Leaving the Philippines for Good: The Exit Checklist Nobody Writes

Relocating back to China: plan backwards from the slowest item

Treat the move as a project whose start date is not the flight booking but the target departure month. Then work backwards:

• T-12 to T-6 months — start the slow things. If you own a Philippine company, begin deregistration now; it is the longest item on the list, normally measured in months and capable of exceeding a year where there is historical clean-up. Confirm the school year boundaries, since the Philippine and destination academic calendars differ and re-entry timing matters. And check your lease notice period — most require written notice months in advance, and missing it by a day can cost the deposit.
• T-6 to T-3 months — the document project. List every Philippine document you will need at home (birth and marriage certificates, diplomas, transcripts, police clearance, corporate papers) and confirm you hold the originals. Request school records. Consolidate medical records, prescriptions and vaccination history into one portable file.
• T-3 to T-1 months — authentication and status. Send documents to the DFA for apostille. Settle with your employer, or your own company, how the visa and AEP will be cancelled or downgraded. Book sea freight if you are shipping household goods, since that runs in months.
• T-1 month — close accounts one by one. Banks, insurance, broadband, utilities, gyms, subscriptions. Many require written notice; a phone call does not terminate a contract.
• Final two weeks — exit formalities. Exit clearance (ECC) under current BI procedure, the move-out inspection and deposit settlement, and pet formalities if applicable.
• Final three days — only three things. Confirm every original document and your old passport are in hand luggage; confirm everything is scanned to both cloud and a physical drive; and do not cancel your Philippine mobile number yet.

Immigration: 9g visa downgrading, the ACR I-Card, ECC and that old passport

"My visa expires anyway, I'll just leave" is a costly assumption. Your status here is a record, and an unclean exit follows you back.

• Deal with the work visa and AEP first. Holders of a 9(g) generally need the visa cancelled or downgraded with the BI when employment ends or the company closes — commonly downgraded to visitor status before departure — with the AEP cancelled at DOLE. Skipping this is the single most common source of later problems: the person has gone home while the status remains open in the system, discovered only when a future visa application stalls. Holders of 13(a), SRRV and other categories have their own procedures.
• Surrender the ACR I-Card. On permanent departure it generally has to be returned or cancelled under the applicable rules. It is not a souvenir.
• Exit clearance (ECC). Foreign nationals who have stayed beyond a defined period must obtain clearance from the BI before leaving; the applicable type, channel, validity and processing time follow current BI rules, and differ by status category. Do not leave it until the day before the flight — one documentary problem and the ticket is wasted.
• Settle overstays and penalties before you go, not at the airport.
• 🔴 Take the old passport with you, and keep it. This is the point we most want remembered. After renewal, the cancelled book holds every Philippine visa page, entry and exit stamp and extension sticker — it is the only original evidence of your residence history here. You may need it to prove length of overseas residence, to resolve a tax residency question, for a child's schooling or nationality matters, for home-country procedures requiring proof of overseas residence, and when applying for a Philippine visa again. Embassies normally return the cancelled book on renewal; keep it, take it home, and do not discard it because it "expired".

Company and tax: why it takes longer to close a SEC and BIR registered company than to move

If you incorporated here, this section determines whether you leave cleanly. Bluntly: a proper deregistration runs in months from start to finish, and can exceed a year where there is history to clean up. It is not one counter; it is several agencies in sequence, and the order and requirements follow each agency's current rules.

1. Corporate resolution to cease operations or dissolve, per the articles and the Revised Corporation Code.
2. BIR — the slowest gate by far. Expect to resolve outstanding or unfiled returns (open cases), submit books of account, surrender unused official receipts and invoices, undergo audit, and obtain the relevant tax clearance documentation. Companies stuck here for over a year are usually paying for years of loose bookkeeping.
3. Local government — retirement of the business permit at Barangay and city level, with local taxes and fees settled.
4. SEC — dissolution or revocation of registration. Ignoring it is not neutral: non-compliant companies accrue penalties, can be revoked, and the record attaches to directors and shareholders.
5. SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG — employer registration cancelled and contributions settled.
6. Employees — termination must follow Philippine labour law on grounds, notice, final pay and certificates of employment, with timelines per current DOLE rules. This is the step most likely to become a dispute, and disputes do not disappear when you board the plane.

Do this: at least twelve months before departure, have an accountant pull your BIR filing status. Find out how large the gap is first, then set the timetable — not the other way round.

Close your bank account, wallets and contributions before leaving: get it in writing

• Close bank accounts formally and take the paper. Emptying an account is not closing it. Request a closure confirmation or clearance letter and keep the final statement. A dormant account can accrue fees and leave a record that is painful to resolve from abroad.
• Move large sums early, with documentation. Cross-border transfers require evidence of source and tax status, and a sudden large remittance in your final week is exactly when additional documents get requested. Stage it, and keep every remittance receipt.
• Wallets, platforms and subscriptions. Withdraw GCash and Maya balances; clean up marketplace and ride-hailing accounts and stored cards; and cancel every auto-renewing subscription, which otherwise bills indefinitely.
• Insurance and investments. Confirm surrender or continuation terms, beneficiary details, how to claim from abroad, and any restrictions on non-resident holdings.
• SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG. Export and keep your full contribution history and member numbers. Certain benefits or lump-sum claims may be available depending on your circumstances; eligibility, conditions and documents follow each agency's current rules, and processing is far easier while you are still in the country.
• Continuity at home. Check what a gap in home-country social insurance contributions means for medical entitlements, property eligibility and school admission — rules vary considerably by locality, and this is worth confirming before you fly rather than after.

Documents and school records: Form 137, the transfer out of the Philippines and use abroad

One principle governs this section: anything requiring an original, your physical presence, or an institutional stamp must be completed before departure. Doing it afterwards means notarised powers of attorney, couriered originals and multiplied cost.

• PSA civil registry documents — birth certificates for children born here, marriage certificates, and so on, obtained on PSA security paper; local civil registrar copies are rejected in many settings. Get spares.
• School records — the most commonly forgotten item. For basic education, the permanent record (Form 137) and report card (Form 138); for higher education, the transcript of records and proof of graduation. Add certificates of enrolment and syllabi, since a receiving school may need to map coursework. Two practical notes: private schools generally release records only once all fees are settled, and records intended for use abroad usually pass through the relevant education authority first — DepEd for basic education, CHED for higher education — before authentication.
• NBI clearance — it has a validity period, so time it near departure and authenticate it at the same time.
• Employment and income evidence — certificates of employment, payslips, tax records. Chasing a former employer from abroad is markedly harder.
• Medical records — files, imaging, prescriptions, and ideally a written medical summary in English from your doctor.

One recent change worth knowing: both China and the Philippines are parties to the Hague Apostille Convention, so under current practice most Philippine public documents need only a DFA apostille for use in China, rather than the older consular legalisation chain — a substantial saving in time. Two caveats: not every document type and not every receiving institution is treated identically, and some bodies impose additional requirements or specific translation rules. Ask the institution that will actually receive the document what form it needs before you start, and follow current DFA and receiving-agency requirements.

PSA documents and Form 137 get far harder to chase once you are back in China. → pre-departure document assistance

Leaving permanently: phone numbers and digital identity, cancel nothing in a hurry

• 🔴 Do not cancel your home-country mobile number. Banking, payments, social insurance, government apps, tax portals and identity-verified accounts are almost all tied to it. Cancel it and you land in a loop where logging in requires a code sent to a number that no longer exists, with recovery typically requiring an in-person visit. Keeping a number alive is cheap; recovering from cancelling one is not.
• Keep the Philippine number for a while too. You may still need it for bank and wallet verification codes, school and former-employer notices, follow-up calls from agencies, and deposit refund discussions. Keep it live until everything is genuinely closed — usually some months after you leave. Note that SIM registration rules apply and unused numbers can be recycled per the carrier's policy.
• Migrate two-factor authentication off the Philippine number before departure, to an authenticator app or a number you will keep. Otherwise a lapsed SIM can permanently lock you out.
• Scan everything, store it twice — cloud plus a physical drive — and name files consistently by date, type and person.
• Keep two reliable local contacts — a former colleague, a lawyer, an accountant, an agent — stored separately. Something will need a person on the ground after you leave, and whether you have one makes an enormous difference.

Run the list backwards and one dividing line emerges: what must be done while you are physically here, versus what can wait. Status cancellation, company liquidation, school records and every original requiring a stamp or apostille belong to the first group — there is no remote workaround, only lead time.

If your documents are gathered but you are unsure which need authentication and which form your receiving institution will accept, let Yixing handle the authentication. We work backwards from what you actually need them for at home — residence registration, school enrolment, social insurance, marriage registration, corporate use — to determine which documents, to what stage, and crucially which must be completed before you fly. Discovering a missing certificate after landing is the expensive way to learn this.