Your parents wire the down payment. Nothing about that is taxable to you — but past a threshold it becomes something you have to report, on a form most people have never heard of, with a penalty measured against the gift rather than against any tax. Check where you stand. Nothing you enter below reaches any server.
A gift or bequest received from a foreign person is excluded from the recipient's gross income. Reporting it on Form 3520 does not create US income tax on the amount received; the form is an information return. This is the fact most people who find out about Form 3520 late get wrong, and the reason a late discovery is usually far less serious than it first appears.
A US person must file Form 3520 Part IV for a year in which they received more than one hundred thousand dollars from a nonresident alien individual or a foreign estate, treated as gifts or bequests. Gifts from foreign persons RELATED to that individual or estate are added to the same total — a family that sends money from several accounts or several relatives does not get several separate thresholds.
A separate and far lower threshold applies to amounts received from foreign corporations or foreign partnerships: this figure is adjusted for inflation annually and was a little over twenty thousand dollars for the 2025 tax year. All foreign corporations and partnerships are aggregated into one total for this test. Because the figure moves each year, the current year's published amount must be checked rather than assumed from a prior year.
When gifts from a nonresident alien individual or foreign estate exceed the one-hundred-thousand-dollar threshold, each individual gift of more than five thousand dollars must be separately identified on the form rather than reported as one lump sum. This is why the dates and amounts of each transfer are worth keeping as they happen, not reconstructing a year later.
Form 3520 is due on the fifteenth day of the fourth month after the end of the tax year — generally 15 April for an individual — and is filed separately, sent to the IRS service centre in Ogden, Utah, rather than attached to the income tax return. Failing to report a foreign gift on time can carry a penalty of five percent of the gift amount for each month the failure continues, capped at twenty-five percent. The penalty is measured against the gift, not against any tax, which is what makes a large unreported family transfer expensive despite no tax being owed on it.
Not answered here: whether the person SENDING the money owes any US gift tax. That turns on where the asset sits and on the sender's own status — facts this page has no way to know and will not guess at. If the sender is a US person, or the money moved from a US-situated asset, ask a preparer that question directly.
We already computed the public version — it is complete and stays free. Log each transfer as it lands and the Square keeps the running total against the threshold for you: Join DesiSquare and the Square remembers your dates, re-runs this when the rules change, and puts a credentialed human one message away.