Of all the conversations we have with people moving from the UK to America, one produces more avoidable expense than any other — and it's about an account most movers consider the safest thing they own: the stocks and shares ISA.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: the IRS does not recognise your ISA. The wrapper that makes it tax-free in Britain is invisible to American law. And if your ISA holds what most ISAs hold — UK or Irish funds, index trackers, ETFs — then from the day you become a US tax resident, those holdings fall under one of the harshest regimes in the American tax code, with punitive rates and complex reporting for every fund, every year.
The window that closes on arrival
The reason this matters before you fly: sales made while you're still only a UK tax resident are, for ISA assets, typically tax-free — that's the ISA doing its job one last time. The same sale made after US residency begins lands inside the American net. So there is a window in which the problem can be dissolved at essentially no cost, and it closes on a date most people can't name precisely — because it isn't your flight date.
US residency runs on day-counting, and days spent stateside before the move — work trips, an early arrival on a business visa, house-hunting — can start your residency earlier than your visa suggests. We've seen movers who assumed an October start discover their residency began months earlier. Establishing your actual start date is step one; everything else is sequenced against it.
Not everything needs to go
Individual shares carry none of the fund problem — a portfolio of ordinary equities can often cross the Atlantic intact. Cash ISAs are merely inefficient, not toxic. The decisions are holding-by-holding, which is why the useful first document isn't your account value — it's the holdings list. And on the other side, the same exposure can usually be rebuilt within days using US-domiciled equivalents of the very funds you sold, often at lower fees.
The one-paragraph plan
Establish your true US residency start date. List the ISA's actual holdings. Sell what needs selling while the UK side is still free. Repurchase the clean equivalents after arrival. And put the whole sequence in writing before acting, because the moves are simple but the order is everything.
If your move is booked and your ISA is invested, this is genuinely time-critical work — and it's exactly what our pre-move planning covers.