You live in France, you built up a pension in Britain — a workplace scheme, a Self-Invested Personal Pension (a SIPP, the do-it-yourself pension wrapper millions of Britons use), or an old frozen pot from a former employer — and you wonder whether you can move it across the Channel now that Britain has left the European Union. The short answer is yes, the transfer remains possible, but it sits at the crossing of two tax systems that do not speak the same language. London tests the transfer before the money leaves and can take 25% at source. Paris taxes you once you are resident in France, treats most foreign pensions as ordinary pension income, and then applies social charges on top, with only a treaty credit to soften the second bill. Get any step wrong — the wrong receiving scheme, the wrong box on the French return, the wrong proof of what you paid or declared in Britain — and you pay twice or you pay too much. This article walks through the whole chain in the order you will meet it: the British exit test, the French residence test, the French tax bill, and the remedies when the bill is wrong. It is written for British readers living in France, and every French legal term is explained the first time it appears.

I. Can You Still Transfer a British SIPP or Workplace Pension to France After Brexit, and What Does London Take on the Way Out?

Brexit did not abolish pension transfers, but it moved them into a stricter regime. Before you think about French tax at all, the British scheme must agree to release the money, and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC, the British tax authority) applies its own charge at the moment of transfer. This section covers the two British-side questions readers actually type into search engines: which overseas schemes qualify, and when the 25% charge bites.

A. Which overseas pension schemes can receive your British pension after Brexit?

The British rule is simple to state and expensive to ignore. The official GOV.UK guidance on transferring to an overseas scheme requires the receiving scheme to be a qualifying recognised overseas pension scheme (QROPS), and places the check squarely on the saver, with their scheme or adviser. A QROPS is therefore not a brand name; it is a status. An overseas scheme tells HMRC it meets the British conditions, HMRC publishes it on the recognised overseas pension schemes notification list, and only then can a British scheme transfer to it without the transfer being treated as an unauthorised payment. The same official page warns that a transfer to a non-QROPS may simply be refused by the British scheme, and that a tax charge of at least 40% can otherwise apply. That 40% figure is not a negotiating position. It reflects the unauthorised-payments charge regime, and in practice most British ceding schemes simply refuse to send money to a scheme that is not on the list, so the transfer never happens.

Three practical consequences follow for a British resident in France. First, the check is your responsibility, not your adviser’s and not the receiving scheme’s. The GOV.UK page puts the burden bluntly on the saver — and if the scheme lost its QROPS status the week before your transfer, HMRC will treat you as the person who got it wrong. The published list changes regularly, so check it in the days before the transfer, keep a dated copy, and ask the receiving scheme for written confirmation that it still meets the ROPS conditions on the transfer date. The guidance warns that British tax charges plus interest for late payment can still be pursued where the receiving entity fails the ROPS conditions, which means the risk follows you even if everyone smiled at signing. Second, France-based QROPS exist but they are fewer than before Brexit, and many British expatriates in France use a QROPS based in a third country such as Malta or Gibraltar. That choice is lawful, but as shown below it changes the 25% analysis, because the exemption depends on where you live relative to where the QROPS sits. Third, the transfer must be reported. Where the five-year rule described below applies, the member must complete HMRC form APSS 241 and hand it to the scheme administrator, and the administrator settles the charge. Keep proof of that filing; the French administration may later ask what was paid in Britain, and the treaty credit analysed in Part II turns on exactly that evidence.

One more British-side point matters before Brexit nostalgia sets in. When Britain was in the EU, transfers to schemes in the European Economic Area broadly escaped the overseas transfer charge as a class. Since the end of the transition period, that blanket protection is gone and each transfer is tested on its own facts: same country of residence as the QROPS, employer link, allowance headroom, and the five-year tail. A transfer that would have passed untouched in 2019 can therefore cost 25% in 2026 for no reason other than the calendar. Readers who moved a pension years ago should also check whether they later broke the residence condition within five years of the transfer, because the charge can revive retrospectively. The French side of the story then starts the day you become resident in France, which is the subject of the next section.

B. Once you live in France, which country does the treaty let tax your British pension?

France taxes its residents on worldwide income; the treaty with Britain then divides the bill. The entry point is article 4 B of the French Tax Code (Code général des impôts), which defines tax residence (domicile fiscal). It provides: “Sont considérées comme ayant leur domicile fiscal en France au sens de l’article 4 A : a. Les personnes qui ont en France leur foyer ou le lieu de leur séjour principal ; b. Celles qui exercent en France une activité professionnelle, salariée ou non, à moins qu’elles ne justifient que cette activité y est exercée à titre accessoire”. In plain English: your home (foyer, the place where your family and personal life are centred) or your main place of stay (séjour principal, roughly presence of more than 183 days in the year, though the case law looks at the whole pattern) makes you resident, as does a main professional activity in France. Any one of these tests is enough. A British retiree who keeps a London flat but spends the year in the Dordogne with spouse and doctor is resident in France under the first test, and the London flat does not save them.

Once you are resident in France, the France–Britain double tax treaty of 19 June 2008, published in France by Decree No 2010-20 of 7 January 2010, allocates the right to tax pensions. The default rule is Article 18 of the treaty, under which private pensions and similar payments for past employment made to a resident of one state are taxable only in that state — so a British private or workplace pension paid to a French resident is taxable only in France. Britain must then exempt it (in practice through the NT — no tax — code mechanism on application), and France taxes it under its own rules examined in Part II. The exception is government-service pensions. Article 19, paragraph 2 of the treaty keeps pensions paid by a contracting state, one of its local authorities or a French public-law body for government service taxable in the paying state, whether paid directly or from funds set aside for the purpose. There is a narrow way back — where the recipient is both resident and national of the other state without holding the paying state’s nationality, the residence state recovers the right to tax — but most British retired civil servants, teachers in state schemes treated as government pensions, National Health Service staff and military pensioners living in France remain taxable in Britain on that pension, and must not declare it as French-taxable pension income. Misclassifying a Crown pension as an Article 18 private pension, or vice versa, is one of the most common and most expensive errors in this desk’s files, and our companion analysis of how the 25% tax-free lump sum and Crown pensions are taxed in France works through that boundary with the treaty text. For transfer planning, the classification decides everything that follows: an Article 18 pension transferred to a French QROPS while you are French-resident produces a French tax event under French rules, whereas a government pension can often not be transferred at all because the paying public scheme forbids it.

The transfer itself then faces the British overseas transfer charge test at the very moment the money moves. GOV.UK states the headline plainly: a 25% tax charge may apply to the transfer. Whether it does depends on two things: the country where the receiving QROPS is based, and the saver’s available overseas transfer allowance. The allowance is usually £1,073,100 and may be higher with protection. The clean exemption applies where two conditions are both met: the saver lives in the same country where the QROPS is based, and the transfer stays within the available overseas transfer allowance. So a French-resident transferring to a France-based QROPS within the allowance generally pays no British charge, while the same person transferring to a Malta-based QROPS fails the same-country test and owes 25% unless another exemption, such as a transfer to a QROPS provided by the saver’s employer, which is usually tax-free, applies. Above the allowance, even an otherwise exempt transfer suffers a 25% charge on the excess over the allowance. And the tail is long: where the saver moves country within five years of the transfer, the APSS 241 form must be filed, a 25% charge applies if the saver has moved away from the QROPS country, and a refund is available in the symmetric case where the saver moved into it. A British retiree who transfers to a French QROPS and then returns to Kent two years later to be near grandchildren can therefore receive a British charge two years after the event. Diary the five-year anniversary before you celebrate. With the British test survived, the French bill arrives, and it is heavier than most newcomers expect.

II. How Does France Tax the Transferred British Pension, and How Do You Challenge a Wrong Bill?

France taxes the pension as pension income, denies the British tax-free label, adds social charges, and then grants a treaty credit computed under precise rules that the administration sometimes misapplies. This part works through the computation first, because you cannot challenge a figure you cannot recompute, and then gives the evidence file and the litigation path that actually wins cases, including two recent court decisions that show what works and what fails.

A. How is your transferred British pension taxed in France: income tax, social charges and the treaty credit?

Start with income tax (impôt sur le revenu). Article 79 of the Tax Code brings pensions into the net in the widest terms: “Les traitements, indemnités, émoluments, salaires, pensions et rentes viagères concourent à la formation du revenu global servant de base à l’impôt sur le revenu. Il en est de même des prestations de retraite servies sous forme de capital.” The second sentence matters enormously for transfers: retirement benefits paid as a lump sum (capital) are also caught. A transfer value paid out and moved is therefore not magically converted into capital-with-no-tax; France looks through the payment and asks what right it represents. If it represents pension rights, Article 79 taxes it. The computation then runs through Article 158 of the Tax Code: “Les pensions et retraites font l’objet d’un abattement de 10 % qui ne peut excéder 4 439 €.” An abattement is a statutory reduction applied before the rate scale: declare the gross pension, subtract 10% within the cap and floor, and the scale applies to the rest. The British personal allowance, the 25% tax-free lump sum, and the British starting-rate band have no equivalent effect in France and must be forgotten the moment the return is prepared. That single misunderstanding — the belief that the British 25% tax-free treatment travels with the money — accounts for a large share of the reassessments (rectifications) this desk reviews each year.

A narrower door exists for lump-sum pension capital through Article 163 bis, II of the Tax Code, which allows certain retirement benefits paid as capital, taxable under Article 158, to be subjected, on the express and irrevocable request of the beneficiary, to a flat levy: the benefits “peuvent, sur demande expresse et irrévocable du bénéficiaire, être soumises à un prélèvement au taux de 7,5 % qui libère les revenus auxquels il s’applique de l’impôt sur le revenu. Ce prélèvement est assis sur le montant du capital diminué d’un abattement de 10 %.” The conditions are strict: “Ce prélèvement est applicable lorsque le versement n’est pas fractionné et que le bénéficiaire justifie que les cotisations versées durant la phase de constitution des droits, y compris le cas échéant par l’employeur, étaient déductibles de son revenu imposable ou étaient afférentes à un revenu exonéré dans l’Etat auquel était attribué le droit d’imposer celui-ci.” So the payment must come in one go (versement non fractionné — no splitting across tax years to manufacture the rate), and you must prove the contributions were deductible or linked to exempt income in the state that had the right to tax them. For a British SIPP where contributions got UK tax relief, that second condition is normally satisfiable with the right paperwork, but the paperwork must actually be produced: P60s, annual allowance statements, employer certificates. Note the exclusion at the end of the article for retirement savings plans (plans d’épargne retraite) and repeating claims: the option is one-shot and irrevocable, so modelling must precede filing. Whether the scale-plus-10%-reduction or the 7.5% flat levy wins depends on the amount, the household’s other income, and the year, and the answer must be computed both ways before the return is signed.

On top of income tax come the social charges: the CSG (contribution sociale généralisée, the broad social contribution) and the CRDS (contribution pour le remboursement de la dette sociale, the debt-redemption contribution). The rate provision is Article L. 136-8 of the Social Security Code (Code de la sécurité sociale): “Sont assujetties à la contribution au taux de 8,3 % les pensions de retraite, et les pensions d’invalidité.” Reduced rates exist for modest households, but the default full-rate load on pensions surprises British newcomers who never paid anything comparable on pension income at home. The persons concerned are, under Article L. 136-6 of the Social Security Code, “Les personnes physiques fiscalement domiciliées en France au sens de l’article 4 B du code général des impôts”, which loops straight back to the residence test above: once Article 4 B catches you, the social charges follow unless a specific exemption applies. The main exemption argued for British pensioners is the S1 route — the portable document (formulaire S1) by which Britain, as the state paying your state pension, remains competent for your healthcare, so that France, which does not carry your sickness risk, cannot levy the sickness-linked charges. That argument is real but narrow: it requires actual non-affiliation to the French compulsory scheme, a live S1 registered with the French health fund (caisse primaire d’assurance maladie), and careful separation of the CSG from the solidarity levies, and the courts test each element. A recent failure illustrates the strictness. In CAA Lyon, 13 August 2025, No 24LY03019 (CETATEXT000052130152), a taxpayer receiving a Swiss capital pension argued, among other things, an equivalence with a voluntary retirement savings plan and an extensive reading of EU coordination Regulation No 883/2004 on social security. The court was unmoved: “Il résulte de ce qui précède, sans qu’il soit besoin de surseoir à statuer pour un renvoi d’une question préjudicielle, que Mme A… n’est pas fondée à soutenir que c’est à tort que, par le jugement attaqué, le tribunal administratif de Lyon a rejeté sa demande. Sa requête doit être rejetée”, and the operative part reads “DÉCIDE : Article 1er : La requête de Mme A… est rejetée.” The lesson is not that the S1 exemption does not exist; it is that courts reject it whenever the file proves affiliation, equivalence, or timing imperfectly — including, in that case, an argument built on a savings vehicle that did not even exist in the year of payment. Build the exemption file before paying, not after assessment.

The treaty then softens double taxation through Article 24, paragraph 3 of the France–Britain treaty, as reproduced in the Conseil d’État’s opinion, and this is where the administration most often under-computes. The mechanism: “nonobstant toute autre disposition de la présente Convention, les revenus qui sont imposables ou ne sont imposables qu’au Royaume-Uni conformément aux dispositions de la présente Convention sont pris en compte pour le calcul de l’impôt français lorsqu’ils ne sont pas exemptés de l’impôt sur les sociétés en application de la législation interne française. Dans ce cas, l’impôt du Royaume-Uni n’est pas déductible de ces revenus, mais le résident de France a droit, sous réserve des conditions et limites prévues aux alinéas (i) et (ii) et au paragraphe 4, à un crédit d’impôt imputable sur l’impôt français.” For ordinary pensions the credit under subparagraph (i) equals the French tax on that income: “(i) pour les revenus non mentionnés à l’alinéa (ii), au montant de l’impôt français correspondant à ces revenus à condition que le résident de France soit soumis à l’impôt du Royaume-Uni à raison de ces revenus”. The computation of that French-tax amount follows subparagraph (b): “/ (i) lorsque l’impôt dû à raison de ces revenus est calculé par application d’un taux proportionnel, le produit du montant des revenus nets considérés par le taux qui leur est effectivement appliqué ; / (ii) lorsque l’impôt dû à raison de ces revenus est calculé par application d’un barème progressif, le produit du montant des revenus nets considérés par le taux résultant du rapport entre l’impôt effectivement dû à raison du revenu net global imposable selon la législation française et le montant de ce revenu net global.” In practice the administration must therefore gross up the French computation with the British income, compute the French scale, and credit the attributable French slice — not merely delete the income, and not cap the credit by the British tax actually paid under subparagraph (i).

The Conseil d’État (the supreme administrative court) confirmed the taxpayer-friendly reading of these words in a landmark opinion on this very treaty, Conseil d’État, 12 February 2020, No 435907 (CETATEXT000041569463). Asked whether the credit requires tax actually paid in Britain, the court answered that the condition “n’exige pas que les revenus en cause aient été soumis à une imposition effective” — it does not require effective taxation — and that it “doit être regardée comme satisfaite s’il est établi par le résident de France qu’il a déclaré les revenus en cause au Royaume-Uni, parce que ces revenus étaient compris dans la base de l’un des impôts énumérés au a) du 1 de l’article 2 de la convention, alors même qu’il n’aurait acquitté dans cet Etat aucun impôt à raison de ces revenus.” Declaration in Britain of income within the scope of a listed British tax suffices, even with zero British tax paid. The court added that social charges are inside the French tax for this purpose: The court added that, for social charges, “aucune stipulation de l’article 24 ne subordonne l’octroi d’un crédit d’impôt égal à leur montant à ce que les revenus soumis à ces contributions aient été compris dans la base d’un impôt équivalent ou similaire au Royaume-Uni”, no provision “ne subordonne l’octroi d’un crédit d’impôt égal à leur montant à ce que les revenus soumis à ces contributions aient été compris dans la base d’un impôt équivalent ou similaire au Royaume-Uni.” Two consequences matter for pension transfers. First, the 25% overseas transfer charge, being a British charge on the transfer rather than British income tax on the pension income itself, does not automatically generate or increase the Article 24 credit; do not assume the 25% “covers” the French bill. Second, where Britain exempts the pension under Article 18 and levies nothing, France must still grant the credit equal to the French tax on that income once the income was declared in Britain within a listed tax base — the administration cannot refuse the credit for want of a British payment slip. Check every assessment for a missing or truncated credit before paying; it is the single most frequently successful ground of challenge in this desk’s treaty files.

B. Your pension transfer is challenged by the tax office: what proof wins and which court annuls what?

Disputes arrive in three familiar forms: the administration recharacterises the receipt (transfer value treated as salary, or capital treatment refused), it denies the 7.5% option for want of contribution proof, or it omits or truncates the treaty credit. Each has a matching evidence file, and the file decides the case before any judge is involved. For characterisation, assemble the British scheme’s benefit crystallisation statement, the transfer discharge forms, the QROPS acceptance certificate, the pre-transfer valuation distinguishing employer and employee contributions and the tax relief each received, and, for defined-benefit schemes, the cash-equivalent transfer value basis. For the 7.5% option, add year-by-year contribution and relief evidence plus a statement that the capital was paid in a single untaxed instalment. For the treaty credit, add the British self-assessment return or HMRC account print showing the pension declared in Britain, any NT-code notice, and the computation of the French attributable tax under Article 24(b) done both ways (proportional and progressive) so the inspector can verify rather than guess. File this bundle with the return where possible and in any event with the first letter answering the administration’s proposal of rectification (proposition de rectification): the criminal-style rule that the file must be complete at the hearing applies in spirit from the first exchange, because the judge will later read delay as doubt.

Procedure then runs in the classic French order. Answer the rectification proposal within the stated period, then contest the assessment through the preliminary complaint (réclamation contentieuse) filed within the time limit printed on the tax notice, and then, on express or implied rejection, to the administrative tribunal (tribunal administratif) of your French home. Keep every deadline from the documents themselves rather than from memory, because limitation rules change and misremembered periods lose cases that the merits would have won. Two recent decisions show why early procedural discipline pays. In CAA Lyon, 25 August 2020, No 19LY03464 (CETATEXT000042283202), the first judges had recharacterised disputed receipts as non-pension benefits on a ground of their own motion — essentially deciding the capital-versus-pension question without putting that ground to the parties — and the court of appeal annulled for breach of the adversarial principle: the tribunal had proceeded to a substitution of grounds without adversarial debate, and “ce jugement doit être annulé pour irrégularité”, with the operative part providing “Article 1er : Le jugement n° 1705120 du 2 juillet 2019 du tribunal administratif de Lyon est annulé”, the case remitted, and costs of 2,000 euros under Article L. 761-1 of the Code of Administrative Justice. The deep lesson for pension-transfer files is that characterisation is genuinely debatable — pension or capital, Article 79 or Article 163 bis — and a tribunal cannot settle it behind the parties’ backs; but the shallow lesson is just as valuable: plead both characterisations in the alternative from the start so the court never needs to invent one. The second decision, the CAA Lyon 24LY03019 rejection quoted above, shows the mirror image: creative arguments (assimilation to a savings plan, expansive readings of Regulation No 883/2004, requests for a preliminary reference to Luxembourg) all failed because the evidence did not fit the text as written. Courts reward files that track the articles word for word and punish files that ask the court to rewrite them.

Paris practice adds three finishing touches worth knowing. First, interest and penalties: the treaty credit, when finally granted, recomputes the principal, and penalties built on the inflated principal fall with it, so always challenge the penalties expressly rather than letting them survive by default. Second, the five-year British tail interacts with French reassessment periods: a British charge raised in year three after the transfer can coincide with a French audit of the transfer year, and each administration will ask what the other decided — keep a single chronological binder both can read. Third, where a transfer is still ahead of you rather than behind you, a written ruling request (demande de rescrit) to the French administration on the characterisation and the credit computation, lodged before the transfer with the full draft file, converts the later dispute from litigation into enforcement of an answer. The administration answers slowly, so lodge it the quarter before the transfer, not the week before. With the file complete, the computation checked both ways, and the deadlines diarised from the documents, a British pension transfer to France is not a gamble; it is an administered process with known tests, published rates, and a supreme-court-backed credit. The readers who pay too much are almost never those whose case was weak; they are those whose file arrived late, thin, or in the wrong box.

Conclusion

A British pension can still be moved to France after Brexit, but the transfer now crosses two checkpoints instead of one. Britain controls the exit through the QROPS list, the £1,073,100 allowance, the 25% charge and its five-year tail; France controls the entry through residence under Article 4 B, taxation of pensions and capitalised benefits under Articles 79, 158 and 163 bis, social charges at 8.3%, and the treaty credit of Article 24 as interpreted by the Conseil d’État in its 12 February 2020 opinion. The planning order follows the money: confirm QROPS status and the same-country test before moving a pound, classify the pension under Article 18 or Article 19 before declaring a euro, compute income tax both ways before choosing the 7.5% option, verify the credit line by line before paying, and assemble the British declaration evidence before the administration asks. Done in that order, with the articles quoted above at hand, the transfer produces one measured French bill rather than two uncoordinated ones — and any bill that departs from that measure can be challenged on paper the courts have already accepted.