If you are British and live in France, the French equity savings plan — the plan d’épargne en actions, universally known as the PEA — is probably the most tax-efficient wrapper you will ever hold for European shares, and it is also the wrapper most directly damaged by Brexit. Before 2021, shares in companies with their registered office (siège social) in London, Edinburgh or anywhere else in the United Kingdom sat comfortably inside thousands of PEAs held by British residents of France. Since 1 January 2021 they do not. The United Kingdom is no longer a Member State of the European Union nor a party to the European Economic Area agreement, so shares issued by British companies fail the permanent registered-office test in French law. The government Brexit tax guidance states the position plainly: shares issued by British companies lost their eligibility for the PEA and the PEA-PME, so keeping them inside the plan amounts to a breach of the operating rules that in principle closes the plan under the sanction article of the Tax Code. That position explains why this article exists. A nine-month tolerance organised by the late-2020 ordinance gave holders until roughly October 2021 to sell those shares or take them out of the plan, and that window is long closed. What remains today is a colder, harder set of questions that British savers still ask in Paris surgeries and on expatriate forums: can I still open a PEA now that I am a third-country national resident in France, can I keep the PEA I opened years ago, what do I do with the UK shares still sitting in it, how is the plan taxed if I withdraw early or late, what mistake closes the plan and costs me the exemption, and how do I challenge a closure notice or a tax bill I consider wrong? This guide answers each of those questions in order, with the exact statutory references your bank and your tax office will use, two court decisions that show how judges actually reason about PEA disputes, and the procedural routes — complaint (réclamation contentieuse), mediation, court action — that let you contest an adverse decision within the time limits.

I. Can a British resident still open or keep a French PEA after Brexit?

A. Who can open a PEA in France and which UK shares stay eligible?

The short answer reassures many readers: yes, a British citizen who is tax-resident in France can open and keep a PEA. Brexit changed the nationality treatment of British citizens, who became third-country nationals for residence purposes, but the PEA has never been a nationality test. It is a tax-residence test. The Monetary and Financial Code provides, word for word, that “Les personnes physiques majeures dont le domicile fiscal est situé en France peuvent ouvrir un plan d’épargne en actions” — any adult individual whose tax domicile (domicile fiscal) is in France may open one, with an account at a bank, the Caisse des dépôts, an investment firm or an insurer, within the ceiling of 150,000 euros of cash payments since opening, and with only one PEA per person and one holder per plan, as set out in Article L221-30 of the Monetary and Financial Code. Your British passport is therefore irrelevant to eligibility; your tax residence is everything. Tax residence itself is defined by Article 4 B of the General Tax Code, which treats as domiciled in France anyone whose home (foyer) or principal place of stay is in France, anyone who carries on a professional activity in France unless it is merely ancillary, and anyone whose centre of economic interests is in France. A British retiree living year-round in the Dordogne, a British employee working in Paris, and a British remote worker whose family home and daily life are in France are all normally French tax residents even though they remain British citizens, and each may open a PEA. Conversely, a British citizen who lives in London and merely owns a holiday home in France generally cannot open one, because the holiday home alone does not create a French tax domicile. The PEA for small and mid-cap companies, the PEA-PME with its higher combined ceiling, follows the same residence logic.

What Brexit changed is not who may hold the wrapper but what may sit inside it. The eligibility rule looks through the wrapper to the company that issued each share, and it applies permanently, every day the plan exists. The statute requires that “Les émetteurs des titres mentionnés au 1° doivent avoir leur siège en France ou dans un autre Etat membre de l’Union européenne ou dans un autre Etat partie à l’accord sur l’Espace économique européen”, with an administrative-assistance convention against fraud and evasion and subjection to corporation tax under ordinary-law conditions or an equivalent tax, as stated in full in Article L221-31 of the Monetary and Financial Code. Funds held in the plan must themselves employ more than 75 per cent of their assets in such eligible shares. Because the registered-office condition is assessed continuously, the moment the United Kingdom left the Union and the transition period ended, every share issued by a company with its registered office in the United Kingdom became ineligible, including household names listed in London, investment trusts constituted under UK law, and shares in private UK limited companies. Shares issued by companies with their registered office in France, Ireland, Germany or any other EU or EEA state remain eligible, as do qualifying EU funds. Shares issued by American, Swiss or Channel Islands companies were never eligible and remain so. The practical consequence for a British saver is asymmetric and sometimes unwelcome: you may keep your French wrapper, but you may no longer fill it with home-market shares. A portfolio that was 60 per cent FTSE 100 before Brexit must be rebuilt around continental European issuers, EU-domiciled trackers that respect the 75 per cent quota, or cash while you decide. Dividends paid by your remaining eligible shares into the plan’s cash account are not a breach; deploying that cash to buy ineligible UK shares is. Subscribing fund units that drift below the 75 per cent threshold, holding preference shares with special rights outside the statutory categories, or letting the account receive shares transferred in from outside the plan rather than bought with plan cash can each constitute a breach, as the exclusions in parts II and III of the same Article L221-31 show. Your bank’s compliance department watches these boundaries automatically, and since Brexit it watches British securities with particular attention.

Two further boundaries deserve emphasis because British clients cross them without realising. First, the single-plan rule is absolute and the courts enforce it without sentiment. The Court of Cassation, commercial chamber, rejected on 9 February 2022 the claim of a saver who held two PEAs simultaneously, in Court of Cassation, commercial chamber, 9 February 2022, appeal no. 20-16.471. The facts, quoted word for word from the judgment, are that “le 15 décembre 2011, l’administration fiscale a notifié à M. [O] une proposition de rectification lui contestant le bénéfice de l’exonération de l’imposition sur les plus-values réalisées sur la cession, le 30 mai 2008, de titres figurant sur un plan d’épargne en actions (PEA) ouvert le 14 décembre 2001 auprès de la Société générale, au motif qu’il était titulaire d’un second PEA, ouvert le 1er mars 2002 auprès de la société BNP Paribas (la banque)”. The saver blamed the second bank for never warning him; the courts let the rectification stand. The lesson for British readers who arrived with several brokerage relationships is blunt: before opening a new PEA at a French online broker, close or formally transfer any earlier plan and keep the written closure certificate, because the tax administration treats the second plan as the irregular one and strips the exemption. Second, the 25 per cent family-holding limit in Article L221-31 catches British family companies. For the whole life of the plan, you, your spouse or civil partner (conjoint ou partenaire de Pacs) and your ascendants and descendants must not together hold, directly or indirectly, more than 25 per cent of the profit rights in any company whose shares sit in the plan, nor have held such a stake in the five years before acquisition through the plan. A British family that moved its UK operating company to France and lodges a substantial stake in a PEA can breach this rule on day one. Ask your accountant to test the percentage before you subscribe, not after the bank’s year-end control.

B. What happened to the UK shares already inside your PEA on 1 January 2021?

For shares already inside the plan on Brexit day, the law combined severity with a short grace period, and both halves still matter because files opened in 2021 continue to produce assessments, closure notices and complaints today. The starting point is that the registered-office test applies at every moment, so British shares lawfully bought in 2019 became non-compliant holdings on 1 January 2021 without any action by the saver. The government organised a nine-month tolerance running from 1 January 2021 under the December 2020 ordinance and its implementing order, during which the shares concerned kept a transitional eligibility so holders had time to regularise by selling them or withdrawing them from the plan. During those nine months the holder had exactly two compliant exits: sell the British shares inside the plan and reinvest the cash in eligible assets, or withdraw the British shares from the plan into an ordinary securities account (compte-titres ordinaire), with the tax consequences of a withdrawal described below. Doing nothing was the one non-compliant option, and many savers, particularly those whose banks communicated late or whose post went to a former UK address, did precisely nothing. The tax administration’s published doctrine in the BOI confirms the analysis in detail: because of Brexit, shares previously entered in a PEA and issued by companies with their registered office in the United Kingdom became ineligible from 1 January 2021, with the transitional tolerance, and fund quotas that slipped below 75 per cent European content for the same reason received a parallel delay. If you regularised in time, your plan survived with its seniority (antériorité fiscale) intact. If you did not, the plan was in principle closed by operation of law at the date of the breach, under the sanction article quoted in the next part.

What should a British saver with British shares still sitting in a PEA in 2026 do this week? First, establish the factual position before you touch anything. Download the full transaction and holding history of the plan, identify every line whose issuer has its registered office in the United Kingdom — London listing alone is not the test, the issuer’s seat is — and check whether any UK line entered the plan after 1 January 2021, which no tolerance covers. Ask the bank in writing for the plan’s opening date, total cash paid in, and any breach or closure flag on the file. Second, choose the compliant exit deliberately rather than letting the bank choose it for you. A sale inside the plan keeps the cash sheltered and preserves the plan; a withdrawal of shares in kind to an ordinary account is treated as a withdrawal for the five-year clock and may trigger immediate taxation of the whole plan’s latent gains if the plan is under five years old. A transfer of the entire PEA to another institution is not a withdrawal and preserves seniority, but it does not cure ineligible holdings — the new bank inherits the breach and will close the plan just as the old one would. Third, reconstruct the 2021 tolerance if you believe you acted in time but the bank recorded otherwise. Keep sale slips, withdrawal confirmations, and any letter by which the bank acknowledged regularisation; the burden of proving timely compliance in a later dispute falls on the holder, and reconstructing brokerage archives from five years ago is slow. Fourth, if the bank has already sent a closure statement (bordereau de clôture), read the stated breach date with care, because that date fixes the tax year of the resulting assessment and the starting point of the complaint time limit. A closure backdated to 2021 produces a 2021 assessment that may now be time-barred or still open depending on subsequent procedure, while a closure dated in the current year produces an immediately payable bill you must contest within months. The Paris Court of Appeal’s PEA closure judgment of 22 June 2022 shows how brutally the date matters: “Par lettre reçue le 2 janvier 2018, la Société générale a adressé à M. [B] [E] un bordereau de clôture de son PEA à effet au 20 décembre 2017, puis selon avis rectificatif à effet au 5 septembre 2016 pour « manquement à la règlementation »”, in Paris Court of Appeal, division 5 chamber 6, 22 June 2022, general register no. 20/10972. In that case the holder had sold all the plan’s shares in a single off-plan private deal without any cash returning to the plan’s cash account, and the bank closed the plan retroactively to the sale date. British holders who moved UK shares to a UK broker in 2021 by private transfer rather than by documented plan withdrawal face the same characterisation risk today.

Readers who also hold a PEA-PME, an employee-share plan or a UK Individual Savings Account (ISA) alongside the PEA should keep the wrappers strictly separate in their minds, because advisers who merge them cause expensive errors. The PEA-PME obeys its own articles and its own ceiling, and the same Brexit ineligibility struck British small-cap shares inside it. Employee shares received under the French qualified regimes cannot simply be lodged in a PEA afterwards if the plan’s acquisition rules forbid it. And the ISA, however familiar from life in Britain, has no French recognition at all: for readers who want the full ISA treatment, our companion analysis of how France taxes British ISA savings, interest and declarations after Brexit explains why the ISA wrapper is transparent in France and why its interest must be declared each year, whereas the PEA wrapper described here is opaque until withdrawal. The two wrappers are mirror images, and confusing them is the single most common British error our offices see.

II. How is your PEA taxed, what closes it by mistake, and how do you challenge the bill?

A. How are PEA withdrawals, dividends and gains taxed while you live in France?

The PEA’s attraction is a simple bargain written across the General Tax Code and the Monetary and Financial Code: respect the operating rules for five years and the income and gains sheltered inside escape income tax, leaving only social charges on exit; break the rules or withdraw early and the bargain collapses into ordinary taxation plus immediate recovery. The hinge is Article 163 quinquies D of the General Tax Code, which ties the tax treatment to plans “ouvert et fonctionne conformément aux articles L. 221-30, L. 221-31 et L. 221-32 du code monétaire et financier”. Gains on disposals of securities are otherwise taxable under Article 150-0 A of the General Tax Code, whose opening words state that net gains on onerous disposals of securities and related rights “sont soumis à l’impôt sur le revenu”, and the standard individual rate mechanism is the flat-rate levy in Article 200 A of the General Tax Code, the 30 per cent prélèvement forfaitaire unique combining income tax and social charges that applies by default to capital income of French tax residents. Inside a compliant PEA older than five years, qualifying gains and dividends escape the income-tax component and bear only the social charges on wealth income — the contribution sociale généralisée (CSG), the contribution au remboursement de la dette sociale (CRDS) and related levies — assessed on the net gains since opening, under the architecture of Article L136-6 of the Social Security Code, which brings within the contribution on wealth income the capital income, gains and profits subject to income tax. In numbers a British saver can use: a compliant withdrawal from a PEA held more than five years currently costs 17.2 per cent in social charges on the net gain and zero income tax, against 30 per cent flat-rate tax outside the plan or the progressive scale plus 17.2 per cent with a partial allowance for older shares if the progressive option is elected. That 12.8-point gap on the entire gain since opening is the financial value of compliance, and it is what a closure for Brexit ineligibility destroys.

The five-year clock in Article L221-32 of the Monetary and Financial Code is the provision British savers misunderstand most often, because the British ISA has no equivalent lock-in. Before the fifth anniversary, any withdrawal of cash or securities, or any surrender payment under an insurance-based plan, closes the plan, subject only to narrow statutory exceptions such as early rearrangements to finance the creation or takeover of a business, dismissal, disability or retirement of the holder. After the fifth anniversary, partial withdrawals and partial surrenders no longer close the plan, and further payments remain possible within the ceiling. The clock runs from the first payment into the plan, not from the last purchase, and a transfer between institutions does not restart it. Concretely: a PEA opened in March 2019 reaches its fifth anniversary in March 2024, so a partial withdrawal in 2026 leaves the plan alive with only social charges on the gain fraction, while the identical withdrawal in 2023 would have closed the plan and subjected all gains since 2019 to the flat-rate tax or the progressive scale plus social charges in the closure year. Dividends received inside the plan and reinvested inside the plan are not withdrawals and trigger no tax; dividends withdrawn in cash are withdrawals and follow the clock. The France-United Kingdom double tax convention of 19 June 2008, published by the decree of 27 August 2009, overlays this domestic treatment for cross-border dividends and gains, capping French withholding on dividends paid to non-residents and allocating taxing rights on gains, and British readers who have left France or receive British-source dividends into a French account should test both the domestic PEA articles and the treaty distribution and gains articles before accepting any withholding. For dividends paid out of a PEA to a person who has become non-resident, the withholding mechanism in Article 119 bis of the General Tax Code may apply outside the shelter, which is one more reason to take advice before moving back to London with a PEA in force. Every figure in this paragraph follows the statutes linked here as in force on the date of writing; rates of social charges and of the flat-rate levy have moved before and Parliament can move them again, so re-check the linked articles on the day you act rather than relying on a saved copy.

A worked illustration helps British readers feel the stakes before the next part explains how to fight. Take Catherine, 58, British, tax-resident in Lyon since 2017, who opened a PEA in 2018 with 100,000 euros, bought French and Irish shares plus a London-listed mining share then eligible, and watched the plan grow to 160,000 euros by 2026 with 60,000 euros of latent gain. If the plan is compliant and over five years old, a full withdrawal costs about 10,320 euros in social charges at 17.2 per cent of the gain and nothing in income tax. If the same plan is closed for a Brexit breach — the mining share never regularised — the 60,000 euros of gain falls into the closure year’s income at the 30 per cent flat rate or the progressive scale plus social charges, roughly 18,000 euros at the flat rate, a difference of nearly 8,000 euros on identical economics, plus late-payment interest and any penalties if the administration treats the breach as a filing failure. If the plan is under five years old the comparison is harsher still, because even a compliant early withdrawal bears full tax while a breach adds the compliance stain to the file. The illustration also shows why the breach date in the closure notice matters so much: taxing the 60,000 euros in 2021, 2024 or 2026 changes the applicable scale, the social-charge rate history, the interest clock and the limitation period for challenge. Never accept a closure notice without checking the breach date against your own sale and transfer slips.

B. What closes your PEA by mistake and how do you challenge closure or the tax bill?

Closure is the sanction, and the sanction article is mercilessly short. Article 1765 of the General Tax Code provides, word for word, that “Si l’une des conditions prévues pour l’application, selon le cas, des articles L. 221-30, L. 221-31 et L. 221-32 ou des articles L. 221-32-1, L. 221-32-2 et L. 221-32-3 du code monétaire et financier n’est pas remplie, le plan est clos, dans les conditions définies au 2 du II de l’article 150-0 A et à l’article L. 221-32 du code monétaire et financier à la date où le manquement a été commis et les cotisations d’impôt résultant de cette clôture sont immédiatement exigibles.” Every phrase counts. Any unmet condition — residence, single plan, eligible securities, 25 per cent limit, no off-plan transfers, withdrawal discipline — closes the plan. Closure is dated to the breach, not to the bank’s discovery letter, so a 2021 Brexit breach discovered in 2025 is a 2021 closure with 2021 tax consequences. The resulting tax is immediately payable, with interest, and a deliberate second-plan overpayment can add a 2 per cent fiscal fine on the excess. The two court decisions in this article show the sanction biting on each side of the relationship. In the 2022 cassation case the sanction fell through the tax assessment: the second PEA of March 2002 destroyed the exemption claimed on the May 2008 sale inside the first plan, and the bank that failed to warn paid no damages on the facts as found. In the Paris appeal the sanction fell through the bank: the holder who sold every share off-plan with no cash returning to the plan’s cash account received a closure statement backdated to the sale, and the litigation turned on whether the bank that executed the private transfer and then closed the plan had breached its duties of information, warning and care. British readers should draw the combined lesson: the tax administration punishes the holder for the breach, and only a separately proved fault by the bank — failure to inform, to warn, to keep documents — shifts any part of the loss to the institution. Keep every account agreement, information brochure, warning letter and annual statement, because both routes demand paper.

When the notice arrives — a bordereau de clôture from the bank, a proposition de rectification from the tax office, or an avis de mise en recouvrement putting the sum into collection — act inside the time limits and in the right forum, because a good argument filed late or in the wrong court fails like a bad one. Against a tax assessment, the route is the contentious complaint (réclamation contentieuse) to the tax department that issued the assessment, normally within 31 December of the second year following the year of the disputed tax, setting out each legal ground with the linked articles and attaching the plan history, the sale and withdrawal slips, and any proof of timely 2021 regularisation. If the administration rejects expressly or stays silent for six months, the next step is the administrative court (tribunal administratif) within two months of the rejection, where pleas include misapplication of the eligibility articles, wrong breach date, miscalculation of the gain, wrong rate, and treaty-based limits on withholding. Against a bank closure you consider abusive, the route is civil: formal demand (mise en demeure) by recorded letter, complaint to the bank’s mediator (médiateur bancaire), then writ (assignation) before the judicial court (tribunal judiciaire), where pleas mirror the two judgments above — the bank closed a compliant plan, misdated the breach, executed an off-plan transfer without the required warning, or failed to keep and produce the file. In both routes, ask early for a stay or payment schedule rather than ignoring collection, because enforced recovery (saisie) does not wait for the merits. Common British files that succeed share three features worth copying: the saver proves French tax residence at opening with tax notices and utility evidence, proves the exact composition and dating of the plan with complete statements rather than summaries, and challenges the breach date with dated sale slips rather than with general complaints about Brexit unfairness. Files that fail share the opposite features: two simultaneous PEAs, undocumented private transfers of UK shares to a London broker characterised as off-plan disposals, or silence left unanswered until the assessment became final (définitive). If your 2021 correspondence went to a previous address, say so with proof of the move and of the forwarding request, but do not present it as a legal excuse on its own — pair it with evidence that you regularised or attempted to regularise in substance.

Prevention from today costs less than litigation tomorrow, and for a British household in France it fits on a single page pinned beside the computer. Confirm in writing, once a year, that you hold exactly one PEA and one PEA-PME at most, that every listed line has its issuer’s registered office inside the EU or EEA, and that no fund has drifted below its 75 per cent European quota. Route every purchase strictly through plan cash, never by contribution in kind from an ordinary account. Before any transfer of shares to the United Kingdom — gift to children in London, move to a UK broker for convenience, sale by private deed — ask the bank for the written procedure that keeps the plan compliant, and refuse any telephone-only instruction. Calendar the five-year anniversary from the first payment and diarise large withdrawals for after it. Keep a Brexit file with the 2021 sale and withdrawal slips, the tolerance correspondence, and the closure or compliance confirmations, because limitation periods and bank archive purges make 2021 harder to prove every year. And when a notice arrives, count the days immediately: complaint periods in tax and the two-month period after an administrative rejection are strict, and the bank-mediation and civil limitation clocks run in parallel rather than suspending each other. A dated, documented, forum-correct challenge preserves the 12.8-point gap described above; a late or misdirected one surrenders it.

Conclusion

The PEA remains open to British residents of France after Brexit, and it remains the best French wrapper for continental European equities once its seniority passes five years. But it is no longer a home for British shares. Shares issued by companies with their registered office in the United Kingdom have been ineligible since 1 January 2021, the nine-month tolerance that allowed sale or withdrawal into an ordinary account expired in 2021, and any British line still sitting in a PEA today exposes the whole plan to closure backdated to the breach with immediately payable tax under Article 1765. The compliant path is narrow and entirely practicable: hold one plan only, fill it exclusively with issuers seated in the EU or EEA and funds that respect the 75 per cent quota, move only cash through the plan’s cash account, respect the five-year clock before withdrawing, and keep the paper that proves each step. The two judgments in this guide show judges applying those rules without indulgence — the double PEA that lost its exemption in the Court of Cassation in February 2022, and the off-plan sale that drew a backdated closure statement in Paris in June 2022 — and they show the only challenges that work: exact breach-date disputes, documented regularisation, proved bank fault, and timely complaints in the correct court. Check your holdings this week against the linked statutes, regularise any surviving British line through the documented withdrawal route, and challenge any closure or assessment you consider wrong within its time limit and in its proper forum. Handled that way, the PEA you opened as a European saver can serve you faithfully as a British saver in France for the decades ahead.