Running a US Business While Living Abroad

If you run a US-registered business (an LLC, an S-corp, a sole proprietorship) and relocate abroad, the business's own US tax and compliance obligations generally continue regardless of where you personally live — moving doesn't dissolve or change your business's US filing requirements on its own. See the US Citizens tax guide for how your personal citizenship-based tax obligations interact with this separately.

Where things get more complex is the interaction between your personal presence in a foreign country and your business — this is the concept of "permanent establishment" (PE) in international tax law, and there's a genuinely major, recent development worth knowing directly: the OECD's November 2025 update to the Model Tax Convention introduced a new two-part framework specifically addressing remote work, including a 50% working-time safe harbor — if you spend less than half your working time in a given country over a 12-month period, that alone generally doesn't create a taxable business presence there. Exceeding that threshold shifts the analysis to qualitative factors (whether there's a genuine commercial reason for the arrangement). This is still genuinely one of the higher-complexity intersections covered anywhere on this site — treaty adoption of this new framework varies by country, and the specifics depend heavily on your exact business structure and destination — so confirm your situation directly with a cross-border tax professional rather than treat the safe harbor as automatic protection.

Banking and payment processing can also get more complicated once you're physically abroad — some US business banking and payment platforms have geographic restrictions or require periodic reverification that assumes a US-based user, which is worth testing and confirming directly with your specific providers before you've fully committed to a long-term move.

None of this is a reason to avoid running a US business from abroad — plenty of people do it successfully — but it's a genuinely different and more complex situation than either "just being a US citizen abroad" or "just running a US business" covered separately elsewhere on this site, and deserves its own direct professional advice rather than assuming either general guide covers it completely.