Paying an IRS Streamlined Balance From the UK: EFTPS, Direct Pay and Wire

An IRS Streamlined Filing submission is only finished when the money arrives with it: the tax and all applicable statutory interest shown on the three amended or delinquent Forms 1040 must be paid at the time the package is sent, and under the domestic procedures the 5 percent Title 26 miscellaneous offshore penalty is paid alongside it. For a filer sitting in London with a UK current account and a UK billing address, that is materially harder than the IRS payment menu at irs.gov/payments suggests. The channels that realistically work from the UK are a debit or credit card through an authorised processor, a same-day wire sent by your UK bank into the Federal Tax Collection Service, or a US dollar cheque posted with the paper package. IRS Direct Pay and EFTPS both assume a US bank account, and each carries a second gate that catches streamlined filers in particular.

The payment obligation itself is not ambiguous. The IRS page for taxpayers residing outside the United States, at irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/u-s-taxpayers-residing-outside-the-united-states, requires you to submit payment of all tax due as reflected on the tax returns and all applicable statutory interest with respect to each of the late payment amounts. The domestic page at irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/u-s-taxpayers-residing-in-the-united-states repeats that requirement and adds the miscellaneous offshore penalty, and it states that your taxpayer identification number must be included on your check. In the returns we prepare, the mechanics of getting sterling out of a UK bank and onto the correct US tax year is routinely the part that takes longest, not the returns.

What exactly has to be paid with a streamlined submission?

There are two streamlined tracks and they carry different money. The Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures (SFOP) apply where you meet the non-residency test, which for a US citizen or lawful permanent resident means no US abode and physical presence outside the United States for at least 330 full days in one or more of the last three tax years. Under SFOP there is no miscellaneous offshore penalty at all, so the payment is tax plus statutory interest for each of the three covered years. The Streamlined Domestic Offshore Procedures (SDOP) apply to filers who cannot meet that test, and they add a penalty equal to 5 percent of the highest aggregate balance or value of the foreign financial assets subject to the penalty across the covered tax return period and the covered FBAR period.

Both tracks cover three years of income tax returns and six years of FBARs, with the FBARs filed separately through FinCEN's BSA E-Filing System at bsaefiling.fincen.treas.gov rather than with the paper package. Note that the IRS withdrew its separate delinquent FBAR page in mid-2026, so late FBARs are now filed either inside a streamlined submission or through the BSA system with a reason for late filing. No money is sent to FinCEN; nothing about the FBAR filing generates a payment. Everything you pay goes to the IRS.

Statutory interest is the piece filers underestimate. Interest runs from the original due date of each return, not from the date you decide to come forward, and it is not waived by acceptance into the programme. The rate is reset quarterly and published at irs.gov/payments/quarterly-interest-rates; for individual underpayments it is the federal short-term rate plus 3 percentage points, and for the third quarter of 2026 that produced a rate of 7 percent. On a three-year catch-up covering years that are already several years old, interest can be a meaningful fraction of the tax.

• Tax shown as due on each of the three Forms 1040 or 1040-X, computed year by year
• Statutory interest on each late payment amount, running from that year's original due date
• For SDOP only, the 5 percent Title 26 miscellaneous offshore penalty, computed on Form 14654
• Nothing for the FBARs themselves, provided the submission is accepted and the conduct was non-willful
• Nothing for failure-to-file, failure-to-pay, accuracy-related or information return penalties, which are the penalties the programme relieves

How do you pay an IRS Streamlined Filing balance from a UK bank account?

The IRS lists its channels at irs.gov/payments. Read that page as a UK resident and the list shrinks quickly, because most of the electronic options run on the US ACH network and need a US routing number, and the card options run on a US merchant acquirer that expects a US billing address. Here is how each channel behaves in practice for a filer whose only bank is a UK bank.

• IRS Direct Pay: needs a US bank routing number and a checking or savings account, and needs a prior-year return to verify your identity against. Frequently unavailable to streamlined filers.
• EFTPS: individuals can no longer create new enrolments, so this is only open to filers who enrolled before the cut-off. It also debits a US bank account.
• IRS Online Account: same ACH rails, plus ID.me identity verification, which is workable from abroad but slower.
• Debit or credit card through an authorised processor: no US bank account needed, but a UK billing address and a UK card issuer create real failure points, and there are per-year frequency caps.
• Same-day wire through the Federal Tax Collection Service: the only channel designed for a payer with no US bank account at all. Your UK bank sends it. This is the reliable fallback.
• Cheque or money order with the paper package: workable, slow, and dependent on a US dollar instrument that a US lockbox can clear.

Why does IRS Direct Pay so often refuse a streamlined filer?

Direct Pay, at irs.gov/payments/direct-pay-with-bank-account, is free, needs no sign-in and is the channel most articles recommend first. It fails for streamlined filers for two independent reasons. The first is banking: Direct Pay debits a US bank account using a US routing number (ABA) and accepts checking or savings accounts only. A UK sort code and account number cannot be entered, and a UK debit card is not an accepted instrument on this channel.

The second reason is the one that catches people out. Direct Pay authenticates you against a prior-year tax return of your choosing, going back roughly five to six years depending on the time of year, and it asks for your name, address and filing status exactly as they appeared on that return. The IRS states plainly that personal tax payments are unavailable if you have never filed taxes or if it has been over six years since you filed. A streamlined filer is, by definition, someone who did not file when they should have. If your last US return was eight years ago, or if there has never been one, Direct Pay has nothing to match you against and will reject the identity step. Even where it works, the address on file is usually an old US address, and a mismatch against your current UK address will fail the check.

Where Direct Pay is available, the designation fields matter more than the payment itself. You choose a Reason for Payment, an Apply Payment To value that identifies the form, and a Tax Period for Payment that identifies the year. For a delinquent original return you are generally selecting a balance due against Form 1040 for that specific year; for an amended return you are selecting 1040-X for that year. The system issues a confirmation number, which is the evidence you keep. Guidance on each field is at irs.gov/payments/direct-pay-help.

Can you still enrol in EFTPS from the UK?

No, not as an individual. EFTPS is being wound down for individual taxpayers. EFTPS.gov states that effective 17 October 2025 individuals are not able to create new enrolments via EFTPS.gov, and that all individuals will be required to transition away from EFTPS.gov later in 2026, with IRS Direct Pay and IRS Online Account named as the replacements. The IRS page at irs.gov/payments/eftps-the-electronic-federal-tax-payment-system confirms that individual taxpayers can no longer create new EFTPS accounts while existing users can continue for now.

This is a genuine change of advice. Older guides, including plenty still ranking, tell UK-resident filers to enrol in EFTPS ahead of a streamlined submission. That route is closed to new individual enrolees. Even historically it was awkward from the UK: enrolment took several business days to process, credentials arrived by post to the address of record, which meant international mail delivery times, and access requires secure sign-in through a credential service provider. If you already hold live EFTPS credentials and a US bank account, you can still use it, and it remains the cleanest way to schedule several dated payments against different years. If you do not, do not spend a fortnight trying.

The successor route is IRS Online Account. That needs identity verification, which for someone outside the US means an ID.me account verified with a government-issued photo ID such as a passport, plus either the self-service photo and selfie process or a live video chat agent. The IRS explains the account set-up at irs.gov/help/creating-an-account-for-irsgov and signposts help for taxpayers who live outside the US and hold a Social Security number. Budget days for this, not minutes, and note that the payment still debits a US bank account once you are in.

Paying by debit or credit card from a UK billing address

Cards are the only fully electronic channel that does not require a US bank account, so for many UK-resident filers this is the first thing to try. The IRS does not take card payments itself; it uses authorised third-party processors, currently Pay1040 and ACI Payments, listed with their fee schedules at irs.gov/payments/pay-your-taxes-by-debit-or-credit-card. At the time of writing that page showed a flat fee of a little over two dollars for a consumer debit card, credit card fees of 1.75 percent and 1.85 percent respectively subject to a minimum, and materially higher rates around 2.9 percent for commercial or corporate cards. Processors revise these, so check the page on the day.

The practical failure modes are all on the UK side, not the IRS side. The processors run address verification against the billing address on the card. A UK address in a form built around US state and ZIP fields is where most attempts die, and the workaround is usually to enter the postcode in the ZIP field exactly as the card issuer holds it and to select the correct country before the address block, rather than after. Second, a five-figure dollar payment to an unfamiliar US merchant is precisely the pattern UK card fraud systems block; call your issuer before you attempt it, not after the decline. Third, some UK credit card issuers treat a tax payment as a cash-like transaction, which attracts a cash advance fee and immediate interest, so check the issuer's terms before putting a large balance on plastic. Fourth, the sterling to dollar conversion is done by your issuer at its own rate plus a foreign transaction fee, and if the processor offers to bill you in sterling that is dynamic currency conversion and is almost always worse.

There is also a volume constraint people miss. The IRS publishes a frequency limit table at irs.gov/payments/frequency-limit-table-by-type-of-tax-payment, and Form 1040 balance due payments, prior year payments and 1040-X payments each carry a published cap of two per year. A three-year catch-up means three separate payments, and if you are also paying an SDOP penalty you may be attempting four or five card transactions in a single sitting. Check the table against the exact payment types you intend to use before assuming the cards will take the lot.

The same-day wire through a UK bank: the fallback that always works

If you have no US bank account and the cards will not cooperate, the same-day wire is the answer, and it is the channel the IRS itself designed for you. The general page is irs.gov/payments/same-day-wire-federal-tax-payments, and the international version is at irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/foreign-electronic-payments-tax-type-codes. The IRS states there that international taxpayers who do not have a US bank account may transfer funds from their foreign bank account directly to the IRS, and that your foreign bank must have a banking relationship with a US bank, although the US bank does not have to be an affiliate or otherwise related to the foreign bank. Small institutions may not manage it; most large UK banks can.

The mechanism is the Federal Tax Collection Service. You complete the Same-Day Taxpayer Payment Worksheet and hand it to your bank, which formats the wire accordingly. The IRS publishes the receiving details on the foreign electronic payments page: the IRS RTN or ABA number is 091036164, shown as US TREAS SINGLE TX, with an IRS account number of 20092900IRS. The worksheet carries your taxpayer identification number, the amount, the tax type code and the tax period. Complete a separate worksheet for each payment where you are paying more than one form or period, which is exactly the streamlined situation.

The tax type code is what routes the money. The IRS lists the codes for the 1040 family on that same page, including 10400 for a payment on an amended return, 10402 where an extension was filed, 10404 for an advance payment of a deficiency, 10406 for an estimated tax payment and 10407 for a subsequent payment made on a return or in response to an IRS notice. Read the table and match the code to what you are actually filing for that year rather than reusing one code across the whole package. Your bank will tell you its own cut-off time, availability and charges; the IRS says only to contact your financial institution for those, and it warns openly that international wire transfer can be costly.

Who bears the wire fees, and what does the FX actually cost?

This is the part nobody writes about and it produces real underpayments. A cross-border wire carries a sending fee from your UK bank, and it may carry deductions taken by correspondent banks in the chain. If the wire is sent on shared charges, an intermediary can lift a fee out of the principal, and the IRS then receives less than the figure on your return. That leaves a small residual balance on that tax year, which continues to accrue interest and eventually generates a notice posted to an address that may be out of date. Instruct the wire so that all charges are borne by you as the sender, and consider sending a small buffer above the computed liability rather than the exact cent, since an overpayment on the correct year is a far smaller problem than an underpayment.

On the currency itself, you are converting sterling into a dollar liability that was fixed years ago. The exchange rate on the day you pay has no effect on the US tax computed on the returns, which is already in dollars; it only determines how much sterling leaves your account. Retail bank spreads on a large one-off transfer are wide, and a regulated payment institution will usually beat the high street bank, though it must be able to send a wire that reaches the Federal Tax Collection Service with the worksheet data intact. Keep the sterling debit advice, because that is what evidences the cost if the payment later has to be traced.

How do you make sure the money lands on the right tax year?

A streamlined submission is a multi-year event, and the IRS does not spread a single lump sum across three years for you. Pay each year separately, with its own designation, and never send one combined payment for the whole package. On Direct Pay that means one transaction per year with the tax period set explicitly. On a wire it means one Same-Day Taxpayer Payment Worksheet per year, each with its own tax type code and period. On a card it means one processor transaction per year, choosing the year in the processor's screens. On a cheque it means writing the tax year and the form number on the face of the cheque.

The failure mode is specific and it is expensive in time rather than money. A payment applied to the wrong year leaves one year underpaid and another sitting in credit. The underpaid year keeps accruing interest and produces a balance due notice; the overpaid year may generate an unexpected refund, which the IRS may then issue as a US dollar cheque to a stale address. Meanwhile the examiner reviewing your streamlined package sees a submission where the payment does not reconcile to the returns, which is the last impression you want to make when the whole submission rests on a certification of non-willful conduct. Correcting a misapplied payment means contacting the IRS to have it transferred, and doing that from the UK, across a time zone, with international phone charges and postal turnaround, is a project. The international line for individual taxpayers is 267-941-1000.

Paying by cheque with the paper package

Streamlined submissions are paper. The IRS states that electronic submissions will not be accepted and gives the SFOP address as Internal Revenue Service, 3651 South I-H 35, Stop 6063 AUSC, Attn: Streamlined Foreign Offshore, Austin, TX 78741, with the equivalent domestic address on the SDOP page. Because the package is going in the post anyway, enclosing cheques is superficially attractive. The IRS instructions at irs.gov/payments/pay-by-check-or-money-order require the cheque to be payable to U.S. Treasury and to show your name and address, a daytime phone number, the tax year, the related tax form number and your SSN, ITIN or EIN, and they tell you not to use staples or paper clips to affix the payment.

In practice we rarely use this route from the UK. A cheque has to be an instrument a US lockbox can clear, and a sterling cheque or a foreign draft is not, so unless you hold a US dollar chequing account there is nothing to write. Postal transit adds weeks during which statutory interest continues to run, and there is no confirmation number to file. Where cheques are used, write one per tax year, never one for the whole package, and photocopy each cheque before it goes in the envelope.

A worked example (illustration only)

The following figures are illustrative and are not a quoted client case. Assume a US citizen who has lived in London for nine years, has never filed a US return, qualifies for SFOP on the 330-day test, and after foreign tax credits has a residual US tax liability across the three covered years of 4,200 dollars, 3,100 dollars and 5,600 dollars respectively, with assumed statutory interest of 1,150 dollars in total. Total due is 14,050 dollars. Assume an illustrative rate of 1.27 dollars to the pound.

Direct Pay is unavailable because there is no prior return to authenticate against. EFTPS is unavailable because new individual enrolments are closed. That leaves cards or a wire. On a personal credit card at an illustrative 1.75 percent processing fee, the three payments cost roughly 246 dollars in processor fees, plus the issuer's foreign transaction fee, typically around 3 percent, which is another 420 dollars or so, and possibly cash-advance interest. On a single wire per year through a UK bank at an illustrative 25 pounds per wire, the direct cost is 75 pounds plus the FX spread. In this shape the wire wins comfortably, and it wins by more the larger the balance. Below roughly two or three thousand dollars a year the flat wire fee starts to lose to a debit card, which carries a flat processing fee rather than a percentage.

How do you evidence the payment inside the streamlined package?

The certification forms, 14653 for SFOP and 14654 for SDOP, ask you to attest to the facts and, for SDOP, to set out the penalty computation. They do not contain a payment schedule, so we build one and include it. A one-page schedule listing each tax year, the tax, the interest, the total, the date paid, the channel used and the reference number turns an examiner's reconciliation from a search into a glance. Keep the underlying evidence with your own file: the Direct Pay or processor confirmation numbers, the bank's wire confirmation or MT103 with the reference, a copy of each completed Same-Day Taxpayer Payment Worksheet, and copies of any cheques.

Timing matters too. Pay before or at the same time as the package is posted, not after. A submission that arrives with the tax unpaid is not a complete submission, and the IRS requirement to submit payment of all tax due is written as a condition of the procedures, not as a courtesy. If a wire will take two working days, send it and post the package once it has left, then note the value date on the payment schedule.

Does the payment date matter on the UK side?

It can. Where the same income is taxed in both countries, GOV.UK explains at gov.uk/tax-foreign-income/taxed-twice that you can usually claim Foreign Tax Credit Relief when you report the overseas income on your UK return, and that you may not get back the full amount of foreign tax paid where a smaller amount is set by the double taxation agreement or where the income would have been taxed at a lower rate in the UK. The detailed mechanics, including the requirement to have reduced the foreign tax to the minimum due under the treaty, are in helpsheet HS263 at gov.uk/government/publications/calculating-foreign-tax-credit-relief-on-income-hs263-self-assessment-helpsheet.

Two practical points follow. First, a US tax year ends on 31 December and a UK tax year on 5 April, so the US tax you have just paid under a streamlined submission has to be matched to the correct UK year on the SA106 foreign pages, and the payment date is part of the audit trail for that. Second, amounts have to be converted to sterling, and HMRC publishes monthly and yearly average exchange rates through the Trade Tariff service at trade-tariff.service.gov.uk. If the streamlined submission changes the US tax on income you have already reported to HMRC, the UK returns for those years may need amending within the normal Self Assessment time limits, and that is a separate exercise from the US catch-up.

The payment checklist we run before a streamlined package leaves

• Confirm the track: SFOP means tax and interest only, SDOP adds the 5 percent miscellaneous offshore penalty
• Compute tax and statutory interest separately for each of the three covered years, using the published quarterly rates
• Choose the channel on evidence, not habit: test Direct Pay eligibility first, then cards, then wire
• For a wire, confirm your UK bank can reach a US correspondent, complete one Same-Day Taxpayer Payment Worksheet per year, and instruct all charges to the sender
• Match the tax type code and tax period to each year's form; never send one combined payment for the whole package
• Warn your card issuer in advance if paying by card, and check whether the issuer treats it as a cash advance
• Capture every confirmation number, wire reference and cheque copy, and build a one-page payment schedule for the package
• Post the package to the correct Austin address, remembering that electronic submissions will not be accepted
• Diarise a follow-up to confirm each year shows the payment, and to catch any correspondent bank shortfall

Paying is the least intellectually interesting part of a streamlined submission and the part most likely to leave a residue on your IRS account three years later. Get the channel decision right at the start, designate every payment to a single year, and keep the evidence in the same file as the returns.

Related reading and tools

• US Tax Services & IRS Compliance
• UK Tax Services
• IRS Streamlined Filing
• UK Income Tax Calculator
• US Federal Income Tax Calculator

Every situation is different. Book a cross-border tax consultation to discuss how these rules apply to you.

Authoritative sources

IRS — Streamlined Filing Compliance Procedures

FinCEN — Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR)

HM Revenue & Customs

GOV.UK — Tax on foreign income

IRS — Foreign Earned Income Exclusion

IRS — Foreign Tax Credit

ICAEW

Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT)

AICPA

MoneyHelper (UK)