You have done the hard part. Since Brexit you have obtained your carte de séjour (residence permit) or your long-stay visa, you have registered with the local mairie (town hall) and with the French tax office, and your day-to-day life is now in France. But one piece of your British past has followed you across the Channel and refuses to fit into any French box: the family trust you set up back home, or of which you are a beneficiary. Perhaps it is a discretionary trust holding the proceeds of the sale of the family business, a will trust created on the death of a parent, or an interest-in-possession trust paying you an annual income. In England and Wales the trust is an everyday conveyancing and estate-planning tool. In France it does not exist as a domestic institution: the closest French device, the fiducie (a contractual arrangement by which a person transfers assets to a manager for a defined purpose), works on entirely different lines. Yet since the rectifying finance law of 29 July 2011, France has built a complete tax net around foreign trusts, and that net catches British settlers, trustees and beneficiaries the moment one of them becomes resident in France or the trust holds French assets. This guide explains, for a British reader living in France, who must declare the trust to the French tax authorities, which returns have to be filed and when, what annual tax the trust suffers while everyone is alive, and how France taxes the trust when the settlor or a beneficiary dies. Every French term is explained at first use, and the law is stated as in force on 7 September 2026, with the exact statutory provisions and court decisions your adviser can verify online.

I. How to declare your UK trust once you live in France

A. Who must declare the trust, and why your move to France triggers the duty

The starting point is the legal definition. For the whole of the French tax code, Article 792-0 bis of the Code général des impôts (the general tax code, usually shortened to CGI) provides that a trust means, in the words of the statute, « 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 » (the 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, in order to place property or rights under the control of a trustee, in the interest of one or more beneficiaries or for a defined purpose). An English discretionary trust, a Jersey trust, a Guernsey trust or a will trust made under the law of England and Wales all fall squarely within that definition. The same article defines the constituant (settlor) as the individual who created the trust or, where the trust was formally created by a professional or a company, the individual whose property was actually placed in it. The official tax commentary on trusts stresses that the definition targets the economic reality of the arrangement, so that putting the family company or a nominee in the deed as settlor changes nothing if the money was yours. Putting the family company or a nominee in the deed as settlor therefore changes nothing if the money was yours.

The declaration duty itself sits in Article 1649 AB of the CGI, and it falls on the administrateur du trust (the trustee), not on you as beneficiary, although you will see below that the price of the trustee’s silence is ultimately paid out of the trust fund and sometimes out of your own pocket. The statute provides, again in its own words, that must file the declarations in the case « d’un trust défini à l’article 792-0 bis dont le constituant ou l’un au moins des bénéficiaires a son domicile fiscal en France ou qui comprend un bien ou un droit qui y est situé » (a trust defined in Article 792-0 bis whose settlor or at least one beneficiary is domiciled for tax purposes in France, or which holds property or a right situated in France). Three everyday British situations therefore trigger the duty immediately. First, you are the settlor and you have moved your tax residence to France. Second, you are a beneficiary and you have moved to France, even if the settlor stayed in Kent and the trustee stayed in Jersey. Third, nobody moved at all but the trust has bought a holiday cottage in the Dordogne, because French-situated property alone is enough.

Whether you are domiciled for tax purposes in France is decided by Article 4 B of the CGI, the provision that governs every British arrival. A person is treated as having their domicile fiscal (tax domicile) in France where, in the words of the statute, « qui ont en France leur foyer ou le lieu de leur séjour principal » (persons who have in France their household or their principal place of stay), or where they carry on a professional activity in France otherwise than incidentally, or where the centre of their economic interests lies in France. Meeting any one of the three domestic tests makes you French tax resident under domestic law, subject to the tie-breaker of any double-tax treaty that may apply to you. If your household, your main home and your daily life are in France, you are French tax resident from the day you settle, and the trust you left behind in London enters the French reporting net on that same day. Readers who need the full residence analysis, including the position of couples split between the two countries, will find it in our companion guide on how British couples prove tax residence after Brexit.

Two refinements matter particularly for British readers. The first concerns trustees. Even where nobody connected with the trust lives in France, a trustee established or resident outside the European Union, which since Brexit includes a trustee in London, Jersey, Guernsey or the Isle of Man, becomes subject to the declaration duty when it buys French real estate or enters into a business relationship in France within the meaning of the anti-money-laundering legislation. Your Jersey trustee buying the Dordogne cottage in the name of the trust must therefore declare, quite apart from anything you must do yourself. The second concerns occupational pensions. The annual levy described in Part II does not apply, where the trustee is governed by the law of a State that has an administrative-assistance convention with France for the fight against fraud, to trusts set up to manage pension rights earned through professional activity under an employer’s retirement scheme. On that convention condition, the statute lifts the levy only for two narrow cases, in its own words « aux trusts irrévocables dont les bénéficiaires exclusifs relèvent de l’article 795 […] » (irrevocable trusts whose exclusive beneficiaries are charities and similar bodies, including equivalent bodies under Article 795-0 A) and for trusts set up to manage occupational pension rights earned under an employer scheme. Whether a London, Jersey or Guernsey trustee meets the convention condition must be verified file by file and never assumed, which is one more reason to identify precisely what kind of trust you have before panicking: a family discretionary trust and an employer pension trust do not receive the same treatment.

One parallel formality on the British side deserves a mention. If the arrangement is a UK express trust, the trustee may separately have to deal with HM Revenue and Customs on the Trust Registration Service, the British register of trusts; the official guidance is on gov.uk. That British registration does not replace the French declarations in any way: the two systems ignore each other, and satisfying HMRC never satisfies the Direction générale des finances publiques (the French tax administration).

B. Which returns to file, when to file them, and what silence costs

Article 1649 AB requires the trustee to declare three things: the creation, modification or extinction of the trust together with the content of its terms; the identity details of the beneficial owners; and the market value of the trust property at 1 January each year. Appointing a new beneficiary, adding the Dordogne cottage to the fund, changing trustee, distributing capital to a child, or winding the trust up all fall under the first head; the yearly value declaration under the third. A missing or incomplete declaration is punished by a fine, as noted below. The value limb is measured at 1 January: the statute calls for the valeur vénale (market value) at that date of the property and rights, in France or abroad, with their capitalised income for a person domiciled for tax purposes in France, and of the French-situated property and rights with their capitalised income for a person outside French tax residence. The official trust doctrine gives the practical detail behind each limb.

The information declared does not stay in a drawer. The statute provides that the declared details « sont conservées dans un registre placé sous la responsabilité du ministre chargé du budget » (are kept in a register under the responsibility of the minister for the budget), with implementation by decree in Council of State. A British resident who assumed that a discretionary trust in Jersey was invisible to the French authorities is therefore mistaken: the trustee has to declare it, and the declaration feeds a ministerial register. Keep copies of everything filed. In practice, when trust money reaches France, for example as part of the funds for a property purchase handled by your French notaire (the public officer who alone can transfer French real estate), you will be asked to show where the money comes from, and an undeclared trust at that moment turns a routine file into a difficult one.

What does silence cost? On the tax side, a missing or incomplete trust declaration exposes the trustee to a 20,000 euro fine under Article 1736 (IV bis) of the CGI. On top of the fine, undeclared assets remain exposed to the annual levy and the wealth-tax attribution described in Part II below. But the heaviest price may be criminal. On 6 January 2021 the criminal chamber of the Cour de cassation (the supreme court for criminal and civil matters) quashed the acquittal of the individuals and two offshore trust companies, one in Guernsey and one in the Bahamas, prosecuted in a case built around trusts concealed from a French succession on counts of tax fraud and complicity, and of aggravated money laundering and complicity. The Court recalled, in terms worth reading in full, that « commet le délit de fraude fiscale celui qui s’est frauduleusement soustrait ou a tenté de se soustraire frauduleusement à l’établissement ou au paiement total ou partiel des impôts, soit qu’il ait volontairement omis de faire sa déclaration dans les délais prescrits, soit qu’il ait volontairement dissimulé une part des sommes sujettes à l’impôt, soit qu’il ait organisé son insolvabilité ou mis obstacle par d’autres manoeuvres au recouvrement de l’impôt, soit en agissant de toute autre manière frauduleuse » (a person commits tax fraud where they have fraudulently evaded or attempted fraudulently to evade the assessment or payment of all or part of tax, whether by deliberately failing to file on time, by deliberately concealing part of the taxable amounts, by organising insolvency or obstructing recovery, or by any other fraudulent means). The decision, Criminal chamber, 6 January 2021, appeal no. 18-84.570, also holds that filing a late corrective return that still omits assets starts the special limitation period of Article L. 230 of the Livre des procédures fiscales (the tax procedure code) running, which means that a half-corrected declaration does not bury the file: it wakes the limitation clock instead. For a British family tempted to leave a modest Jersey trust unmentioned in a French succession, that ruling is the whole warning in one paragraph.

The operational lesson is therefore simple and it conditions everything that follows. As soon as France becomes your tax home, write to the trustee, in terms that leave a paper trail, instructing it to make the French event and annual declarations, and keep copies of everything filed. If the trustee is in London or the Channel Islands, confirm expressly that it accepts the French reporting burden despite Brexit, because some British trust corporations still assume, wrongly, that European reporting duties stopped applying to them in a way that also removed the French ones. If the trust holds only an employer pension within the exclusion described above, obtain written confirmation of that analysis rather than assuming it. And if past years were missed, take advice before filing anything: as the 2021 criminal ruling shows, the way a late declaration is framed determines when time starts running for the administration as well as for the prosecution.

II. What French tax the trust suffers while everyone is alive, and what happens on death

A. The annual levy, income tax and wealth tax during the trust’s lifetime

France taxes the trust on three separate tracks at once, and a British reader used to the single logic of the British ten-year charge or exit charge must learn to keep them apart. The first track is the prélèvement sui generis, the special levy of Article 990 J of the CGI, which applies precisely because the trust has been declared, or should have been. The levy catches individuals only: individual settlors and beneficiaries are liable where « 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 and beneficiaries of a defined trust are liable to a levy set at the highest rate mentioned in paragraph 1 of Article 977). For a person domiciled for tax purposes in France, the levy bites on the Article 965 assets placed in the trust, in France or abroad; for a person outside French tax residence, it bites only on the assets described at Article 964, 2°. There are three exits, and all reward openness. The levy is not due on assets that were included in the wealth-tax base of the settlor or a beneficiary and properly declared there, nor on assets declared under Article 1649 AB in the hands of a settlor or deemed settlor who is not liable to wealth tax given the value of the assets. In plain terms: declare the assets for wealth tax, or at least declare them under the trust reporting duty while staying below the wealth-tax threshold with proof, and the levy falls away. Hide them, and the levy applies at the top rate on top of everything else.

The second track is wealth tax itself, the impôt sur la fortune immobilière (tax on real-estate wealth, universally shortened to IFI), which replaced the old solidarity tax on wealth. For IFI, the rule sits in Article 970 of the CGI: qualifying assets placed in a defined trust are included, in the words of the statute, « […] Les actifs mentionnés à l’article 965 placés dans un trust défini à l’article 792-0 bis sont compris, pour leur valeur vénale nette au 1er janvier de l’année d’imposition, selon le cas, dans le patrimoine du constituant ou dans celui du bénéficiaire qui est réputé être un constituant en application du II du même article 792-0 bis » (the Article 965 assets placed in a defined trust are included, at net market value on 1 January of the tax year, in the estate of the settlor or of the beneficiary deemed to be settlor). The same article excludes irrevocable trusts whose exclusive beneficiaries are charities and similar bodies with a convention-state trustee. A British beneficiary of a discretionary trust who receives nothing this year and concludes that nothing should be taxed anywhere in the structure is therefore mistaken: the qualifying assets are still attributed, for wealth tax, to the settlor or, in the defined deemed-settlor cases of Article 792-0 bis, to the beneficiary. Discretion changes who decides, not in whose estate the assets are counted.

The administration applies these attribution rules beneficiary by beneficiary, and assessments are computed on declared annual values. Because the levy under Article 990 J falls away where the assets were included in a wealth-tax base and properly declared there, or where they were declared under Article 1649 AB by a settlor or deemed settlor below the wealth-tax threshold, the annual return is not paperwork for its own sake: it is the document that switches the levy off. Ask your adviser to check, every year, that the value declared, the person to whom the assets are attributed, and the levy position tell one consistent story.

The third track is the yearly value itself. The levy and the wealth-tax attribution run on the net market value of the qualifying assets, which is why the yearly value declaration matters even in years when nobody receives a penny. A British beneficiary receiving trust income in France should therefore expect the trustee’s distribution statement to be the starting point of the French file, not the end of the story. Keep the distribution statements stapled to the British tax vouchers, so the adviser can reconcile what left London with what arrived in France.

B. Death, distributions and succession duties: who pays what, and when

Death is where British families suffer the worst surprises, because the French duties on trusts do not follow the trust deed, they follow the statute, and the statute taxes events the deed never names. Article 792-0 bis provides first that gifts and successions of trust property, including the capitalised income, are subject to French transfer duties according to the family relationship between the settlor and the beneficiary, on the net market value at the date of transfer. Where neither gift nor succession treatment fits, typically because the trust simply continues with new beneficiaries after the settlor’s death, the statute taxes the fund as if it had passed on death: the share fixed for an identified beneficiary is taxed according to kinship with the settlor and aggregated with the other succession assets for the progressive scale and allowances, a share fixed globally for the settlor’s descendants is taxed, in the words of the statute, « au taux applicable à la dernière tranche du tableau I de l’article 777 » (at the rate of the last band of Table I of Article 777), and the remainder at the last band of Table III of the same article. The duties in those last two cases are paid by the trustee within the succession-filing deadlines running from the settlor’s death, with a detailed estimated declaration identifying the beneficiaries; and where the defaulting trustee is governed by the law of a non-cooperative State or of a State with no recovery-assistance convention with France, the beneficiaries are, in the words of the statute, « solidairement responsables du paiement des droits et tenus de déposer la déclaration » (jointly liable for the duties and required to file the return). By exception, the top Table III rate also applies to gift and death duties where the trustee sits in a non-cooperative State other than those mentioned at 2° of 2 bis of Article 238-0 A, or where the trust was created after 11 May 2011 by a settlor then domiciled for tax purposes in France. The same article deems the beneficiary to be settlor only in defined cases: assets of a trust whose settlor had already died when the law of 29 July 2011 entered into force, and assets already taxed under the gift and succession limbs with their capitalised income. For a British family this means the Jersey or London trustee must be ready to file and pay in France within months of the death, and the beneficiaries cannot treat the trust as a separate world that settles its own affairs offshore.

The territorial reach of these duties is set by Article 750 ter of the CGI, and its wording leaves no gap for the trust to slip through. The article provides that transfer duties catch « biens ou droits composant un trust défini à l’article 792-0 bis et produits qui y sont capitalisés » (property or rights forming a defined trust, and the income capitalised inside it) wherever situated, including outside France, where the donor or the deceased was domiciled for tax purposes in France, while only French-situated property, again expressly including trust property, is caught where the deceased was not French resident. Three branches therefore matter, not two. A British settlor who dies resident in France exposes the entire worldwide trust fund to French duties; a settlor who dies resident in England exposes only the French assets, such as the Dordogne cottage and the French portfolio. And there is a third net: worldwide assets, expressly including trust assets, « reçus par l’héritier, le donataire, le légataire ou le bénéficiaire d’un trust défini au même article 792-0 bis qui a son domicile fiscal en France au sens de l’article 4 B » (received by the heir, donee, legatee or trust beneficiary who is domiciled for tax purposes in France) are caught wherever situated, but only where that beneficiary has been French tax resident for at least six of the last ten years, in the words of the statute « pendant au moins six années au cours des dix dernières années précédant celle au cours de laquelle il reçoit les biens » (during at least six years of the ten years before the year the property is received). A British child long settled in France who inherits from a Jersey trust therefore faces French duties on worldwide trust assets even though the settlor never lived in France. Residence, at death and at receipt, is consequently the most expensive fact in the file, and families that plan the timing of a return to Britain, or the acquisition of French residence, without modelling this article are planning blind.

The most counter-intuitive rule, and the one that has generated the leading supreme-court authority, concerns timing. In a case decided under the pre-July-2011 wording of Article 750 ter, before the statute expressly named trust assets, the commercial chamber of the Cour de cassation held on 18 November 2020, in reasoning still cited in every trust file, 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 transfer duties is the transfer of ownership, which for trust property 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). In that case the appeal court had treated a beneficiary as becoming owner at the settlor’s death and the later distribution as a mere technicality; the supreme court quashed that analysis because the deed closed the trust only at the later death of the life tenant (Commercial chamber, 18 November 2020, appeal no. 18-14.242). For British will trusts that run on for years after death, paying income to a surviving spouse before distributing capital to the children, the message is that on those facts the duty fell years after the funeral, at closure and distribution, and paying too early on the wrong analysis proved as dangerous as paying too late. Today’s Article 750 ter expressly lists trust assets, so modern deeds must be read under the current wording; the closure clause remains the paragraph to check first. Litigation in this field is also far from over: in January 2025 the same chamber declined to refer a constitutional challenge about the former wording of Article 750 ter 1° as applied to a 2001 death (Commercial chamber, 22 January 2025, appeal no. 24-16.995, constitutional question, no referral), a transitional case confined to its own dates, which confirms that the administration continues to assess, taxpayers continue to fight, and every paragraph of the deed matters.

Two final practical points complete the picture. First, run the British inheritance-tax analysis and the French analysis as two separate exercises. What London thinks of the trust does not decide what Paris taxes under Articles 792-0 bis and 750 ter, so keep proof of any British tax actually paid, asset by asset, for the file. Second, succession planning for a British resident in France should never leave the trust deed and the French exposure in two separate folders. A will trust that works perfectly under English law can still attract French duties under Article 792-0 bis when the settlor dies and the fund stays in trust, a discretionary trust whose beneficiaries have all moved to France faces yearly declarations and the levy even if nobody touches the capital, and a trustee who will not file in France should be replaced before the death, not after it. The families who pay the least are not those with the cleverest deed, but those whose deed, residence pattern and declarations tell a single consistent story.

Conclusion

A British resident in France cannot leave a United Kingdom trust behind in any legally meaningful sense. From the day French tax residence begins, the trustee must declare the trust’s creation, changes, beneficial owners and yearly value under Article 1649 AB, because the settlor, a beneficiary or an asset connects it to France. While everyone lives, the fund attracts the special levy of Article 990 J unless properly declared wealth-tax assets displace it, and wealth-tax attribution to the settlor or deemed settlor under Article 970. On death, Articles 792-0 bis and 750 ter impose French transfer duties on the worldwide fund of a French-domiciled settlor, on the French assets otherwise, and on worldwide assets received by a beneficiary long resident in France. The duties in the hardest cases are paid by the trustee within the succession deadlines, with the beneficiaries jointly liable on default where the trustee sits in a non-cooperative State or a State with no recovery-assistance convention. Concealment is punished as tax fraud, as the 2021 criminal ruling shows. None of this makes holding a British trust incompatible with living in France; thousands of families do exactly that. It does mean the trust must be mapped, declared and modelled for French tax from the first year of residence, with the trustee instructed in writing, the annual values filed, the distributions reconciled on both sides of the Channel, and the deed reviewed before the death that will one day close it. Done in that order, the trust remains what it was meant to be: a shelter for the family, not a surprise for the heirs.

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