FEIE on a Rotation Schedule: Can 28/28 and 35/35 Rotators Qualify?

Educational content only — not legal, tax, immigration, or financial advice. Rules and interpretations change, and some of the positions below are areas where qualified practitioners disagree. Always verify with the relevant government agency and a qualified U.S. expat tax preparer before filing. Full disclaimer · Spot an error?

The two tests, and the one rotators forget

Section 911 lets a qualifying individual exclude up to $132,900 (2026) of foreign earned income. Everyone knows the second half of the definition — the Physical Presence Test (330 full days in foreign countries during any 12 consecutive months) or the Bona Fide Residence Test (a genuine foreign residence for a full calendar year). Fewer people know the first half: you must have a tax home in a foreign country for the same period. Both halves are required. A rotator who concentrates on counting days and ignores the tax-home requirement is answering the wrong question.

The abode rule: why home-every-rotation fails

Your tax home is your regular or principal place of business. For a rotator that is the rig, mine, or plant — which is abroad, so far so good. But section 911(d)(3) adds a limit: an individual shall not be treated as having a tax home in a foreign country for any period for which his abode is within the United States. “Abode” is where you actually live in the domestic, family, and economic sense, as opposed to where you work. The IRS and the Tax Court look at where your spouse and children live, where you keep your house and vehicles, where you go on every day off, where you bank, vote, and hold a driving licence, and whether your overseas accommodation is a company camp you cannot stay in when off-rotation.

A 28/28 rotator with a family home in Louisiana, who spends every one of his 28 days off there, has a U.S. abode. The Tax Court has reached that conclusion repeatedly in cases involving rotational offshore and oilfield workers, including workers who spent well over half the year abroad. Because the abode is in the U.S., there is no foreign tax home, and the FEIE is unavailable — the 330-day count never comes into it. Publication 54 uses almost exactly this fact pattern as its example: an offshore worker on a 28-days-on, 28-days-off schedule who returns to a family home in the United States during off periods is considered to have a U.S. abode and does not meet the tax home test.

The 330-day count on common rotations

Even setting the abode rule aside, most rotations fail the arithmetic once travel days are counted correctly:

The Physical Presence Test allows at most 35 days outside foreign countries in the 12-month window, and travel days spent partly in the U.S. count as U.S. days. Only a schedule with U.S. time under about five weeks a year passes on days alone — which in practice means a resident expat, not a rotator. Use the PPT calculator or the residency day calculator to run your actual travel.

Who does qualify

Rotators who have moved their abode abroad. The pattern that works, and that I have seen work for colleagues in Qatar and Southeast Asia:

• family (if any) lives abroad — Manila, Bangkok, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur — and you spend off-rotation there, not in the U.S.;
• you rent or own the home there in your name, with a lease or title, utilities, and a local bank account;
• U.S. visits are short and clearly visits: a few weeks a year, staying with relatives or in hotels, not in a home you maintain;
• driving licence, vehicle, and day-to-day banking are abroad; a U.S. mailing address at a relative’s house is fine, a U.S. house you return to every month is not;
• the 330 foreign days are met counting the third-country home as foreign days — which they are; the test is days in foreign countries, not days at the worksite.

Under those facts, both the abode rule and the day count are satisfied. Many rotators also qualify under the Bona Fide Residence Test once the foreign home has been in place for a full calendar year, which removes the day-counting anxiety. Rotators who are single and spend off-time travelling (a month in Vietnam, a month in Europe, a month in the U.S.) are in the middle: a preparer will want to see a fixed foreign base, not just an absence from the U.S.

Offshore: where a “foreign country” ends

For section 911 a “foreign country” is territory under the sovereignty of a government other than the United States. Under the regulations it includes that country’s territorial waters, its airspace, and the seabed and subsoil of the adjacent submarine areas over which it has exclusive rights under international law to explore and exploit natural resources — in other words, its continental shelf. So a drilling rig or production platform working a licensed block offshore Angola, Brazil, Norway, or Qatar is in a foreign country, and days aboard count toward the 330. That is the good news for oilfield rotators.

What is not a foreign country:

• International waters beyond any country’s shelf rights — a vessel in transit across an ocean, a seismic or survey ship working outside licensed areas, a cruise or merchant ship on the high seas. Days there are non-foreign days, which is why seafarers and cruise crew so often fail the test.
• Antarctica, which is under no government’s sovereignty.
• International airspace for pilots and crew, except time on a journey between two foreign points lasting less than 24 hours.
• U.S. territorial waters and the U.S. outer continental shelf — a rig in the Gulf of Mexico is not foreign.

The regulation speaks of the seabed and subsoil, so a rig that is fixed, moored, or dynamically positioned over a country’s shelf to exploit it is squarely inside the definition. A floating installation or vessel that is merely passing through those waters, or a ship whose work is not the exploitation of that seabed, is the grey area; a preparer will want the vessel’s position logs for the year. Rotators on supply boats and drillships moving between countries should count days by position, not by assumption.

Transit days through the U.S.

Days you pass through the United States in transit between two foreign points count as foreign days only if you are in the U.S. for less than 24 hours and are not in transit to or from the U.S. itself. A Doha–Houston–Doha trip home is a trip to the U.S.; every day touching U.S. soil is a U.S. day, including the arrival and departure days. A Doha–Dallas connection on the way to Mexico City with a four-hour layover is transit and does not break the foreign-day run. Time in the air over international waters between two foreign countries counts as foreign time if the whole journey is under 24 hours.

Combat-zone contractors: the exception

Note that the Arabian Peninsula designation means a defence contractor at Al Udeid in Qatar and a QatarEnergy rotator in Ras Laffan are treated differently under the same section of the Code. The contractor can keep a Texas house and still claim the FEIE if the day count works; the energy rotator cannot.

If you cannot claim the FEIE

Then your foreign salary is taxed like U.S. salary. The remaining tools are:

• Foreign Tax Credit — useful only where the host country taxes you. Nigeria, Angola, Norway, Australia, Kazakhstan, and Brazil do; Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia do not, so Gulf rotators with a U.S. abode pay full U.S. tax with no credit. See the FTC guide.
• Per diem and travel reimbursements — if your employer reimburses actual lodging and meals at the worksite under an accountable plan, those are not wages. A flat uplift paid in cash is wages.
• Retirement contributions — the upside of taxable wages is full 401(k), IRA, and HSA eligibility, which FEIE filers often lose.
• State tax — a U.S. abode usually means state residency, so budget for a state return as well. Texas, Florida, Washington, and Alaska rotators are spared.
• Tax equalisation — on operator-direct assignments the employer may gross up the tax; on contractor day-rate work it almost never does. Know which contract you are on before accepting a “tax-free” day rate.

What an audit looks at

FEIE claims by rotational workers are a known examination area. An examiner will request: the travel log and passport stamps for the 12-month window; the employment contract and rotation schedule; evidence of a foreign home (lease, utility bills, local bank statements); where your spouse and children lived; and U.S. ties (home ownership, vehicle registration, driving licence, voter registration, where your mail goes). If the file shows a U.S. house, a U.S.-based family, and 180 days a year at home, the abode conclusion is quick and the FEIE is disallowed for every open year, with tax, interest, and an accuracy penalty. Rotators who qualified on paper but kept a U.S. abode are the single most common FEIE disallowance I have seen among colleagues.

Rotator checklist

1. Where did you spend your last four off-rotations? If the answer is a house you own or rent in the U.S., stop — you have a U.S. abode and the FEIE is not available (unless you are a combat-zone contractor).
2. If your off-time base is abroad, document it: lease or title, utilities, local bank, local licence, family location.
3. Count foreign days in the PPT calculator using actual arrival and departure dates, treating every day touching the U.S. as a U.S. day and every day on the high seas outside a country’s shelf rights as a non-foreign day.
4. Pick the 12-month window that maximises foreign days; it does not have to be a calendar year.
5. After a full calendar year with the foreign home in place, consider switching to the Bona Fide Residence Test.
6. If you cannot qualify, run the FEIE vs FTC calculator with FEIE set to zero to see what the Foreign Tax Credit alone does, and plan for estimated tax and a state return.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and references

Last reviewed October 2026 by Ken Hoven. Educational content only. See editorial standards and full disclaimer.