Firms experiencing financing constraints may increase tax planning if the associated cash savings outweigh any increased cost of capital caused by information asymmetry resulting from those tax planning activities. Prior research finds that US firms facing this trade-off engage in additional tax planning. We investigate this relation in an international setting and find opposite results. Specifically, we find a significantly negative association between tax planning and country-level financing constraints, suggesting that, outside the U.S., the transparency benefits of committing less tax planning outweigh any cash saving benefits. The effect is more pronounced in settings where transparency is already lacking and cost of capital is otherwise high. Overall, we show that U.S. firms are unique in their approach to tax planning when facing financing constraints, likely due to the U.S. penalty for tax planning being relatively low and the U.S. cost of capital being the lowest in the world.