When you stop being a New York resident, Tax Law § 639 makes you accrue income you had a fixed right to receive — an installment-sale gain, a lottery prize, a determinable bonus — onto your final resident return. File a surety bond on Form IT-260 instead and you defer that tax, reporting the amounts as they actually arrive. Premiums cost 2% of the bond amount, with a $100 minimum, after a soft credit pull that never affects your score.
















No long underwriting queue for the standard special-accruals bond — enter the deferred tax, pay, and file it with your return. Here is the whole thing:
Your details, the date your resident status changed, your prior New York address, the tax deferral year, and the deferred-tax amount — plus a one-time consent to a soft credit pull.
Most special-accruals bonds issue right after purchase. The soft credit pull informs approval and never affects your score; pricing is 2% of the bond amount, with a $100 minimum.
The bond must be executed in triplicate and filed with your IT-201, IT-203 or IT-205 for the year the change of residence occurred, sent by registered mail to the Income Tax Audit Administrator at the W A Harriman Campus in Albany. We issue the originals you need.
New York does not simply let a departing resident walk away from income that was already fixed and determinable while they lived here. Under Tax Law § 639, an individual whose status changes from New York State resident to nonresident must accrue, on the final part-year or full-year resident return, every item of income, gain, loss or deduction that an accrual method would have reported at the moment of the change — the unrealised income from an installment sale made while you were a resident, a lottery prize won here, a bonus or severance payment whose amount was already fixed. Lump-sum distributions subject to the separate tax are accrued too.
The statute then offers a way out. Tax Law §§ 639(d) and 639(h) (with §§ 1307(c) and 1307(f) doing the same job for New York City) say the accruals are not required if you file with the Commissioner a bond or other acceptable security, on the condition that the accruable amounts are taken into account in later years as if your resident status had never changed. In practice: you post a bond for the deferred tax, and you keep reporting those amounts on Form IT-203 as they are actually received.
The bond amount is the deferred tax itself — the additional personal income tax that would have been due had the items been accrued. The Tax Department’s own worked example runs a $150,000 installment gain: $8,433 of tax if fully accrued, $2,147 paid under the installment method, and a $6,286 bond for the difference. The surety must be a company registered with and supervised by the New York State insurance regulator, and the Department of Taxation and Finance approves the bond. If you were a New York City resident before the move, you continue paying New York City resident tax on those accruable amounts.
These are the actual underwriting fields, including the date your residency changed, your prior New York address, the deferral year, and a one-time consent to a soft credit pull that never affects your score.
Start the application →Premiums from $100, soft pull only. Enter your deferred tax and file Form IT-260 with your return. Free until issued.