Your first US tax return after moving here

If you have moved to the United States from a country where tax is handled for you — deducted, reconciled and closed without you ever filling anything in — the first thing to understand is that here, it is not. The return is yours to file. The deadline is yours to remember. Nobody will write to tell you that you owe something until well after you were supposed to have said so yourself.

That is not a warning about penalties so much as a description of the design. The US system assumes the taxpayer is the one who knows their own situation, and it puts the reporting obligation on them.

Withholding is not the same as settling up

If you work for an employer, tax is taken out of each paycheck. It is easy to assume that this is the tax, paid, done. It is not — it is an estimate made in advance, based on a form you filled in when you started.

The return is where the estimate meets reality. If too much was withheld you get the difference back, which is what a refund actually is: your own money returned, not a payment from the government. If too little was withheld you owe the remainder. Most people who work for an employer have already paid most of what they owe, and many are owed something back.

Two returns, not one

You may have to file with the federal government and separately with the state you live in. They are different authorities with different rules, different forms and, sometimes, different definitions of income.

Some states have no income tax at all. Some tax only certain kinds of income. Some start from a figure your federal return produces, which is why the federal one usually has to be worked out first. If you moved between states during the year, or live in one and work in another, you may have obligations in both — and that is common enough that it should not alarm you, but it does need handling rather than ignoring.

The identification number question

To file, you need either a Social Security number or an ITIN. If you are authorised to work you will usually have the former. If you are not eligible for one but still have a filing obligation — which happens more than people expect — the ITIN exists precisely for that, and applying for one is part of the filing process rather than a prerequisite to it.

Which one you hold affects which credits you can claim. It does not affect your obligation to file, your rates, or your deduction.

Words you will meet, in plain terms

• Gross income Everything you were paid, before anything is taken out.
• Adjusted gross income (AGI) Gross income minus a specific list of adjustments the law allows. Many credits phase out against this figure rather than against what you actually earned, so it matters out of proportion to its size.
• Standard deduction A flat amount subtracted from your income that everyone gets automatically. For a single filer in the 2026 tax year it is $16,100.
• Itemizing Adding up specific deductible costs instead of taking the standard deduction. Worth doing only when they come to more than it, which for most people they do not.
• Filing status Single, married filing jointly, and so on. It is not just a description — it changes your deduction, your rates and your eligibility for several credits.

The residency question that is not about immigration

US tax law has its own definition of residency, and it is not the same as your immigration status. Someone can be a non-resident for immigration purposes and a resident for tax purposes, or the reverse. It is decided largely by how many days you were physically present in the country, across the current year and the two before it.

This is genuinely one of the harder parts of a first return, and it is the point at which it is most worth asking someone who does this professionally, because the answer changes which form you file and what income the US taxes at all.

Every figure here is for the 2026 tax year. Amounts change annually, and a page written for an earlier year will give you different numbers with equal confidence.