You moved to France for the slower mornings, the village market and the spare bedroom the grandchildren will fight over. Then the paperwork catches up with you. HM Revenue and Customs keeps deducting tax from your occupational pension through PAYE, the French tax office sends an avis d’impôt that seems to tax the same money again, and somewhere in the pile there is a glossy brochure inviting you to move your whole pension pot to a QROPS in Malta or Gibraltar. Each office sounds confident. They cannot all be right, and the difference decides whether you lose a fifth of your retirement income to double taxation or to an avoidable 25% transfer charge.
This guide is written for a British reader living in France, or about to move, who draws a UK State Pension, a workplace pension, a personal pension, or a combination of the three. It explains, in plain English with every French term translated on first use, which country is allowed to tax each kind of pension under the France-United Kingdom double tax treaty, how France calculates the bill once a pension is taxable here, when shifting a pension pot into a Qualifying Recognised Overseas Pension Scheme (QROPS, an HMRC-recognised foreign pension scheme that can receive UK pension transfers) triggers the 25% overseas transfer charge, and how to challenge a wrong assessment on either side of the Channel. Read the whole piece before signing anything a cold-calling adviser puts in front of you: pension transfers are difficult to undo, while tax bills usually come with a formal appeal route if you act within the deadline.
I. Where is my UK pension taxed now that I live in France?
A. How the France-UK treaty divides State, workplace and government pensions between the two countries
The starting point is that France taxes its residents on their worldwide income, and you become resident for French tax purposes earlier than many newcomers expect. Article 4 B of the French General Tax Code (Code général des impôts, the main French tax statute) provides that a person has their tax home, known as the domicile fiscal, in France where they have in France their household or their principal place of stay: “Les personnes qui ont en France leur foyer ou le lieu de leur séjour principal”. The word foyer means the family home and centre of personal life, not merely a holiday flat. Meeting any one of the three statutory tests, home, professional activity or centre of economic interests, is enough to make you French tax resident, and from that moment France claims the right to tax your UK pensions, subject only to what the tax treaty says. The treaty cannot make you taxable in France if you are not resident there, but once you are, it decides which pensions France must leave alone and which it may tax.
For the pensions most British retirees live on, the answer is reassuring. Article 18 of the France-United Kingdom double tax treaty, signed in London on 19 June 2008 and in force, provides that pensions and similar remuneration paid for past employment to a resident of one of the two states are taxable only in that state, subject to the special government-service rule in Article 19(2). In ordinary language, if you are resident in France, your UK State Pension, your former employer’s occupational or workplace pension, and your personal pension payments are taxable only in France. The United Kingdom must step back. That single sentence covers the monthly State Pension paid by the Department for Work and Pensions, a defined-benefit final-salary pension from a British employer, regular drawdown from a self-invested personal pension where it represents pension income, and annuities bought with a UK pension pot. If HMRC is still operating a tax code against that income after your move, the treaty says the deduction should not be happening, and the practical fix is to claim exemption at source rather than to accept the deduction and hope the French bill somehow adjusts itself.
The exception that catches out retired teachers, nurses paid from public funds, police officers, members of the armed forces and former civil servants sits in the next article. Article 19 of the same treaty deals with government service, and its first paragraph keeps pensions paid by the British State, a British local authority or a statutory body for government service taxable only in the United Kingdom. A classic example is a civil service pension paid by the Cabinet Office, a police pension, or an armed forces pension. The treaty then adds a nationality-and-residence escape clause, reflected in the official text published on GOV.UK: where the services were rendered in France and the recipient is both resident in France and a French national without also being a British national, France alone may tax. A British national living in Bergerac with a police pension therefore stays taxable in the United Kingdom on that pension even though everything else he receives is taxable in France, while his French-national spouse, retired from the same French-side teaching post, is taxed in France. Mixed households must split their pensions pension by pension instead of assuming one country takes everything.
Sorting out which pension falls where is the single most valuable hour you will spend on this. List every income stream, mark each one as Article 18 (taxable only in France if you live here) or Article 19 (government service, usually still taxable only in the United Kingdom), and keep the employer’s leaving letter and the pension payer’s P60 or annual statement for each. When both countries claim the same pound of pension, the elimination article of the treaty, Article 24, requires the residence country to give relief, normally as a tax credit equal to the foreign tax on the doubly taxed income. But relief after the event is slower and poorer than exemption before it: on Article 18 pensions you should be asking HMRC for a nil-tax code and paying in France, while declaring the income correctly on the French return so the credit machinery never needs to engage. Where the pension is genuinely taxable in the United Kingdom under Article 19, the mirror image applies, and it is the French return that must neutralise the French claim through the treaty credit.
One further building block matters for readers who split their working life between the two countries. A British national who worked in the United Kingdom, in France and in a third country asked the French pension fund, the CARSAT (caisse d’assurance retraite et de la santé au travail, the regional old-age pension fund), to totalise all his insurance quarters, and the dispute reached the Cour de cassation, France’s highest civil court. The Court confirmed the orthodox coordination method: periods built up in the United Kingdom and in France are totalised under the European coordination rules on one side, and periods built up in France and in Monaco under the Franco-Monegasque bilateral convention on the other, with the retiree receiving the higher of the two results, expressed in the judgment as “la pension la plus élevée des deux devant lui être attribuée”. The decision, Cass. 2nd civil chamber, 7 November 2019, appeal no. 18-18.344, available on the Court’s official database, is a useful reminder of two things. First, French courts do aggregate foreign insurance periods instead of pretending they do not exist, which protects the basic pension, known as the pension au taux plein, of people with cross-border careers. Second, since Brexit the European regulations no longer cover new British situations directly, and aggregation now depends on the withdrawal agreement for those already in a cross-border position before 31 December 2020 and on the social-security coordination protocol of the EU-United Kingdom Trade and Cooperation Agreement for later cases. Ask for a UK State Pension forecast and a French career statement, called a relevé de carrière, and reconcile the quarters before you assume either country has counted everything.
B. How France taxes the pension once the treaty says it is taxable here
Once the treaty points to France, French domestic law takes over, and it treats pensions as ordinary taxable income rather than as a sheltered category. Article 79 of the General Tax Code states: “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 translation is that salaries, pensions and life annuities all join the household’s global income that forms the income-tax base, and the same applies to retirement benefits paid as a lump sum of capital. So the full text of Article 79 matters for two reasons: your monthly UK pension goes into the same pot as any French-source income, and a one-off pension lump sum is in principle taxable too, with its own specific reliefs that depend on the payment pattern. Declare the gross pension, convert sterling into euros at the rate the tax office accepts for the year, and report it on the main return, form 2042, with foreign pensions detailed on the foreign-income schedule, form 2047, so the treaty credit for any Article 19 pension can be computed on the right lines.
France then softens the blow with a standard allowance that many British filers miss. Article 158, 5, a) of the General Tax Code provides: “Les pensions et retraites font l’objet d’un abattement de 10 % qui ne peut excéder 4 439 €.” Pensions and retirement income receive a 10 per cent standard deduction, capped at 4,439 euros for the tax household, with a statutory minimum per pensioner that is revised each year. The official wording of Article 158 means a retired couple with 40,000 euros of combined UK pensions deducts 4,000 euros before the progressive scale applies, while a household with very large pensions hits the ceiling and deducts no more than 4,439 euros. Because the allowance applies per tax household with a floor per pensioner, a widow or widower living alone should check that the minimum was actually applied to the return, and a couple where only one spouse draws a pension should not expect two allowances. Errors on this line are common when the return is pre-filled from French payers only and the British pension is keyed in by hand, so verify the arithmetic on the detailed calculation notice, the avis de situation déclarative, rather than trusting the headline figure on the first page.
On top of income tax come the social charges, known collectively as prélèvements sociaux, and they surprise British retirees because nothing equivalent is deducted from a UK State Pension at home. The standard rate on retirement pensions is set by Article L. 136-8 of the Social Security Code (Code de la sécurité sociale, the statute that organises French social security): “Sont assujetties à la contribution au taux de 8,3 % les pensions de retraite, et les pensions d’invalidité.” Retirement and invalidity pensions bear the social contribution at 8.3 per cent at the full rate, with a reduced 3.8 per cent rate for households whose reference tax income sits below set thresholds and a complete exemption for the lowest incomes. The contribution sociale généralisée, universally called the CSG, and the contribution for the repayment of the social debt, the CRDS, are the two levies inside that envelope. The thresholds for the reduced rate move every year with the income-tax scale, so a pensioner whose income dips after a bad exchange-rate year can drop from 8.3 to 3.8 per cent without any change in the law, and a pensioner whose income rises can climb back up. Read the social-charges lines of the assessment rather than assuming last year’s rate still applies.
Whether any CSG and CRDS is due at all depends on where you are insured for health care, and this is where British retirees holding an S1 form have real money at stake. The S1 is the portable document by which the United Kingdom, which remains responsible for the health care of British State Pensioners who move to France, asks the French health system to treat you while London picks up the bill. European case law has long held that a person insured in one state cannot be charged social contributions earmarked for the social security of another, because coordination rests on a single applicable legislation. The Court of Justice confirmed this single-legislation logic in the de Ruyter case (C-623/13), which concerned French social charges imposed on a French resident insured in the Netherlands: a person covered by the social-security legislation of one Member State cannot be subjected at the same time to the social-security levies of another for the same period. For an S1 holder the consequence is practical: if the French assessment charges CSG and CRDS on a UK pension while the United Kingdom is the competent state for your health cover, that charge is challengeable and frequently refunded on formal complaint with the S1 certificate attached. Since Brexit the same logic runs through the withdrawal agreement and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement coordination protocol for protected persons, but the paperwork is examined more strictly than before, so keep the S1, the French attestation de droits, which is the certificate of health-care entitlement, and every assessment on file together.
France also asserts a contribution on capital income against its tax residents generally. Article L. 136-6 of the Social Security Code states: “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”. Anyone individually domiciled in France for tax purposes within the meaning of Article 4 B is liable to the contribution on capital income assessed on the net amount used for income tax. The official text of Article L. 136-6 matters to retirees because pension drawdown products, investment growth inside a personal pension, and lump sums can straddle the line between pension income and capital income, and the two categories do not always carry the same social-charge treatment. If your provider labels a payment as interest, a gain or a pension annuity, keep that label consistent across the British P60, the French 2047 schedule and any complaint letter, because the tax office classifies what you declare and rarely reclassifies in your favour on its own motion.
Health-care entitlement itself deserves a short paragraph because advisers sometimes present a QROPS or a private policy as a substitute for it. It is not. Article L. 160-1 of the Social Security Code provides: “Toute personne travaillant ou, lorsqu’elle n’exerce pas d’activité professionnelle, résidant en France de manière stable et régulière bénéficie, en cas de maladie ou de maternité, de la prise en charge de ses frais de santé dans les conditions fixées au présent livre.” Anyone working in France, or, when not working, residing there in a stable and regular manner, receives cover for health and maternity costs under the conditions of that book of the Code. The provision, readable in full as Article L. 160-1, founds the universal health protection, the Protection Universelle Maladie known as PUMa, that covers legal residents after three months of stable residence, alongside the S1 route for British State Pensioners and the private-insurance route used for the first months of a long-stay visitor visa. A pension transfer changes none of this: moving a pension pot does not move your health cover, and losing or letting lapse your S1 while restructuring pensions is one of the costliest administrative mistakes a British retiree in France can make.
II. What if I move my pension pot or HMRC keeps taxing me?
A. When moving a UK pension to a QROPS triggers the 25% overseas transfer charge
A QROPS solves a genuine problem for some expatriates: it lets a UK pension be held in an overseas scheme, paid in euros, passed on under local succession expectations, and managed by an adviser in the same time zone. For many British retirees already settled in France, though, it solves nothing and costs a quarter of the fund. The British rules start from a simple warning on the official guidance page for transferring to an overseas pension scheme: a transfer may attract a 25% tax charge depending on where the receiving QROPS is based and on the saver’s available overseas transfer allowance. The allowance, the lifetime limit for tax-favoured overseas transfers, is usually £1,073,100. Above that allowance, even an otherwise exempt transfer suffers the charge on the excess, and where no exemption applies the 25% charge bites on the whole amount transferred. Read that sentence twice before initialling any transfer form, because a 400,000-pound pot moved without an exemption loses 100,000 pounds at the stroke of a pen, with no French tax advantage to set against it.
The exemptions are narrower than sales brochures suggest. A transfer to a QROPS provided by your own employer is usually exempt, which rarely helps a retiree. The residence-based exemption requires you and the QROPS to be in the same country, or both inside the European Economic Area, and it comes with a five-year clawback: the guidance warns that if you move countries within five years of the transfer you can lose the exemption retrospectively and face the 25% charge for having moved away from the country where your QROPS is based. A British retiree living in France who moves a UK pension to a Maltese or Gibraltarian QROPS is therefore betting twice: betting that the exemption applies on day one, and betting that neither a return to England to be near the grandchildren nor a later move to Spain or Portugal will happen within five years. France-based QROPS hardly exist in practice, because French pension vehicles are not structured to seek or keep HMRC recognition, so the same-country route is usually unavailable to a French resident. Add the French side of the equation: the transfer does not make the pension disappear from the French tax net, later payments remain declarable in France under Article 18 of the treaty, and adviser fees, exit penalties and the loss of the UK Pension Protection Fund safety net come on top of the British tax charge. The honest question is not whether a QROPS is clever in the abstract, but what concrete French tax or succession problem it fixes for you that the treaty and a French will do not already fix for free.
Three practical checks belong before any signature. First, confirm the receiving scheme is genuinely on HMRC’s published QROPS list on the day of transfer, not merely described as QROPS-compatible, and take a dated screenshot, because schemes lose recognition and the liability follows the facts at transfer. Second, demand the transfer analysis in writing with the overseas transfer charge calculation shown for the exempt and non-exempt scenarios, the five-year residence undertaking explained, and the French tax treatment of subsequent payments addressed by someone qualified in French tax, not only in British advice. Third, never transfer under time pressure linked to a Budget rumour or a bonus deadline: legitimate transfers wait a fortnight, while the irrevocable ones are always presented as urgent. British pension transfers above 30,000 pounds of safeguarded benefits already require regulated financial advice by law, and a reputable adviser will put the recommendation, the risks and the alternatives in a signed report you can show a French avocat later. If your question is only whether to move the pot, read our dedicated guide to moving a UK pension to a QROPS alongside this article. If the paperwork cannot survive that pause, walk away.
B. How to challenge double taxation, a wrong French bill or a British penalty step by step
When the same pension has been taxed twice, work methodically from the treaty outward, and keep every deadline in writing. Start by establishing the correct country under Articles 18 and 19 as explained above, because a complaint that does not name the treaty article reads as a vague grievance and is treated as one. If an Article 18 pension paid to a French resident has suffered British PAYE, the remedy on the British side is a claim to HMRC for exemption at source and repayment of over-deducted tax, made on the France-Individual claim form with a certificate of French residence attached, and the resulting nil-tax code, marked NT, stops the monthly deduction going forward. Keep the P60s, the P45 from the year of departure, the pension payslips showing the deductions, and the French tax assessments for the same years, because HMRC routinely asks for proof that France has taxed or will tax the income, and a file that answers that question on page one is repaid months faster than one that does not.
On the French side, the standard route against a wrong assessment is the formal tax complaint, called the réclamation contentieuse, addressed to the local tax office, the service des impôts des particuliers, known as the SIP, that issued the notice. The time limit is strict and generous at once. Article R*196-1 of the Tax Procedures Book (Livre des procédures fiscales, the statute governing tax disputes) requires that, to be admissible, complaints about taxes other than local direct taxes “doivent être présentées à l’administration au plus tard le 31 décembre de la deuxième année suivant celle” of the collection, payment or event giving rise to the claim. In plain terms, a complaint against income tax assessed in 2025 can generally be lodged until 31 December 2027, and the full text of Article R*196-1 lists the triggering events precisely. File through the secure messaging of your personal account on impots.gouv.fr so the date is stamped, state the treaty article, attach the HMRC documents proving British tax was levied or an NT code refused, quantify the credit or discharge requested to the euro, and ask expressly for a stay of payment, the sursis de paiement, if enforcement has started. If the SIP rejects the complaint in whole or in part, the next step is the administrative court, the tribunal administratif, within two months of the rejection, express or implied, and that deadline, unlike the complaint period, is measured in weeks, not years.
Three recurring fact patterns deserve their own files. First, French social charges levied on the pension of an S1 holder: complain with the S1, the attestation de droits and the assessment, invoke the single-legislation principle from de Ruyter, and request repayment of the CSG-CRDS with default interest. Second, the Article 19 government-service pensioner taxed in France by mistake: the French return should carry the pension on the treaty-credit lines so the French charge is neutralised, and if the assessment ignored the credit, the réclamation asks for the credit to be applied, not for sympathy. Third, the retiree taxed only in the United Kingdom on French-law logic, the mirror image for British residents with French pensions or for non-residents: French-source pensions paid to persons not domiciled in France suffer the withholding tax of Article 182 A of the General Tax Code, which provides that “les traitements, salaires, pensions et rentes viagères, de source française, servis à des personnes qui ne sont pas fiscalement domiciliées en France donnent lieu à l’application d’une retenue à la source”, and where the treaty reserves the pension to the residence state, that withholding is reclaimable through the treaty procedure. The official wording of Article 182 A shows the mechanism is a true withholding at source, creditable against the final French tax computed under Article 197 A, which caps the minimum tax on French-source income of non-residents at 20 per cent up to the second bracket ceiling and 30 per cent above. Non-resident readers who receive a French pension should therefore check whether the withholding was levied, whether the treaty allows France to levy it, and whether the minimum-rate calculation was applied correctly, in that order.
Finally, coordinate the two countries instead of fighting on both fronts at once. A mutual agreement procedure under the treaty allows the British and French competent authorities to settle a double-tax dispute between themselves, and it can be requested while domestic complaints run, though it moves slowly and suits large, clean treaty questions rather than small arithmetic errors. For modest bills the faster path is almost always the domestic complaint in the country that taxed wrongly, supported by a certificate from the country that taxed rightly. Never ignore a notice while waiting for the other country’s reply: lodge the complaint, request the stay of payment, and diary every deadline twice. And keep the human element in view: tax offices on both sides process thousands of post-Brexit residence changes, the officials reading your file did not design the treaty, and a short letter that names the pension, names the article and attaches the proof succeeds where a long letter about fairness fails.
Conclusion
A British retirement in France rests on three documents kept together: the treaty classification of each pension, the French assessment checked line by line, and the proof of where you are insured for health care. Article 18 of the France-United Kingdom treaty makes France the only taxing state for the State Pension and for ordinary workplace and personal pensions once you are French resident, Article 19 keeps most government-service pensions taxable in the United Kingdom, French law then applies its 10 per cent allowance and its social charges with the reduced rates and S1 exemptions the assessment does not always volunteer, and a QROPS transfer that ignores the 25 per cent overseas transfer charge can cost more than any of these taxes combined. Classify first, declare carefully, transfer only with the exemptions proved in writing, and challenge wrong bills through the réclamation and the treaty claim forms before the deadlines expire. The system is navigable, but it rewards the retiree who keeps the file, and it punishes the one who signs first and reads later.