Probably been covered loads of times before and a somewhat academic thing on my mind in my journey to emigrate from the UK…
I was already a bit annoyed that my local gov pension would always be taxed under the less generous UK regime, but now I wonder what wil happen with my state pension…
I just received my first state pension payment and they pay it to me untaxed, but instead changed my tax code so all the tax is taken from my LG pension.
Would this change were I to become tax resident in France ?
Of course while I’m still in the UK my tax code is also tweaked by HMRC to recoup what I owe them in bank interest…
Yes, covered everywhere though appreciate sometimes in different places. Short answer is yes state pension taxable in France - you would get French tax authority to sign a double tax treaty form to send to HMRC to have your tax code adjusted.
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You’re welcome ! 2 minutes of typing versus an hour of you searching?
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The form you want is called France Form Individual. As soon as you are officially resident here ie you have arrived with the intention of staying, go to local Impõts with it completed, have them sign it, and send to HMRC.
If you can get here even for 1 day this year officially resident, would be good as then you’ll have to do a France tax declaration next year (April or May approx) for the part of this year you are resident. Occasionally we have heard of a local Impôts office refusing signature till at least one year was declared…
I’d also be tempted to include both state pension and the local government pension (with appropriate annotation) on the form in the sources of income concerned. I know the local government pension will stay taxed by the UK under the double taxation treaty but the income is still used as part of your total income to determine what tax bracket you fall into in France. So I’d want both the UK and France to see both together. So you don’t end up getting taxed on the local gov pension as well as the UK already taxing you and then have to get that corrected. Maybe overkill but I don’t think it would do any harm.
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Thanks 
I may need to hire someone for a bit !
I am likely already too trusting of HMRC getting it right with changing my tax code to recoup savings interest..
Maybe you could also include interest-bearing UK bank accounts in your double taxation form. As, like your UK state pension, any interest on those accounts will be taxable in France, not the UK.
From what I gather elsewhere on Survive France, you can list various sources of income in one form.
It would be great if you could report back on how you get on with your local French tax office, as regards getting them to sign the form as people have had mixed experiences.
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Providing you already have a French fiscal number then no reason you cannot do the form asap. Its not too hard, key is to be consistent in the dates you put in when you arrived in france for tax purposes and to put all your pensions on. There is a box to tick for your uk state pension make sure to tick it.
Then get it stamped, signed, copied and sent to the uk then be very paitent. Can be a long wait time.
The one beauty of having the government pension still taxed in the uk is you keep your uk personal allowance whilst france will fully relieve the pension for tax and social charges (or it should, check it) versus you paying both in france. Depends on amounts of course but if you do the maths you may be pleasantly surprised.
I’ve never managed to work out whether there’s actually any advantage to having the personal allowance in the UK, given that, regardless of where you pay the tax, all your worldwide income is totalled by the French and even income that is taxable and taxed in the UK can push your other income into a higher French bracket.
Has anyone ever done the maths? To compare the situation of someone with some income taxable in the UK and some in France. With that of another person with exactly the same amount of income, but all taxable in France.
It’s not as if you really get 2 personal allowances.
I suspect there wouldn’t be a huge difference in terms of tax. But there would be a big difference in social charges (which has nothing to do with personal tax allowances of course).
Yes, it can make a big difference as I notice when I add in the UK rental income. One of my tasks is to do some maths (arithmetic?) to check whether renting is still better than selling…
Agree only makes sense to look at on a personal basis. Paticularly with uk property income it can indeed be better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Standard health warning…never do things just for tax reasons…always do things that make sense for your life first and check tax second.
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We’re keeping ours because I want a toehold in the UK. From a purely financial point of view, it would make more sense for us to sell and stick the money in NS&I.
We’re going to have to start quarterly reporting from 2028, so yet more hassle.
It’s been a revelation to find NSand I give decent interest and much more than 120k protection so it will be very handy when I finally offload my house…
It made me finally phone them to gain control of my premium bonds…
I’m very happy with them. My only (slight) concern is what we would do if we suddenly no longer had a UK current bank account (because as you know NS&I would then close our NS&I accounts). But we’ll cross that bridge if we ever come to it.
My other caveat for anyone thinking of opening one is that we can no longer get the security code via our French mobiles. Used to come through fine but now they don’t.
I’ve even tried adding the number from which the codes are sent (a French number, interestingly) to my Contacts. But it still doesn’t work. Plenty of other people have no problems getting the codes on foreign mobiles, though.
The codes do still come through to our French landline so I use that to access the accounts. And I have included the mobile of a family member in the UK in the list of 3 numbers NS&I will send codes to. Although obviously using that number would involve arranging with the person in advance.