Hello,
I appreciate any advice or knowledge on this matter.
Recently arrived in France and quickly learning how difficult and different things are here, especially taxes.
I am living in a rental here and have left my mortgaged uk home rented back there. It has been two months so far.
Am i right that i can sell that house within a year and avoid capital gains tax on it here?
The cgt appears to be steep here so dont really want to pay it when we only just rented it out.
I have read so much about it and still feel confused.
I was hoping the uk house would be a bolt hole and pension fund for the future but now wondering if better off selling it and investing the money here instead.
Thanks in advance,
Nicola
Hello Nicola, welcome to Survive France. Hope things go smoothly for you. The initial months can be daunting. It will get easier.
I quite understand you need to understand the tax implications but there might be another issue to bear in mind - are you certain you will remain in France for the rest of your life (your lives)?
We have friends who years down the line decided they needed to go back to the UK - strong family ties. They had sold their UK property when they first moved here and bought in France. UK property prices continued to rise steeply over the years, whereas French property prices over the same period hardly moved. It was a real shock for them to find how little they could buy with their money.
Several of us on here, even though we have been in France many years, still keep a bolthole - just in case.
Just a thought.
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Hi Sue,
Thank you for your kind reply.
It is very daunting indeed, now things are a bit more real and every day stresses are showing their face.
I do feel I would want to stay forever in theory, but things do change in life so you make a good point that i will not overlook.
I am not sure i want to sell the uk place, just weighing up implications if i did. I can do guestimates of the pros and cons when i know what tax implications are now.
You are probably right that keeping the UK house makes most sense in long run.
Best,
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Yes, if it is left empty and not let. Sorry! However Iām fairly sure if you sell it in future to buy a principal residence in France you will receive a refund of France GCT if the principle residence is purchased within three (?) years.
Edit - the refund is on the portion of the sale amount used to buy the new residence.
You should declare your rental income in France too as well as the UK (the France tax due on the income is deducted from your total France tax ).
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Welcome @nic681 to Survive France. A great source with very helpful people, more accurate than other media aimed at English speakers who have settled in France.
Youāll find anxiety reduces a lot once your healthcare is arranged - and youāve submitted your first France tax declaration which will be in the spring of the calendar year after the calendar year of your arrival.
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Hi - i sold my UK house at the end of last year (iāve been resident in France for 5/6 years). I was renting my house out in the uk. I have gone throught the French āPlus Valueā (capital gains tax) process here and received some awful advice from an English speaking notaire. The longer you have owned the house in the uk, the less capital gains you pay - like the UK. Iād owned my uk house for nearly 20 years and assumed Iād have very little to pay, There is capital gains tax here and capital gains tax cotissations (social charges on the capital gains tax) I think Plus Value is 19% and the cotisations 17.2%. There is a sliding scale for how much you pay for both, but the cotissations one hardly changes much till youāve owned the property for 22 or so years.
Basically, If youāve owned the house for a long time - 30 years, youāll have nothing to pay anyway, if you think you can keep renting it out till youāve owned it for 30 years then it could be worth keeping it.
In france you can go and get free advice on this from a notaire and they will work out what you owe if you give them the buying price, selling price, years owned etc. My notaire said i owed ā¬5300. I looked into this and heād calculated the āGainā by using the exchange rate Ā£- ā¬ at the date of sale for both purchase and sale price. Considering when i bought the house it was ā¬1.55 to the Ā£ and when I sold it it was ā¬1.15 to the Ā£. This made a huge diffence in capital gain. I took advice from an English speaking tax expert, and didnāt use the notaires figures, so far the Impots have said nothing and i have nothing to pay.
I would have kept my UK house if the whole rental system back there wasnāt in such chaos because what you earn in rent you can offest against your uk tax threshold (despite not even paying tax there any more) and it doesnāt get taxed in France. .
Anyway - sorry to waffle on, the gist of what iām trying to say is the longer you own the house the less CGT your pay both here and UK. You donāt pay twice, but you often pay CGT in UK then cotissation on it here, pensioners pay a lower value
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RENTING
this is how I understand thingsā¦ for a Resident in France renting out a property in UKā¦
Rental Income received in the UK is declarable in Franceā¦
Such Rental Income will form part of the French annual Declaration of Worldwide Income (always for the year behindā¦)
Once France looks at the overall incomeā¦ decides what Tax one owes ā¦ they look at what has been paid in UKā¦ deduct it and only ask one to pay the balanceā¦
thus avoiding double-taxingā¦
however French Social-Taxes might well be dueā¦ thatās yet another payment to think about.
This is a simple over-viewā¦ 
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I rented my house out for almost 5 years of me living here. You declare it on your UK tax return, and pay no tax, like i did since i recieved less than my personal tax threshold, then you put that figure into your impots in france, and due to double taxation treaty, you donāt get taxed twice on it regardless of whether you actually paid anything in the uk. But they do give you tax credits in France which shows on the bottom line for your income. So for me, say i earned only ā¬15k in france and received Ā£6k rent in the uk my impots would show my income at something like ā¬22k but iād only be paying cotissation on the ā¬15k, and of course no tax because the earning are below the french threshold. Iām Self employed.
The second part you are talking about applies to Plus Value (french CGT). Donāt rely on Notaires to work out the figures though
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CGT is steep - if you make a capital gain! Depending on what you own and how long you have owned it then you may be worrying over a high % of very little!
But do you have a UK state pension, as you will pay more if you donāt.
I would make your decision based on what you want to do, not on the tax. You could sell now, pay no CGT, and reinvest in a French property IF that is your long term plan.
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Who would work out the figures?
I am self employed also. I just got my siren number today.
I am feeling like it makes most sense to keep the house for now.
Is the impots site all fairly easy to navigate with the income and the rent?
I have a ridiculously small pension pot at the moment! Its something i am working on going forward as also worry about the future.
I am feeling like selling now just to save a small amount of cgt is maybe a bad move.
I have to say this worldwide family income thing sounds so confusing. Something i need to look into.
This is done the year after tho? So i have some time.
We have had the house for 3.5 years at the moment! The idea was it would be something to go back to or with any luck a pension pot after 20 years and mortgage paid.
So perhaps, after that 20 years of renting the cgt wouldnāt be so bad?
Thank you! I just got my siren number and it felt really good to have succeeded with step one!
The taxes are filling me with dread tho but perhaps i will get some help year oneā¦
Well, we wont buy anything here as we have a family house we can live in.
This is why i feel nervous as i do not have own place here and likely never will for the foreseeable.
Hello @nic681 just to say, to donāt need to start a new post each time when you are replying to everyone. You can just type an @ which brings up a list of people who are talking to you and put in their āaddressā and reply to them, which then means they get an āalertā that you have replied - like this:
@JaneJones : hi Jane, please ignore, just explaining to Nicola
@larkswood12 hi Larkswood, just ignore, explaining @ to Nicola.
and so on ā¦ 
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If youāve had the house for only 3.5 years you cannot claim any reduction in French CGT (not in first 5 years) French Capital Gains Tax: Exemptions Sale Property so youād effectively have maybe a 36% bill - if the gain is more than ā¬50k then thereās more tax to pay. I spend months sussing this stuff out
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sorry it took so long to reply This website limited the amount of responses I could make in one day since itās was my first day as a member
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@nic681
sounds to me that it might well be a good idea to hang-onto the UK house.
Letās face itā¦
Whatever taxes are paid on the Rentā¦ youād still have a property in your own rightā¦ as a fallbackā¦ and/or eventual financial reward should you decide to Sell āwhen the time is rightāā¦
and, donāt worry about doing the French Worldwide Declarationā¦
lots of helpers on this forumā¦
and the French Tax folk themselves can help (face to face) by appointment
All will be well in the endā¦ 
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You can actually pop in to your local tax office and talk through your tax return. Iād recommend to start with the paper format and book yourself in a few weeks before the impots is due - May/June. I found them very helpful, my French isnāt so good, and she spoke no English (i live in a sparsely populated area). Once sheās shown me what to put where on the various forms I got her to copy and print the return, which i used on subsequent years as a reference for me filling it out myself. You could pay someone to do it of course, but if you are like me, I want to know exactly how to do it. And it really isnāt that hard once youāve seen it done once. Plus if you do do it wrong itās unlikely that youāll be slapped down with instant fines like HMRC!
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