UK Tax Residency and summer job in France

Hi guys, I worked in France for about 2 months over the summer, and was stunned by the amount of taxes deducted off my pay. Being a British Tax Resident, is there a way to get these taxes refunded and be taxed in the UK instead? (being a student, those few hundreds do make a difference)
Thank you

Hello Mike… please will you amend your Registration to show your Full Name.

If you are unsure how to do this, please put your full name here, on this thread, and I will amend your Registration for you.

Why not visit the local Tax Offices and ask their advice… ??? There will perhaps be a form to complete… but it’s got to be worth it.

Without an more info and not knowing anything about your situation, it’s impossible to guess at what you paid and why. Normally if you are here as a posted worker with an S1, your employer would have continued to deduct NICs and PAYE from your salary as per UK rules. The only difference would be that your employer would have been obliged to notify France of your presence here as a posted worker, pay you at least French minimum wage, record and report your working hours and ensure they were in line with French labour laws, and issue French style payslips. But posted workers don’t normally pay any social taxes or income tax in their host country, so maybe you could clarify what the deductions were?

As to more information : Worked on normal French fixed term contract, so I paid all French taxes and deductions, I believe at least a quarter of my salary was gone after the tax. When I called HMRC to get some advice they said I need to take it up with the French.
I do spend a lot of time in France these days as to see the misses, however, my French is not good enough to be able to call around the tax office call centers or filling in some papers (which, as I understand, is a lot of fun in France, everything being 200 page long and needing initials on every page? )

You could ask “the misses” to make enquiries for you… and you could follow it up next time you visit France…

A quick Google search found this;

Students in France are allowed to earn up to a threshold before being liable for tax, it might be worth asking at your local (French) tax office if foreign students working in France are able to claim a rebate.

I suspect that what you paid was in fact social security contributions, not income tax. France is on the verge of introducing a PAYE system but up until now, income tax has been an annual exercise. In the normal way of things, any income you earned last summer would be declared on your annual tax return next April and if you had any tax liability you would receive a tax bill in due course. So, I don’t think you would have had any income tax deducted from your salary because there was no mechanism for employers to do this.

French social security contributions are indeed a lot higher than NICs in the UK. But if you were employed on a regular French contract, you would have been covered by French social security including healthcare for the period you were working, so I don’t really see how you can claim your contributions back even if you never needed any medical treatment. Same as in the UK, you can’t claim your NICs back on the grounds that you never claimed anything from social security.

That’s how it seems to me at any rate, sorry.

For the record - you probably should fill in a French tax return if you were employed as a French resident worker during 2018. For a couple of months work it’s highly unlikely there would be any tax to pay. But if you don’t, I doubt you’ll hear any more about it.

Probably not, seeing they were sécurité sociale contributions, not income tax. You can earn up to 3 months’ of minimum wage in any one year tax free as a student but you still have social charges deducted. Any more than that and you have to file a tax return on which you will be assessed, then you may or may not be liable to pay income tax.