Yes! You declare it only to the UK when you become UK resident, since you were not providing services to a French state body ie it’s a pension for private sector work - even if paid by a state body. You shouldn’t file French returns for periods after your departure unless you have French taxable income (this pension is NOT French taxable income). Don’t do any more French filing (assuming no taxable income).
Obviously this raises the small matter (presumably) of French withholding tax that is/was being applied? If this is the case you do the reverse of the famous form FFI. There is a French equivalent which you get stamped by HMRC to prove you’re UK resident to France, after which they should stop withholding and repay you the French tax over-withheld.
@George1, as ever you always appear when needed.
Many thanks for your information, it answers all the questions, and more, I had in my mind.
This morning I have updated my personal details on my pension website and now I will look forward to filing my last French tax return in May this year, we left France on 17th December but to make things easy I will declare 31st December. We sold our principal residence on the 15th December and can prove all travel documents and temp accommodation in UK from then and also iur new principal uk residence purchased in January 2026.
Just got to wait 6 months now to claim back non-resident stamp duty although from earlier posts something tells me that once I have filed UK tax return for 2025/26 covering January to April 2026, which will show uk residency going forwaed to 2026/27 tax year, perhaps I can reclaim non resident stamp duty sooner?
That’s the right form, even though it seems to downplay the pensions aspect, in favour of a focus on dividends etc. I think you may also need Form 5001 for the actual calculation of the refund.
I still haven’t heard anything from agirc-arrco, though maybe I should only expect to receive their pension a year after I began receiving the French state pension (this was Jacquie’s experience).
I think I’ll try to email them, to ask about the process? Do they need any information from me? Are they waiting for me to provide it? And when do they normally start paying?
Hi, I get paid 2nd January in a lump sum that I accumulated whilst working for one particular French business and for which it’s too small to pay monthly. The originally contacted me to set the ball rolling after my Carsat pensions were in place for monthly payments. I would contact them yourself and check on their progress as it maybe in the pipeline and they have written or emailed you and are waiting for an answer but I found they had all my info, I just had to confirm it was correct.
Hi Jacquie, having battled to get my elderly mother access to my late father’s French state pension for the best part of a year (it has been a rollercoaster of a ride to say the least via endless calls and correspondence with CARSAT Normandie and the International Pensions centre), I believe I’m in the final stretch, and find myself in a similar position to you previously where I have received the request from l’Assurance Retraite for confirmation of the recipient bank details, which includes a requirement for the dreaded “Visa & cachet de l’etablissement”. Having visited a Lloyds branch in London, they point blank refused to provide a signature or stamp and instead gave me the print out of my mother’s Lloyds account details including IBAN and BIC. As I understand it from your previous posts, this is likely to be rejected by l’Assurance Retraite, and I wondered whether you could let me know the branch you used where they seemed to be much more prepared to help. Many thanks!
Lloyds Bank are a set of charlatans and bashibazouks - I won’t repeat the experience I had with them recently trying to get £60K of my father’s money out of their evil clutches - but suffice to say it took months and several personal visits to a branch…
The branch that successfully handled my request for a rubber stamp AND signature was the main branch for the county in which I live. I would suggest that some phone calls to the largest branch in your area might save you a great deal of time and frustration. Asking them online or by phone doesn’t help, as they don’t have anyone who understands the problem.
It is literally impossible to phone any branch of Lloyds.
They have a central phone number, with automated answering, which starts by asking for your account number, thus making it difficult to ask any question that does not relate directly to a current account or credit card. I wanted to talk to them about a Trust bank account that they had unilaterally closed - I ended up phoning their private banking arm, who were a bit more helpful but could not access the details of the account in question. The only thing that worked was going into a branch and making a fuss - repeatedly - and even then I was given erroneous information.
When I was having my run in with them I could not get any member of staff, even up to the level of the branch manager, to give me a direct phone number. I had to wait for them to phone or email me.
This is how UK banks operate these days, proper customer service is a distant memory.
Lloyds are one of our bugbears. Many years ago we had to open executor accounts with them to sort out the probate stuff for MIL and then FIL. It has proved impossible to close these two accounts as we no longer live in the UK. I think it must be near on 10 years we have been trying. What a farce.
Thanks for all your responses and I’m glad I’m not alone in finding Lloyd’s desperately impossible to deal with ! I’ll try one more Lloyds branch in London and if not I think I’ll go for Plan B which is to get the pension transferred into my mother’s French account at Credit Agricole. I’m in France later in the summer and hopefully they will be more in tune with the requirements of the Assurance Retraite! Thanks again.
Months.