Social charges on foreign income for a self employed with 2 incomes

Hi,

I am just in the process of setting up an EURL company and will be registering with the RSI and Ursaff etc.
This is a small company with seasonal income and I will obviously be paying the social charges on that income.
I also have the possibility of a second income from the UK which I would like to declare for TAX purposes.

My question is:

Does the second income from the UK also get RSI 47% social charges applied to it?

I have been told that only the income from the French company is subject to RSI but I am not sure that is 100% correct.

Any advice greatly appreciated :slight_smile:

It would depend on the nature of the work you do to earn the “UK” income, as to where it’s taxable and whether or not it has to be registered as a business activity in France. Eg if it is an online business activity that you carry out from France on a self employed basis, the activity would have to be registered in France and you would pay both tax and cotisations on it here, It would be nothing to do with the UK; the fact that your clients may be in the UK, makes no difference. However even that is not straightforward, because in France one individual cannot register 2 separate entreprises individuelles, so if you already have a siret number for your EIRL you couldn’t register another completely different self-employed business.

If you are working from France as an employee of your own company or someone else’s company you would need to be declared to URSSAF as an employee and pay cotisations that way, also income tax.

If the work is actually carried out in the UK, say if you go back to the UK and work from an office there 3 or 4 days a week, then the income would be taxable in the UK (but if you’re tax resident in France, would still declared as income in France as already taxed in the UK). The complication here would be healthcare. While the UK is a member of the EU and EU regulations apply, you cannot simultaneously belong to the social security system of 2 different states. So an agreement would have to be reached between the French and UK authorities as to where you are primarily resident, which would depend on where your family lives/where you spend your time/where you earn most of your income. And the rest would follow on from that (the state where you’re deemed to be resident and/or carrying out most of your work would be responsible for your social security, and that state would the issue you with an A1/S1 document to cover you for the periods when you work in the other state).

Trying to keep a foot each side the Channel is always complicated and the devil is in the detail, it can work out advantageous but you can also come badly unstuck. If you really want to do this, you need to get proper advice from this from an advisor, and provide him with exact details of where you’ll be spending your time and what your employment status will be. There’s also the question of CSG charged in France on UK income if you belong to the French healthcare system.

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Thanks Anna for the reply - really appreciated.

I knew it was going to be complicated and from the sounds of it what I am planning would need to be declared to URSSAF. The RSI contributions for self employed are outrageous and whilst I am more than happy to contribute to what is the best healthcare system in the world paying nearly half your income and not even getting unemployment benefit from that is crazy.
At least if I am declaring the UK income to URSSAF which would be working for a UK based company part time I would be able to get unemployment and childcare etc. - I Hope!!
Will definately have a chat with a pro though - good advise

No, you need to be a bit careful here. If you’re “working for a UK based company” then declaring your salary as self-employed income would technically be fraud. Also, self-employed contributions give you no entitlement to unemployment benefit etc. For that you would need to be registered as a salarié. Your UK employer would need to register you as an employee with URSSAF and pay employer cotisations on your wages (which if you think self employed contributions to RSI are outrageous, then you ain’t seen nothin’ yet), in addition to your employee cotisations. In practice, a clued-up UK company would be extremely unlikely to go along with this because of the cost, but many UK companies aren’t clued up.

If you’re getting upset about the level of self-employed cotisations, the way you need to look it is: it’s just figures on a piece of paper. You know what your liabilities will be so you simply build it into your pricing, and it’s the end customer who pays. It goes with running a business: you, like every other business in France, are simply taking that money from the end customer and passing it on to the state. That’s how the economy works here, it’s not as if you’re paying money from your own pocket. Once you start seeing it this way, it seems palatable.

No doubt your advisor will see you straight, but be sure to provide full information. At the end of the day you don’t get a choice in the wheres or the hows. There is a set of criteria for just about every imaginable set of circumstances - which a good advisor will have at his/her fingertips - so it is simply a case of looking in detail at your complete working/lifestyle pattern seeing which criteria it fits, which is what a good advisor will do.

Link to website where UK employers can declare their French-based employees:
https://www.urssaf.fr/portail/home/employeur/creer/quelle-urssaf-pour-votre-entrepr/firmes-etrangeres.html

Link to explanation of criteria for distinguishing between employment and self-employment
http://www.federation-auto-entrepreneur.fr/node/12015

Link to santions for declaring salaried income as self-employed income:
http://www.fraude-fiscale.fr/les-types-de-fraudeurs/les-entreprises-ou-personnes-morales/le-travail-au-noir/ (“Il y a dissimulation d’emploi salarié dès lors que l’employeur n’a pas accompli de manière intentionnelle l’une des obligations suivantes etc”)