You moved to France, you kept your house in Manchester, Leeds or Bristol, and you let it out. Then two letters land in the same month. Your English letting agent tells you it must go on deducting tax from every month’s rent and sending it to HMRC. The French tax office expects you to declare that very same rent in France. You are asking the question hundreds of British landlords in France ask each spring: am I really going to pay full tax twice on one rental income, and how do I challenge it if both countries take their cut?
The short answer is that both countries are acting within their rights, but the system is designed so that you do not pay twice. Since Brexit, you are a non-resident landlord in the eyes of HMRC. That is a precise status, with its own withholding scheme, its own form NRL1, and its own yearly paperwork. In France, you are most likely fiscally domiciled here, which means you are taxable on your worldwide income, including rent from a house that never left England. The France–UK double tax treaty of 19 June 2008 then shares out the taxing rights: the United Kingdom may tax rent from UK land, and France eliminates the resulting double taxation through a tax credit. A recent line of French case law adds a trap for the unwary: foreign rental losses cannot always be set against your other French income. And the 17.2 percent French social charges on the rent raise a further question if you hold an S1 health certificate from the UK.
This guide walks through the whole chain in order. First, the British end: why the 20 percent style deduction happens, how to obtain approval to receive your rent gross, and what you must still file with HMRC. Second, the French end: where and how to declare the rent, which expense regime to choose, how the treaty credit works, what the S1 changes for social charges, and why a loss-making UK let can still leave you with French tax to pay. Every decisive statement below is tied to the official text it comes from, quoted word for word.
I. How do I stop tax being taken off my UK rent now that I live in France?
A. Why is my letting agent still deducting tax after my move, and how does form NRL1 get my rent paid gross?
The deduction is not a mistake and not a penalty for leaving. Under the Non-Resident Landlord Scheme, usually shortened to NRLS, the United Kingdom collects tax at source on rent paid to landlords who have their usual place of abode outside the country. The official guidance states the mechanism plainly: an agent acting for a non-resident landlord is required to deduct tax from the UK rental income and pay it over to HMRC. Your agent is therefore obeying a legal duty, and it must operate the scheme whatever the amount of rent it collects, even where the rent is small. Where there is no letting agent, the duty can fall on the tenant instead, although a tenant who pays rent of 100 pounds a week or less does not have to use the scheme unless HMRC tells it to do so. The scheme year runs from 1 April to the following 31 March, and agents and tenants who operate it must account for the tax each quarter, for the three-month periods ending on 30 June, 30 September, 31 December and 31 March.
That withholding is only a payment on account, not the final tax bill, and it can be switched off. The same official guidance explains that a non-resident landlord may apply to HMRC for approval to receive rental income with no tax deducted. Once HMRC has notified the agent in writing that the landlord holds such approval, the agent must stop deducting, and agents and tenants holding that written notice are released from the deduction duty. For an individual landlord, the vehicle for that application is form NRL1. The GOV.UK page introducing it explains that form NRL1 is the route for an individual non-resident landlord seeking approval to receive UK rental income with no UK tax deducted. You can apply online through the Government Gateway service, or on paper where you cannot use the online route, and the form must be signed by the landlord personally.
HMRC does not grant approval automatically. It will register you for Self Assessment, the British yearly tax return system, and it grants approval where your UK tax affairs are up to date, or where you have never had UK tax obligations, or where you do not expect to be liable for UK tax for the year of the application. In practice, a British landlord newly arrived in France with a modest rental profit and no other UK income will often satisfy one of these routes, but you must present a clean file: past returns filed, past liabilities paid, and realistic figures for the coming year. Approval, once given, covers future payments. If your agent deducted tax earlier in the same scheme year before the approval notice arrived, the money is not lost. The guidance allows the agent to contact HMRC to discuss recovering tax already deducted for the relevant quarters, recording any repayment to you, or to agree with you that a year-end certificate will cover the deducted tax while no further deductions are made during the year. Keep every approval letter, every quarterly statement and every year-end certificate: they are the documents that prove, on both sides of the Channel, how much British tax you have already suffered.
Two practical points deserve attention because they generate most of the disputes seen in practice. First, tell HMRC and your agent immediately about any change of agent, tenant or bank details. If HMRC has not been told of a change, the new agent holds no notice and must resume deducting, even where an approval exists. Second, approval is personal. If a non-resident landlord dies, the approval dies with them: anyone continuing to receive the rent, including a surviving spouse, must suffer deduction until they obtain their own approval notice. Where trustees are involved, a separate form, NRL3, exists for non-resident trustees. Executors based in the United Kingdom, who do not have their usual place of abode outside the country, sit outside the scheme altogether.
B. Once the rent is paid gross, what do I still owe HMRC: Self Assessment, allowable expenses and the yearly certificate?
Receiving the rent gross feels like a victory, and it improves cash flow, but it changes nothing about the underlying liability. Approval to receive rent without deduction is a collection decision, not an exemption. You must still report the rental income to HMRC each year through Self Assessment and pay whatever British tax is genuinely due on the profit. The letting agent’s yearly certificate showing any tax deducted, together with your approval notice, lets you reconcile what was withheld against what is owed, with any over-deduction available for repayment or set-off. Treat the approval as the beginning of the paperwork, not the end of it.
British tax falls on the profit, not on the gross rent, and the computation follows British rules. Deductible expenses under the scheme include the ordinary costs of letting: letting-agent fees, accountancy, buildings and contents insurance, repairs and maintenance that restore the property to its previous condition, interest on a mortgage taken out to buy or improve the let property within the limits British law sets from time to time, ground rent and service charges on a leasehold flat, and council tax, water charges and energy bills where you, the landlord, bear them. Capital improvements that add value beyond restoration, and private or personal expenditure, do not reduce the rental profit. Keep invoices, mortgage statements and the agent’s management packs for at least the retention period HMRC requires, because a landlord who lives abroad and receives gross rents is a natural candidate for an enquiry, and every deduction will need a receipt.
The order of events across a typical year therefore looks like this. Before or just after your move, you file form NRL1 and register for Self Assessment if you are not already registered. Your agent receives the approval notice and stops deducting. Each quarter, the agent accounts to HMRC for any tax it did deduct before approval. After 5 April, the end of the British tax year, you prepare your Self Assessment return for the year just ended, declaring the full rental income and claiming your expenses and any personal allowance available to you, then you pay the balance of British tax due or claim the repayment. Your agent issues the annual certificate of tax deducted, which you file alongside the approval letter. This British file then becomes the foundation of your French declaration, because France will ask you to prove exactly what the United Kingdom taxed before it grants any treaty credit. Landlords who skip the British return, assuming that French residence ends British obligations, create the worst possible position: UK penalties and interest on one side, and no documented British tax to credit on the other.
A final British pitfall concerns landlords whose rent is their only UK income and falls below the personal allowance. Approval to receive gross is still worth obtaining, because it avoids funding HMRC interest-free all year and then chasing a repayment, but you must still file where HMRC requires a return. Conversely, landlords with several UK properties, or with UK employment or pension income alongside the rent, should check how the rental profit stacks with their other British income, since the approval test looks at whether you expect to be liable for UK tax for the year. When in doubt, apply for approval early, file carefully, and keep the full paper trail: approval notice, quarterly evidence, annual certificate, return and payment receipts.
II. How is my UK rental income taxed in France, and how do I challenge double taxation?
A. Where do I declare the rent in France: micro-foncier or régime réel, and can I deduct my UK mortgage interest and repairs?
Moving to France almost always makes you taxable here on your worldwide income. The opening rule of the French Income Tax Code (CGI, art. 4 A) provides: “Les personnes qui ont en France leur domicile fiscal sont passibles de l’impôt sur le revenu en raison de l’ensemble de leurs revenus.” In plain terms, a person fiscally domiciled in France pays French income tax on all of their income, wherever it arises. Whether you are domiciled here turns on any one of three alternative tests: “Les personnes qui ont en France leur foyer ou le lieu de leur séjour principal”, those who carry on a professional activity here unless it is merely ancillary, and those who have the centre of their economic interests here (CGI, art. 4 B). Most British settlers who live year-round in France, even while keeping a let house in England, satisfy the first test from the day they settle. Treaty tie-breaker rules can in rare cases deem you resident of only one country, but the starting assumption for a family home in France is French fiscal domicile, and therefore French taxation of the English rent.
French law then classifies that rent as property income. Article 14 of the Code (CGI, art. 14) states: “Sous réserve des dispositions de l’article 15 , sont compris dans la catégorie des revenus fonciers, lorsqu’ils ne sont pas inclus dans les bénéfices d’une entreprise industrielle, commerciale ou artisanale, d’une exploitation agricole ou d’une profession non commerciale”, and it expressly lists “Les revenus des propriétés bâties, telles que maisons et usines”. Rent from an unfurnished English house therefore enters the revenus fonciers category, the French basket for rent from bare, unfurnished property. A furnished English let would fall under a different set of rules, and this article deals only with the ordinary unfurnished case, which is also the case the micro-foncier and régime réel choice governs.
Declaration is compulsory even though the United Kingdom has already taxed the same rent. Every person liable to French income tax (CGI, art. 170) “est tenue de souscrire et de faire parvenir à l’administration une déclaration détaillée de ses revenus et bénéfices”, a detailed return of income and profits. For foreign income, that overall return is completed by a dedicated schedule: form 2047, Cerfa 11226, the declaration of income received abroad (service-public.fr: declaration of foreign income). The official service-public.fr page describes it as the return to complete where you are domiciled in France and have received income from outside mainland France, to be attached to the main yearly return. In practice you therefore declare the English rent twice on paper: once analytically on form 2047 with the treaty credit computation, and once in the totals of the main return, form 2042, with the property detail going to the 2044 schedule where the actual-expenses regime applies. The general rental guide already published on this site walks through those forms line by line, and the present article builds on it rather than repeating it: UK Rental Income for a French Resident After Brexit: How to Declare It in France and Claim Double-Tax Relief.
Once the rent is inside the revenus fonciers basket, two tax regimes compete, and the choice is yours each year within the legal conditions. The simplified regime is called micro-foncier. The Code provides (CGI, art. 32): “lorsque le montant du revenu brut annuel défini aux articles 29 et 30 n’excède pas 15 000 €, le revenu imposable correspondant est fixé à une somme égale au montant de ce revenu brut diminué d’un abattement de 30 %.” If your gross yearly bare-rental receipts, across the whole tax household, stay at or below 15,000 euros, you may simply report the gross figure and the administration applies a flat 30 percent allowance for expenses, taxing the remaining 70 percent. No receipts to schedule, no expense table to defend. The regime is unavailable, however, where you own certain special property such as listed historic buildings, or where you claim specific rental deductions or depreciation allowances, and it applies to the household’s entire bare-rental income, not property by property.
The alternative is the régime réel, the actual-expenses regime, under which you deduct your real costs. The Code opens with the principle (CGI, art. 31): “Les charges de la propriété déductibles pour la détermination du revenu net comprennent”, and then lists, for urban property, “Les dépenses de réparation et d’entretien effectivement supportées par le propriétaire”, insurance premiums, certain irrecoverable tenant charges, co-ownership provisions, management costs, loan interest on debt taken out to acquire, preserve or improve the let property, and the property taxes you bear as owner. For a British landlord, this is where English paperwork meets French categories: the Manchester letting-agent fees, the buildings insurance, the boiler repair invoice, the leasehold service charges and, crucially, the interest on the English buy-to-let mortgage all belong in principle to the deductible column, provided each expense genuinely relates to the let property and is documented. Translate and keep every invoice, because the French inspector will test English receipts against French deductibility concepts, and an expense allowable in a British Self Assessment computation is not automatically allowable in the French revenu foncier computation, nor vice versa.
The arithmetic usually decides the regime. With gross English rents of, say, 12,000 euros a year and real costs of 5,000 euros, the actual-expenses regime taxes 7,000 euros while micro-foncier taxes 8,400 euros, so the detailed regime wins despite its paperwork. With the same rent but only 2,000 euros of costs, micro-foncier’s 30 percent allowance, worth 3,600 euros, beats reality. Mortgage interest is often the swing factor in the early years of a buy-to-let loan, while a mortgage-free property with few repairs will usually sit better in micro-foncier. Run both computations every year rather than renewing last year’s choice by habit, and remember that deficit mechanics differ: a loss under the actual-expenses regime can, within limits, reduce your other income, whereas micro-foncier, with its flat allowance, can never manufacture a loss. That difference leads directly to the treaty question, because where the United Kingdom taxes the rent first, France must then give relief, and where the English let loses money, French relief works very differently.
B. How does the France-UK treaty remove double tax, what about the 17.2 percent social charges with an S1, and can a UK rental loss cut my French bill?
The treaty starts by confirming that the United Kingdom is entitled to tax rent from land on its soil. The French tax administration’s own commentary on the France–UK convention (BOI-INT-CVB-GBR-10-20) explains that income a person draws from the direct use or letting of a right of enjoyment over immovable property is taxable in the state where the property sits, under paragraph 5 of Article 6 of the convention. Your English rent is therefore taxable in Britain as a matter of treaty design, whether through the NRLS withholding, the Self Assessment balance, or both. France, for its part, taxes you on the same rent because you are domiciled here, and then eliminates the resulting double taxation by way of a tax credit. The mechanism is the classic credit method used across French treaties: the foreign income is included in the French taxable base, and the French tax attributable to it is then cancelled by a credit, so that the income supports the progressive rate but does not pay full tax twice. Concretely, you declare the gross economics on form 2047, compute the French tax on your total income including the rent, and then deduct the treaty credit, attaching the British approval letter, certificates and return as proof of the British tax suffered.
The leading French court illustration of this machinery is a 2019 decision of the Conseil d’Etat, the supreme administrative court, case number 428443 of 19 December 2019, published at Conseil d’Etat, 19 December 2019, No 428443. The case concerned French residents letting property in Germany, but the reasoning governs how French judges read credit-method treaties generally. The court recalled the treaty bargain in these terms: “les revenus provenant des biens immobiliers ne sont imposables que dans l’Etat contractant où ces biens sont situés.” It then quoted the elimination article: where positive foreign income taxable abroad is received by a French resident, it remains taxable in France, the foreign tax is not deductible, but “le bénéficiaire a droit à un crédit d’impôt imputable sur l’impôt français dans la base duquel ces revenus sont compris”, and “Ce crédit d’impôt est égal, s’agissant de revenus provenant de biens immobiliers, au montant de l’impôt français correspondant à ces revenus.” The decisive holding followed: the signatory states had intended, for operating these rules, “limiter aux seuls revenus positifs la prise en compte des revenus de source allemande dans les revenus imposables en France des contribuables résidents de France, à l’exclusion des déficits.” Because the lower court had allowed negative German rental income into the French base, it had, in the court’s words, “entaché son arrêt d’erreur de droit”, and the judgment was quashed.
For a British landlord with an English let, the lesson is direct. Where the France–UK treaty follows the same credit-for-positive-income architecture, a loss on the English property does not travel into your French return to reduce your French salary, pension or other income, and unrelieved foreign deficits cannot be carried forward in France the way a domestic rental deficit can. French domestic law does allow property deficits to be set against overall income within limits — the Code opens that chapter with the principle that “L’impôt sur le revenu est établi d’après le montant total du revenu net annuel dont dispose chaque foyer fiscal” (CGI, art. 156) — but the treaty overrides domestic law where it restricts the take-up of foreign-source income to positive amounts. Before claiming any English rental loss in France, check the elimination article applicable to your year and keep the full British computation: a deficit manufactured by British-only reliefs, or by an aggressive allocation of interest, will not survive a French documentary check.
Income tax is only half the French bill. Net property income of a person domiciled in France also bears the social charges on unearned income, and English rent is no exception. The Social Security Code provides: “Les personnes physiques fiscalement domiciliées en France au sens de l’article 4 B du code général des impôts sont assujetties à une contribution sur les revenus du patrimoine assise sur le montant net retenu pour l’établissement de l’impôt sur le revenu” (Code de la sécurité sociale, art. L136-6), and it expressly lists “Des revenus fonciers” among the income caught. The official service-public.fr English-language page confirms the current burden on rental income: CSG at 9.2 percent, CRDS at 0.5 percent and the solidarity levy at 7.5 percent, for a combined “TOTAL” of “17.2%”, as set out at service-public.fr: social charges on property income.
British settlers often ask whether holding an S1 health certificate removes those charges. The S1, for the record, is the portable document by which the United Kingdom, as the state paying your state pension or covering you as a posted worker or protected beneficiary, accepts the cost of your healthcare in France while you register with the French health system. It can change the social-charge analysis, because CSG and CRDS are legally linked to the French social security system, but it does not produce an automatic exemption, and Brexit narrowed the easy cases. The same service-public.fr page states the relief for persons affiliated abroad in deliberately limited terms: a person living in France but working in an EU or EEA country or Switzerland, and affiliated to that country’s compulsory social security, is not subject to CSG and CRDS there, with only the 7.5 percent solidarity levy remaining due. The United Kingdom is no longer in the listed group. Whether you are covered instead by the social security coordination of the Withdrawal Agreement, as a protected beneficiary, or by the protocol attached to the EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, depends on when and how you moved, what benefit or status your S1 reflects, and where you are genuinely insured. The French courts police this boundary strictly. In a 24 December 2020 judgment concerning social charges claimed back by a person affiliated outside the European framework, the Paris administrative court of appeal held that no national, EU or treaty provision barred the charges and rejected the claim in full: “M. B… n’est pas fondé à soutenir que c’est à tort que, par le jugement attaqué, le tribunal administratif de Paris a rejeté sa demande.” (CAA Paris, 24 December 2020, No 19PA00215). The court relied in part on the Court of Justice’s Jahin ruling of 18 January 2018, case C-45/17, described as “excluant d’ailleurs explicitement les États tiers”, explicitly excluding third states from the relevant guarantee. A British landlord relying on UK insurance must therefore assemble the complete coordination file — S1, proof of the competent state, evidence of the applicable agreement — before asking for any CSG/CRDS relief, and should expect the administration to test it line by line.
When both countries have taken their share and something still looks wrong, challenge methodically and on both fronts. On the British side, correct the Self Assessment return within the amendment window, use the repayment claim process for over-withheld NRLS tax with the annual certificate as evidence, and appeal any HMRC assessment or penalty through the stated review and tribunal route rather than simply not paying. On the French side, file the treaty credit correctly in the first place on form 2047, since most so-called double taxation turns out to be a missing or miscoded credit line; where the assessment has already issued, lodge a formal claim with the tax office that issued the notice, attaching the British approval letter, the agent’s certificates, the Self Assessment calculation and the treaty articles relied on, and keep proof of filing. Where each administration maintains its position and the treaty supports you, ask for the two authorities to resolve the conflict under the treaty’s dispute-resolution machinery. Throughout, observe the time limits printed on every notice: British amendment and appeal windows, and French claim deadlines, are short, and a strong treaty argument filed late is worth nothing. Never stop a direct debit or ignore a notice as a negotiating tactic; penalties and surcharges then compound a dispute you might otherwise have won.
Conclusion
A British landlord settled in France lives permanently inside two tax systems, and the only comfortable position is to be fully compliant in both. In Britain, that means entering the Non-Resident Landlord Scheme deliberately: apply on form NRL1 for approval to receive the rent gross, keep the approval notice and every certificate, and file the Self Assessment return on the true profit with properly evidenced expenses. In France, it means accepting worldwide taxation from the date of fiscal domicile, declaring the English rent every year through form 2047 with the main return, choosing each year between the 30 percent micro-foncier allowance and the actual-expenses regime by running the real numbers, and claiming the treaty credit with British proof attached. Around those routines, remember the three points that most often cost British landlords money: a UK rental loss does not automatically reduce French taxable income where the treaty limits relief to positive income; the 17.2 percent French social charges apply to the net rent unless a properly documented coordination position removes the CSG/CRDS element; and the United Kingdom’s post-Brexit third-state status means every exemption drafted for EU situations must be re-tested, not assumed. Handled in that order — approval, declaration, credit, coordination evidence, timely challenge — the English let becomes what it should be: a taxable but singly-taxed income, documented well enough to defend on either side of the Channel.
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