To qualify for the 7.5% French tax rate on a lump-sum UK pension withdrawal, contributions made by employees into UK pensions have to have been tax deductible as I understand it. However, if the employer was making the contributions for part of the time (not the whole time), and being employer contributions these were not tax deductible and were therefore paid gross, does the lump-sum withdrawal still qualify for the 7.5% tax rate? Any clarification of this appreciated.
Welcome to SF.
Categorically, employer pension contributions to a UK approved pension plan that you wish to apply the 7.5% ruling to a single lump sum should qualify for the favourable French treatment.
Here is an extract from the tax bulletin that I will link to below. References to exemption in the extract clearly apply to employer contributions to a UK approved pension plan. In other words the employer contributions are not deductible by the employee but are not taxable on them as income.
The practical issue is demonstrating that the contributions are not taxable on an employee, given that they don’t usually feature on payslips, tax returns etc..I had to show specific sample monthly payslips which obviously didn’t include employer pension contributions on them as income, alongside a schedule from my pension plan for the exact same months, which clearly showed contributions being made (by my employer). Certificates from an employer or pension company should help.
There are several helpful threads on related issues on SF if you search under pension lump sums. There is also a useful tax bulletin that sets out country by country what sorts of pension plans are regarded by the Impôts as qualifying..These include the standard UK approved pension schemes (also covering personal pension plans).
Best of luck.
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Thank you George, this is good news! Thanks for the clear explanation and the link.
OK, I’m stumped & would appreciate some advice @George1
I have declared my pension lump sums that were received in 2025. I am confident that I’ve entered the gross figure in the right places of my tax return.
Despite reading official French tax information a lot I’m still unclear as to how/where to get the tax form to add on & show the various social charges.
I’m using the mention express to say how much the payments were in £, who they were from, & the exchange rates used to give a € figure. I may also mention that I’ve not succeeded in getting the form to behave as I hoped.
Being in 14 the online return is due in by the end of tomorrow, 21/05/2026…!
It’s actually your local tax office that will work out, and subsequently bill you via your Avis for the social charges due, (I recall you don’t have an S1 due to presumably the latter part of your career working in France). You don’t have to do anything extra to calculate the social charges, (assuming you haven’t inadvertently ticked the box to say you’ve an S1.)
By the way, did I answer your 9 May question fully eg was there anything to worry about if your pension plans from which you took the lump sums were employer funded (answer - no).I didn’t see a response but you may have been happy with the answer?
Ah, that’s the conclusion that I was coming too, but needed to be sure.
I do not have an S1, having worked here for 15 years.
Yes, & thank you so much for that & for this answer too. I was very remiss & didn’t reply straight away & it got lost in the mists of everything else; there’s a few stressful &/or distracting things going on right now which go some way to account for my lack of manners.
I think SF needs some kind of special medal for advice like yours.
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