You settled in France after Brexit, you pay French tax on your worldwide income, and back in England a family trust still holds the old house, the share portfolio or the money set aside for your children. Your English solicitor told you years ago that the trust protects the family. Your French tax office sees something entirely different: an opaque foreign arrangement holding assets that belong, in French eyes, to identifiable living people who must declare them every year and pay for the privilege. France does not recognise the trust as a legal person, it taxes straight through it, and since 2011 it has built a dedicated machinery — event declarations, an annual valuation return, a yearly levy at the top wealth-tax rate and full succession duties at death — that applies to you the moment you become French tax resident. This guide explains, in plain English with the exact legal texts, how France defines your UK trust, which two declarations your trustee must file and by when, how much the annual levy costs and who pays it when the trustee stays in London, how gifts and deaths through the trust are taxed, what two Court of Cassation rulings change for your defence, and how to challenge a wrong bill step by step.

I. Your UK Trust Must Be Declared in France and Pays an Annual Levy While You Live Here

A. How France Sees Your UK Trust: the Legal Definition, Why Your Move Triggers Disclosure, and the Two Declarations Your Trustee Must File

Start with the shock that frames everything: English law treats the trust as a flexible management tool, while French tax law treats it as transparent and suspicious. Article 792-0 bis of the General Tax Code provides: “on entend par trust l’ensemble des relations juridiques créées dans le droit d’un Etat autre que la France par une personne qui a la qualité de constituant, par acte entre vifs ou à cause de mort, en vue d’y placer des biens ou droits, sous le contrôle d’un administrateur, dans l’intérêt d’un ou de plusieurs bénéficiaires ou pour la réalisation d’un objectif déterminé” — a trust means the whole set of legal relations created under the law of a State other than France by a person acting as settlor, by lifetime deed or on death, placing assets or rights under the control of an administrator in the interest of one or more beneficiaries or for a defined purpose. Read that definition slowly, because it catches every British arrangement you know: the discretionary family trust (trust discrétionnaire, where the trustee decides who gets what), the interest-in-possession trust, the bare trust for minor children, the will trust created on a parent’s death. If there is a settlor (constituant, the person who put assets in), an administrator (administrateur, your trustee), and beneficiaries (bénéficiaires), France calls it a trust and the whole machinery below applies, whether the trust was made in London, Jersey, Guernsey or the Isle of Man.

Do not confuse this foreign trust with the French fiducie (the only trust-like device French civil law recognises). Article 2011 of the Civil Code states: “La fiducie est l’opération par laquelle un ou plusieurs constituants transfèrent des biens, des droits ou des sûretés, ou un ensemble de biens, de droits ou de sûretés, présents ou futurs, à un ou plusieurs fiduciaires qui, les tenant séparés de leur patrimoine propre, agissent dans un but déterminé au profit d’un ou plusieurs bénéficiaires.” — the fiducie is the transaction by which settlors transfer assets, rights or securities, present or future, to fiduciaries who, keeping them separate from their own property, act for a defined purpose for the benefit of beneficiaries. The fiducie is a narrow, contract-based tool supervised by French courts; your English trust is none of that. France therefore refuses to reason in English categories — legal versus equitable ownership, vested versus contingent interest — and taxes by looking through the trust to the real people behind it. The practical consequence is immediate: telling the tax office that “the trust owns the house, not me” is not a defence in France. It is the opening line of a reassessment.

Your move to France is the trigger, because French tax residence drags your worldwide assets into the French net. Article 4 B of the General Tax Code treats as French tax resident anyone meeting any one of three tests, the first being: “Les personnes qui ont en France leur foyer ou le lieu de leur séjour principal” — persons who have their household (foyer, where your family life is centred) or their main place of stay in France. Most British settlers meet this test within months: the family home is in France, the children go to French schools, you spend most nights here. From that moment, the trust disclosure duties apply to you in full, even if the trust, the trustee and every asset remain in Britain. The duties fall first on the trustee, wherever he sits. The official doctrine (Bulletin officiel des finances publiques, the tax administration’s published instructions) devotes a full chapter to trusts and requires two separate filings, described on the BOI-DJC-TRUST official commentary: an event declaration (déclaration événementielle) on form 2181-TRUST1 whenever a trust is created, amended or extinguished, or when beneficiaries change; and an annual valuation return (déclaration annuelle) on form 2181-TRUST2 stating the market value (valeur vénale, the price the assets would fetch on the open market) of all trust property each 1 January, filed with the non-residents tax office (recette des non-résidents) by 15 June each year. Miss either filing and the levy described below applies automatically, plus separate fixed fines for each missing declaration. Write to your trustee now, in English and in French, instructing him to file both forms every year you remain French resident — a London trustee who has never heard of the TRUST2 is the single most common cause of the five-figure bills in this guide.

The British side of the picture confirms that dual compliance is unavoidable, not optional. A UK resident trust files its own UK trust tax return and the trustees pay UK tax on trust income and gains, as explained in the GOV.UK guidance on trusts and Income Tax, and the position of trusts whose trustees or settlors leave the UK is set out in the GOV.UK guidance on non-resident trusts. None of that filing in Britain exempts anyone from the French filings above: the two systems run in parallel, and the France-United Kingdom double tax treaty allocates taxing rights without merging the two administrations’ paperwork. Keep both sets of returns, both valuations and both BPAY-equivalent payment proofs in one file, because when the French office asks how the trust was treated in London, a complete UK file turns a fraud suspicion into an ordinary coordination case.

B. How Much the Annual Levy Costs Each Year: the Top Wealth-Tax Rate, Who Pays When the Trustee Stays Silent, and the Two Cases That Escape It

The annual levy (prélèvement sui generis sur les trusts, the specific yearly charge on trusts) is the price of opacity: it applies whenever trust assets escape the normal French wealth declarations. Article 990 J of the General Tax Code provides: “Les personnes physiques constituants ou bénéficiaires d’un trust défini à l’article 792-0 bis sont soumises à un prélèvement fixé au tarif le plus élevé mentionné au 1 de l’article 977.” — individual settlors or beneficiaries of a trust as defined in Article 792-0 bis are liable to a levy set at the highest rate shown in paragraph 1 of Article 977. That cross-reference is what makes the levy so painful. Article 977 of the General Tax Code sets the wealth-tax scale whose top line reads “Supérieure à 10 000 000 € 1,50” — the portion above 10 million euros taxed at 1.50 per cent — and the trust levy applies that 1.50 per cent to the entire net market value of the trust property, every year, with no threshold and no progressive scale. A £600,000 portfolio inside an undeclared trust therefore costs roughly £9,000 a year in levy alone, before any income tax, before any fine, and the charge repeats each 1 January until the declarations are regularised.

The base of the levy is the property-wealth base, which is why even a trust holding only a London flat can be caught. Article 965 of the General Tax Code opens: “L’assiette de l’impôt sur la fortune immobilière est constituée par la valeur nette au 1er janvier de l’année” — the real-estate wealth tax base consists of the net value on 1 January of the year — and continues over the shares and units representing buildings held directly or through companies. For the trust levy, the same valuation logic applies to the assets placed in the trust, wherever they sit, when the settlor or a beneficiary is French tax resident. The same Article 990 J of the General Tax Code then organises payment: “La consistance et la valeur des actifs mentionnés à l’article 965 placés dans le trust sont déclarées et le prélèvement est acquitté et versé au comptable public compétent par l’administrateur du trust au plus tard le 15 juin de chaque année.” — the content and value of the Article 965 assets placed in the trust are declared and the levy is paid over to the competent public accountant by the trust administrator no later than 15 June each year. Note the order of liability: the trustee pays first. “A défaut, le constituant et les bénéficiaires, autres que ceux mentionnés aux a et b du présent III, ou leurs héritiers sont solidairement responsables du paiement du prélèvement.” — failing that, the settlor and the beneficiaries, or their heirs, are jointly and severally liable (solidairement responsables, meaning the Treasury may pursue any one of them for the whole sum). A London trustee who ignores French post does not make the debt vanish; it transfers the full bill onto you in France, with joint liability among every beneficiary the office can identify.

Two narrow families of trusts escape the levy, and you should test yours against both before assuming the worst. The first covers genuine charities: where the trustee is subject to the law of a State bound to France by an administrative-assistance treaty against fraud — which the United Kingdom is — the levy does not apply to irrevocable trusts whose exclusive beneficiaries fall under the charitable-exemption regime. Those exemptions are listed in Article 795 of the General Tax Code, which opens “Sont exonérés des droits de mutation à titre gratuit” — are exempt from gratuitous-transfer duties — and covers gifts and legacies to public bodies, recognised charities and similar institutions. A family trust paying school fees for your children is not a charity; a trust irrevocably dedicated to a registered hospice may be. The second exemption covers occupational pension trusts: trusts set up to manage pension rights earned through professional activity under an employer’s retirement scheme. A standard UK discretionary family trust, a bare trust for the children, or a will trust holding the old matrimonial home qualifies for neither exemption, and dressing a family trust in charitable language without meeting the statutory conditions only adds a misrepresentation issue to a tax bill. If your trust genuinely serves a pension scheme or a qualifying charity, evidence it with the trust deed (acte de trust, the founding document) and the charity’s registration — the exemption is claimed with documents, never with assertions.

The newest Court of Cassation ruling (Cour de cassation, France’s supreme court for civil and tax matters) gives you one serious treaty argument against the levy, while setting a strict method for using it. On 11 February 2026 the commercial chamber quashed a Paris appeal decision that had discharged a trust administrator on treaty grounds: Court of Cassation, 11 February 2026, No 23-14.305. The case concerned a Canadian-law trust and the Franco-Canadian treaty, but the method applies to every French tax treaty including the one with the United Kingdom. The court reproached the appeal judges for holding that taxing the trustee would double-tax the settlor “sans rechercher, comme il lui incombait, si la Convention s’appliquait au prélèvement sur les trusts prévu à l’article 990 J du code général des impôts” — without examining, as it was required to do, whether the treaty applied to the trust levy provided for in Article 990 J — and the operative part reads: “CASSE ET ANNULE, en toutes ses dispositions, l’arrêt rendu le 6 février 2023, entre les parties, par la cour d’appel de Paris” — quashes and annuls in all its provisions the judgment of 6 February 2023 of the Paris Court of Appeal. The lesson for your file is double-edged and practical: yes, you may argue that the France-United Kingdom treaty covers the levy as an identical or similar wealth tax and therefore blocks or credits it — but you must prove it article by article, showing the levy’s nature, the treaty’s scope clause and the overlap, because a bare reference to “the treaty” will be quashed on appeal. Build that comparison in writing before you invoke it, or the victory you win in Paris will be lost in the supreme court.

II. What France Takes When Trust Assets Pass to Your Children and How to Challenge the Bill

A. How Death and Gifts Through a Trust Are Taxed: Kinship Rates, the 100,000 Euro Allowance, and the Six-Month and Twelve-Month Filing Deadlines

Death does not close a trust in French eyes — it taxes it, sometimes twice. Article 792-0 bis of the General Tax Code provides that transfers by gift or on death of assets or capitalised income placed in a trust are subject to gratuitous-transfer duties (droits de mutation à titre gratuit, the French gift and succession taxes) according to the kinship between settlor and beneficiary, and adds a punitive ladder where no beneficiary share is fixed at death: the determined share of descendants pays death duties at the top rate of Table I of Article 777, and the remaining value pays duties at the top rate of Table III of the same article. In plain terms, a distribution to your own children is taxed like a normal parent-to-child succession, while assets left floating in a discretionary trust with no fixed shares can be taxed at the highest stranger rates. The territorial reach is then set by Article 750 ter of the General Tax Code, which taxes French and foreign assets alike, “lorsque le donateur ou le défunt a son domicile fiscal en France au sens de l’article 4 B” — where the donor or the deceased was French tax resident within the meaning of Article 4 B — and taxes French-situated assets, expressly including “biens ou droits composant un trust défini à l’article 792-0 bis et produits qui y sont capitalisés” — assets or rights forming a trust defined in Article 792-0 bis and the capitalised income therein — even where the deceased lived in England. If you die French resident, your worldwide trust assets are in scope; if your father dies in Manchester leaving a trust holding a Dordogne cottage to you in France, the French cottage is in scope regardless of his residence.

The rates that then apply are the ordinary French succession scale, which surprises British families by its steepness beyond the allowances. Article 777 of the General Tax Code sets the direct-line scale culminating in “Au-delà de 1 805 677 € 45” — beyond 1,805,677 euros, 45 per cent — and the between-spouses, siblings and strangers scales that climb to 45 and 60 per cent. Against those rates, the allowances (abattements, the tax-free slices) are modest. Article 779 of the General Tax Code provides: “il est effectué un abattement de 100 000 € sur la part de chacun des ascendants et sur la part de chacun des enfants vivants ou représentés par suite de prédécès ou de renonciation” — an allowance of 100,000 euros applies to the share of each parent and of each living child, or child represented where a child predeceased or renounced. Each child therefore receives 100,000 euros free of duty, renewed every fifteen years for gifts, and pays 5 to 45 per cent above it — while an unrelated beneficiary of a discretionary trust may face 60 per cent from the first euro with only a small allowance. Map every beneficiary’s kinship to the settlor before anyone signs anything: in trust successions, kinship is the single biggest determinant of the final bill, and a distribution routed to the wrong person in the wrong year can cost the family hundreds of thousands of euros.

Two filing duties surround every death and every gift, and both carry their own clock. First, the succession return (déclaration de succession, the inventory and valuation filed after death). Article 641 of the General Tax Code sets the time limits: “De six mois, à compter du jour du décès, lorsque celui dont on recueille la succession est décédé en France métropolitaine” — six months from the day of death where the deceased died in metropolitan France — and “D’une année, dans tous les autres cas.” — one year in all other cases. A British settlor dying in France leaves six months; a settlor dying in England leaves twelve. The trust administrator must pay the duties on the floating shares within those same periods, and late filing draws interest plus penalties automatically. Second, the disclosure of prior gifts (rappel fiscal des donations antérieures, the adding-back of earlier gifts to police allowance shopping). Article 784 of the General Tax Code requires: “Les parties sont tenues de faire connaître, dans tout acte constatant une transmission entre vifs à titre gratuit et dans toute déclaration de succession, s’il existe ou non des donations antérieures” — the parties must state, in every lifetime gift deed and every succession return, whether or not there were prior gifts. Every distribution the trust ever made to a beneficiary therefore resurfaces at death: the French notary (notaire, the public officer who settles successions) must add back gifts made within fifteen years when computing the allowances, and a family that “forgot” the 2019 appointment of capital to the eldest child will see it rediscovered through the UK trustee’s accounts, with penalties for omission.

Organise the paperwork as a French notary expects it, not as an English solicitor filed it. Obtain a certified copy of the trust deed with sworn translation (traduction assermentée, a translation by a court-approved translator), every deed of appointment and retirement of trustees, every distribution resolution, ten years of trust accounts, the 1 January valuations already filed on the TRUST2 forms, and a family tree with dates of birth, marriages and prior gifts proved by bank transfers. Where the trust holds French land, the notary will also demand the property title (titre de propriété), the last French wealth-tax returns and the rental accounts, because the succession value of a tenanted Dordogne house is not its Rightmove estimate. Start this file while the settlor is alive and competent: after death, English trustees answer slowly, April valuations become archaeological, and the six-month clock does not pause for cross-Channel correspondence.

B. How to Prove the Real Transfer Date, Use the Double Tax Treaties, and Challenge a Wrong Assessment Step by Step

The most valuable defence in a trust succession is often the calendar: France taxes the transfer when the beneficiary actually receives the assets, not when the settlor dies. In a leading ruling the Court of Cassation laid down the generator (fait générateur, the event that triggers the tax) for trust property: Court of Cassation, 18 November 2020, No 18-14.242. The court held that “le fait générateur des droits de mutation à titre gratuit est constitué par le transfert de propriété, qui, s’agissant de biens placés dans un trust, s’opère par l’effet de la distribution de l’actif du trust au bénéficiaire final, au jour de sa clôture, laquelle peut être postérieure au décès du constituant.” — the chargeable event for gratuitous-transfer duties is the transfer of ownership which, for assets placed in a trust, occurs through distribution of the trust assets to the final beneficiary on the day the trust closes, which may be after the settlor’s death. The operative part follows: “CASSE ET ANNULE, en toutes ses dispositions, l’arrêt rendu le 12 janvier 2018, entre les parties, par la cour d’appel de Versailles” — quashes and annuls in all its provisions the judgment of 12 January 2018 of the Versailles Court of Appeal. Apply this to your family: where the deed keeps the trust running after the settlor’s death — for example, income to the surviving spouse for life, capital to the children only when the youngest reaches thirty — there is no taxable capital transfer at the settlor’s death, only later at each distribution and at closure. Conversely, where the deed distributes everything outright on death, the duties fall immediately. Read the deed’s closure and distribution clauses before accepting any assessment dated from the death certificate alone, and make the office prove which clause it relies on.

The double tax treaties then decide whether Britain or France keeps the tax, or whether one credits the other — but they operate asset by asset, never as a blanket shield. For income and wealth, the France-United Kingdom treaty allocates dividends, interest, pensions and business profits between London and Paris, and the method approved in the February 2026 ruling above requires the same clause-by-clause comparison for the trust levy: identify the levy’s nature, match it to the treaty’s covered taxes, then claim the credit or exemption the treaty grants for that category. For successions, the 1963 France-United Kingdom estates treaty coordinates French and British inheritance tax on cross-border deaths, while French domestic law still demands its own succession return within the six- or twelve-month period above. In practice, run the computation in this order: first the French domestic charge under Articles 792-0 bis, 750 ter and 777 with the 779 allowances; second the British inheritance-tax position shown by the UK grant and HMRC accounts; third the treaty match that eliminates the overlap, keeping every proof of tax actually paid abroad, because France credits foreign tax effectively paid, never foreign tax merely in theory due. Families lose treaty relief far more often through missing HMRC receipts than through bad law.

When the assessment (avis de mise en recouvrement, the formal demand) arrives and it is wrong, challenge it in the French order: papers first, then the office, then the judge. Start within days by photographing every page of the demand, diarying the payment deadline separately from the complaint deadline printed on the notice, and paying what is truly due if you can — payment accompanied by an explicit written reservation (paiement sous réserve, payment marked as contested) stops late-payment interest from accumulating while preserving every ground of challenge. Then file a written claim (réclamation contentieuse, the formal complaint to the tax office) setting out, article by article, each error: wrong kinship rate, forgotten 100,000 euro allowance, valuation that ignores a lifetime tenancy, levy applied to an exempt pension or charitable trust, treaty credit omitted, transfer dated from death instead of distribution. Attach the trust deed clauses, the TRUST1 and TRUST2 receipts, the 1 January valuations, the distribution resolutions, the HMRC proofs and a computation showing the corrected figure. Number each ground separately so that a partial admission by the office reduces the bill even if other grounds fail.

If the office rejects the claim expressly or stays silent past its reply period, take the dispute to the court (tribunal judiciaire, the civil court hearing wealth and succession tax disputes) with a petition that mirrors the claim ground by ground, adding the two supreme-court rulings where they fit: the November 2020 distribution-at-closure reasoning against any death-date assessment of undivided trust capital, and the February 2026 treaty method against any refusal to examine the France-United Kingdom treaty match for the levy. Ask the judge to order disclosure of the office’s valuation file, commission an independent valuation of any French property at the relevant 1 January or death date, and subpoena the trustee’s distribution records where the office alleges a hidden appointment. Throughout, keep the trustee aligned: a trustee who files the missing TRUST1 and TRUST2 late, pays the modest duties on the true base and certifies in writing that no earlier distribution occurred often halves the dispute before the hearing. The offices reward documented candour and punish discovered silence — so correct voluntarily what is wrong, evidence fiercely what is right, and let the judge decide only the points genuinely in dispute.

Conclusion

Your English trust survives the move to France, but none of its English advantages travels with it untouched. Once your household or main stay is in France, the trust must be declared event by event and revalued every 1 January on the TRUST2, the trustee must pay the 1.50 per cent yearly levy by 15 June or see the full sum pursued jointly from settlor and beneficiaries, and every gift or death is taxed through the trust by kinship at up to 45 or 60 per cent above modest allowances, within six or twelve months. Against that machinery you hold precise tools: the charitable and pension-trust exemptions, the distribution-at-closure timing confirmed by the Court of Cassation in November 2020, the treaty comparison method imposed in February 2026, and the written claim followed by the civil court for every error of kinship, valuation, allowance or treaty credit. File the two trust returns every year, keep the deed and every valuation where a French notary can find them, date every transfer from the distribution and not from the death certificate, and challenge promptly and in writing what is wrongly assessed. Handled that way, the trust remains what your English solicitor intended — an orderly provision for your children — instead of becoming an annual French penalty.

Need a quick opinion on your case

Our firm offers a telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm to review your trust deed, your TRUST1 and TRUST2 position, your levy assessment and your succession exposure. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22, or write via our contact page with a copy of the trust deed, the latest 1 January valuation and the assessment you wish to challenge.