely registers. “We are not feeling this rise in renunciation,” he remarks, describing clients who purchase Caribbean citizenship “as a Plan B only,” with most having “no intention of moving anywhere.”
The people actually renouncing, he finds, are largely accidental Americans abroad “who cannot afford to pay accountants in the US to manage their tax burden.”
For the wealthy, he says, the calculus inverts: the exit tax, levied on unrealized worldwide gains, is “incredibly overburdening,” and most HNWIs conclude it isn’t worth it.
If Katz is right, those accidental Americans should, in theory, be showing up in the quarterly counts: never having filed US taxes, they cannot certify five years of compliance, the third trigger for covered expatriate status.
In practice, Lesperance doubts the government catches them. Flagging a non-certifier requires the IRS to notice a missing Form 8854, a filing due by April 15 of the year after renunciation, and “there is very little transparency from the government on how an individual is deemed a ‘covered expatriate’,” he observes.
“Given the IRS’s general lack of resources,” he reasons, “it is logical to conclude that the vast majority of the names included on the list belong to individuals who actually completed Form 8854 and noted that they exceeded either the net worth or five-year tax liability thresholds.”
In other words, the wealthy self-report their way onto the list, the accidental Americans slip off it unnoticed, and the record pace is being set by the rich and compliant while the priced-out renounce in numbers no agency publishes.
The Exit Crowd Goes Ancestry First
Finn draws a line between the surge in Americans buying residence permits abroad and the renunciation statistics. Residency confers the right to live somewhere, not a new nationality, and citizenship can take years to follow.
When a client genuinely wants an exit passport, her first stop is the family tree. Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Germany all offer citizenship by descent options.
“Ancestry may be the quiet volume leader,” she argues, noting it doesn’t appear in investment migration statistics because no investment program sits behind it. “Sometimes the second passport someone is looking for isn’t something they need to buy at all. It may already be sitting in their family tree.”
Where no ancestral claim exists, she points to Caribbean citizenship by investment (CBI) when speed matters, and still rates Portugal among the strongest options despite the country extending the naturalization timeline in 2026.
One number she flags for anyone who renounces but keeps American assets: a US citizen has a $15 million federal estate-tax exclusion in 2026, while a nonresident noncitizen with US holdings faces a filing threshold of just $60,000.
As for where the renunciation figures go from here, Katz expects no dramatic break in either direction. The quarterly counts will “fluctuate for many years to come in the same range,” he predicts, so long as Americans abroad must file US taxes and FATCA reports simply for holding the passport.
Lesperance’s index takes a different view, anticipating the counts will keep climbing through 2028. His paper points to California’s proposed wealth tax stoking fears of a federal version, high-profile critics of the administration fearing retribution, unease over political violence, and a weakening dollar that shrinks the cost of paying the exit tax, a dynamic he last observed during the 2008 financial crisis.
Whether 2026 takes the all-time record will become clearer when the third-quarter list lands this fall.
