You are British, you live in France, and your pension is not a pot of invested savings but a promise: a final-salary or career-average pension earned with a British employer, paying a guaranteed income for life from a fixed retirement age. The question you are asking sounds simple: can that promise follow you to France, and what will it cost to move it? The answer is harder than for the invested pots our guide to SIPP transfers to France describes, because a defined-benefit promise must first be converted into a cash number, and British law then forces you through regulated advice before you are allowed to give the guarantee up. Since Brexit you are a third-country national in France, and the transfer sits at the crossing of two systems: British pension law, with its cash-equivalent valuation, its advice requirement and its 25 per cent overseas charge, and French tax law, where your residence makes France the country that taxes the pension stream under the double tax treaty signed in London on 19 June 2008. This guide explains both gates with the exact official sources your adviser will want to see, and how to challenge the bill when either country gets it wrong. Read it before you request the valuation, because the valuation itself starts clocks you cannot stop.
I. The British Exit Gate: Valuing a Promise, Taking Advice, and Surviving the Charge
A. The CETV: turning a guaranteed income into a cash number on a three-month clock
A defined-benefit pension is the opposite of a SIPP. Nothing is invested in your name and there is no pot with your name on it: your employer promises you an income, usually a fraction of your final or average salary for each year of service, payable for life and often indexed. To move that promise overseas it must first be priced, and the price is the “cash equivalent transfer value (CETV)”: in the official description, you ask your existing provider for a CETV because “how much the new scheme would receive”. The CETV is an actuarial number, sensitive to interest rates, inflation assumptions and your age: the same promised income can be worth very different cash sums from one year to the next, and a high CETV is not free money but the market price of the guarantee you surrender. Ask for the CETV computation in writing with its assumptions, because that document is the baseline against which every later decision, and every later dispute, is measured.
The valuation comes with two three-month clocks. The official guidance warns that a CETV is “valid for three months” and that your provider has up to three months to send it to you, adding that you might have to pay for a fresh valuation if you request more than one in a twelve-month period. In practice this squeezes you from both sides: the provider can take most of the validity window to produce the number, and the financial advice examined below must then be obtained, considered and acted on before the number expires. The guidance draws the practical conclusion itself: it is often sensible to find a financial adviser before requesting the CETV, to avoid it expiring. Line the adviser up first, request the CETV second, and diarise the expiry date on the day the valuation arrives: an expired CETV means starting over, paying again, and receiving a different number in different market conditions.
Not every promise can be moved. Pensions already in payment can generally not be transferred, and some public-sector schemes, notably the unfunded ones such as the teachers’, NHS, civil-service and armed-forces schemes, have no transfer values to offer because there is no fund behind them. If your scheme administrator answers that no CETV exists for your benefits, that is usually the end of the transfer project, not the start of a negotiation. What remains is then the taxation of the pension where it is paid, under the treaty rules explained in Part II: our analysis of lump sums and Crown pensions covers the public-sector cases that cannot travel. Establish transferability in writing before spending anything on advice or valuations.
The CETV also fixes the figure on which the British overseas charge will bite if you move the money abroad. As our SIPP-transfer guide explains, a transfer to an overseas scheme must land in a recognised scheme and fit the overseas transfer allowance, normally £1,073,100, failing which a 25 per cent charge applies to the excess or, without any exemption, to the whole amount. For a defined-benefit transfer the same arithmetic applies to the CETV: a large final-salary promise capitalised at forty times its annual pension can breach the allowance on its own, producing a British charge before France has taxed a euro. Get the allowance position in writing alongside the CETV, because the two numbers together decide whether the project is viable at all.
B. The advice rule over £30,000, the overseas charge on top, and the scam filter
Above a modest threshold, British law takes the decision out of your hands alone. If your defined-benefit pension is “worth over £30,000”, you “must get financial advice” before you are allowed to transfer it to a defined-contribution scheme, and your British provider will refuse the transfer without proof that advice was taken. Note what the rule requires and what it does not: it requires you to take advice, not to follow it. An adviser who recommends against the transfer still satisfies the requirement, and the provider must then let you proceed, although many savers reasonably treat a negative recommendation as decisive. The advice is normally at your expense, it can run into thousands of pounds, and cheaper abridged advice only tells you whether a transfer looks unsuitable: a positive recommendation, or going ahead at all, needs full advice. Budget the fee before requesting the CETV, since the fee is sunk whether the transfer proceeds or not.
The Department for Work and Pensions frames the same rule in technical language worth knowing, because it also covers benefits that look like invested pots but hide a guarantee. The benefits concerned are “safeguarded benefits”, defined as benefits that are not money-purchase or cash-balance rights, and the factsheet confirms the exception for “safeguarded benefits worth £30,000 or less”. Guaranteed annuity rates and guaranteed minimum pensions can therefore pull an apparently flexible policy inside the advice requirement. If your provider classifies your benefits as safeguarded, do not argue the classification from the policy brochure: ask for the determination in writing with the valuation of the safeguarded element, since that document decides whether the advice bill applies to you.
On top of the advice cost sits the overseas transfer charge examined in our SIPP guide: 25 per cent on the whole CETV where no exemption applies, with exemption only for a transfer to a scheme in the country where you live or to an employer-provided scheme, plus a five-year tail that re-tests the exemption if you move country again. A defined-benefit transfer stacks three British costs that a domestic transfer never meets: the advice fee, the potential 25 per cent charge, and the loss of the guarantee itself, which no later investment performance is certain to replace. Put the three in one computation before instructing anything: CETV minus advice fee minus potential overseas charge, compared with the capitalised value of the guaranteed income you keep by staying put. If the transfer still wins, proceed; if it wins only because the CETV looks generous this quarter, remember that generosity is the market pricing your employer’s promise, not a bargain.
Finally, run every unsolicited approach through the scam filter. Expatriate savers with large CETVs are prime targets for scammers offering free reviews, early access or guaranteed returns, and the British guidance tells savers who are “concerned about a scam” to contact the national fraud-reporting service rather than the pension provider. Treat any adviser who cold-calls you, pressures you before the CETV expires, or proposes a receiving scheme you cannot verify on HMRC’s published recognition list as a reason to stop, not to hurry. Verify the adviser’s authorisation on the British financial-services register, verify the receiving scheme on HMRC’s list on the day you act, and keep both screenshots with dates: in a later dispute about an unauthorised payment or a refused exemption, contemporaneous verification evidence is the whole of your defence. A transfer induced by fraud is not merely a bad bargain; it can be an unauthorised payment attracting British charges of at least 40 per cent on top of everything France will tax.
II. The French Entry Gate: Residence, Treaty Taxing Rights, and Challenging the Bill
A. French residence and Article 18: France taxes the transferred capital and Britain steps back
Everything in France starts with one question: are you a French tax resident? In French law this is called your domicile fiscal, literally your tax home, and it decides whether France taxes your worldwide income or only your French-source income. Article 4 B of the French Tax Code provides: “Sont considérées comme ayant leur domicile fiscal en France au sens de l’article 4 A : a. Les personnes qui ont en France leur foyer ou le lieu de leur séjour principal” (are considered as having their tax domicile in France: persons who have in France their household or their principal place of stay). Settling permanently in France, registering with the French health system, enrolling children in a French school: each of these points the tax administration towards French residence, and once residence is established France taxes the pension rights you cash in, even though they were earned in Britain. Our guide to the tie-breaker for taxpayers claimed by both countries explains what happens when London and Paris both assert residence, but for the settled British retiree the answer is normally France.
Once you are French resident, the treaty gives France the exclusive right to tax your private pension, including the capitalised transfer value once it is paid to you. Article 18 of the France-United Kingdom convention of 19 June 2008 reserves pensions paid for past employment to the state of residence: they “ne sont imposables que dans cet Etat” (are taxable only in that state). For a French-resident former member of a British final-salary scheme, that state is France: France taxes, Britain exempts. The main exception concerns public-sector pensions that cannot be transferred anyway: government-service pensions stay taxable in the paying state, which is why unfunded British public schemes remain a British tax matter even when you live in France. Identify which article covers your benefits before you declare, because declaring a non-transferable public pension as an Article 18 private transfer guarantees a reassessment.
Britain gives effect to the exemption through a stamped form, and the French tax office is part of the circuit. The French administration’s official commentary requires a separate claim for each British payer of the income, and since the early 2010s the exemption from British withholding on private pensions of British source follows a fixed procedure, as set out in BOI-INT-CVB-GBR-10-30. In practice you complete a France-Individual claim, have it certified by your French tax office, which keeps a copy to ensure taxation of the income shown in the claim, and send the other copy to HMRC. Expect the British payer to keep deducting withholding until HMRC issues its exemption notice, and do not treat interim British deductions as proof that the treaty fails: they are procedural lag, recovered through the claim, while France taxes the pension from the start of your residence.
Declaring correctly in France means two forms. Report the British pension amounts on form 2047 for income received abroad, then carry the total to the main 2042 return. French law then softens the bill in two ways that matter enormously for a large CETV paid as capital. First, Article 158-5-a of the Tax Code provides that “Les pensions et retraites font l’objet d’un abattement de 10 % qui ne peut excéder 4 439 €” (pensions are subject to a 10 per cent allowance capped at 4,439 euros). Second, and decisive for a six-figure transfer value, Article 163-0 A lets you ask for the quotient computation where the capital is exceptional income: “l’intéressé peut demander que l’impôt correspondant soit calculé en ajoutant le quart du revenu exceptionnel net à son revenu net global imposable et en multipliant par quatre la cotisation supplémentaire ainsi obtenue” (the taxpayer may ask for the tax to be computed by adding one quarter of the net exceptional income to taxable income and multiplying the resulting extra charge by four). Without the quotient, a £400,000 CETV taxed in one year at the top marginal rate produces a bill several times larger than with it; if the administration scales your transfer value at full progressive rates despite your quotient claim, that omission alone can found a claim. Our analysis of flexi-access drawdown payments and of the UK State Pension declaration works through the form-by-form detail for pensions drawn as income rather than transferred as capital.
Social levies follow the pension into France, and the courts have just confirmed how far. The contribution for generalised social security (CSG) applies, under Article L. 136-1 of the Social Security Code, as “une contribution sociale sur les revenus d’activité et sur les revenus de remplacement” (a social contribution on employment income and on replacement income) due from persons “considérées comme domiciliées en France pour l’établissement de l’impôt sur le revenu et à la charge, à quelque titre que ce soit, d’un régime obligatoire français d’assurance maladie” (considered domiciled in France for income tax and covered by a compulsory French health insurance scheme), while Article L. 136-6 extends a parallel contribution to capital income. In Conseil d’État, 25 October 2024, No. 473997, concerning a Swiss lump-sum survivor’s pension paid to a French resident, the Court annulled the appeal judgment that had capped French social contributions at the amount of the French pension received: the European coordination rules, the Court held, “n’interdisent pas à l’Etat membre compétent d’assoir les cotisations sur la totalité des pensions perçues de deux ou plusieurs Etats membres par une même personne, pas plus qu’elles ne lui imposent de limiter le montant des cotisations à hauteur du montant de la pension qu’il verse” (do not prevent the competent state from assessing contributions on all pensions received from several states by the same person, nor require it to cap contributions at the amount of the pension it pays). The operative part is blunt: “Les articles 1 à 3 de l’arrêt du 16 mars 2023 de la cour administrative d’appel de Lyon sont annulés” (articles 1 to 3 of the Lyon appeal judgment of 16 March 2023 are annulled). The case concerned a Swiss pension under the EU coordination regulations, so its reasoning does not transfer mechanically to a British pension after Brexit, but it shows the direction of travel: a French resident complaining that France levies CSG, CRDS and the autonomy contribution on a transferred pension starts from a judgment that upheld exactly that. Check your health cover first, because exemption from French social levies on pension income generally requires not being within a compulsory French health scheme, a point to evidence with your S1 or PUMA certificate rather than assert.
B. When both countries bite: the treaty credit, the forms that prove it, and how to challenge the bill
Double taxation still happens in practice: British withholding deducted before the exemption notice arrives, an overseas transfer charge paid in Britain on the CETV that France then taxes as pension capital, advice fees that neither country relieves the same way. For these overlaps the treaty provides a credit method, and the Conseil d’État has interpreted it in a case about British-source income. In Conseil d’État, opinion of 12 February 2020, No. 435907, on Article 24 of the Franco-British convention, the Court held that qualifying income “doivent être compris dans la base de […] au sens du a) du paragraphe 1 de l’article 2 de la même convention, sans que le résident de France en soit exonéré à raison de son statut ou de son activité. En revanche, cette condition n’exige pas que les revenus en cause aient été soumis à une imposition effective” (must fall within the base of United Kingdom tax within the meaning of Article 2(1)(a), without the French resident being exempt by reason of status or activity; but the condition does not require the income to have been effectively taxed). Two practical consequences follow. First, you can satisfy the credit condition by showing you declared the income in Britain within a listed tax base even if you paid no British tax on it: the condition “doit être regardée comme satisfaite s’il est établi par le résident de France qu’il a déclaré les revenus en cause au Royaume-Uni, parce que ces revenus étaient compris dans la base de l’un des impôts énumérés au a) du 1 de l’article 2 de la convention, alors même qu’il n’aurait acquitté dans cet Etat aucun impôt à raison de ces revenus”. Second, for French social contributions specifically, “aucune stipulation de l’article 24 ne subordonne l’octroi d’un crédit d’impôt égal à leur montant à ce que les revenus soumis à ces contributions aient été compris dans la base d’un impôt équivalent ou similaire au Royaume-Uni” (no provision of Article 24 makes the matching credit conditional on the income having fallen within an equivalent British levy). Keep every British self-assessment return, P60 and HMRC notice alongside your French file: under this opinion, proof of declaration in Britain can be as valuable as proof of payment.
A cautionary tale accompanies that position. The Lyon appeal judgment discussed above, CAA Lyon, 16 March 2023, No. 21LY03252, had given the taxpayer exactly the cap on social contributions that the Conseil d’État then annulled in No. 473997. Do not rely on first-instance or appeal decisions that expatriate forums and advisers still circulate from before October 2024: check that any decision you invoke is final, meaning no appeal to the Conseil d’État is pending or admitted, before building a claim on it. The taxpayer in the Lyon case had also invoked the Court of Justice’s Nikula judgment of 18 July 2006 (C-50/05); the Conseil d’État distinguished it on the wording of the old 1971 regulation, a reminder that European case law must be read with its exact legal basis, not its headline. If an adviser cites you a decision, ask for its number, its date, and whether it survived cassation: those three answers separate authority from anecdote.
When the French assessment is wrong, the challenge runs on a fixed track with a fixed deadline. File a formal claim (reclamation) with the tax office that issued the assessment, setting out the treaty article, the declaration evidence, and the computation you defend. The English-language service-public guidance on claim deadlines states that the claim must be filed “before December 31 of the 2nde year” following the year in which the tax was assessed, as shown on the notice. Miss that date and the substance of your case no longer matters. If the administration rejects the claim expressly or stays silent for six months, appeal to the administrative tribunal of your place of residence: for readers in Paris and the inner suburbs, that means assembling the file, including certified translations of the CETV calculation, the advice letter and the British discharge papers, for the Paris tribunal, whose docket for treaty cases is heavy, so file early within the two-month appeal window rather than on its last day. Useful evidence includes the CETV statement with its guarantee date, the adviser’s report, the France-Individual form certified by your tax office, the HMRC exemption notice or withholding certificates, proof of your French health cover position, and the quotient computation for the capital sum. Ask the tribunal, in the alternative, for discharge of the social contributions if the health-cover condition fails, for the quotient computation if the CETV was scaled at full rates, and for the treaty credit with interest on any doubly taxed amount: alternative pleadings cost nothing and each survives independently if another fails.
Three file-hygiene rules close this section. First, never commingle the British and French disputes in one letter: write to HMRC and the pension administrator about the CETV, the advice requirement and the 25 per cent charge, and to the French tax office about the French assessment, because no administration answers for another. Second, keep a single chronological bundle, British documents with translations and French notices with dates, since the CETV guarantee date, the 60-day APSS window, the five-year re-test and the French claim deadline all turn on dates. Third, diarise three anniversaries on transfer day: three months for any fresh CETV, five years for the British re-test, and 31 December of the second following year for each French assessment. For readers in Paris and Île-de-France, add a local specificity: treaty-credit claims and quotient requests filed by Paris residents are handled by the Paris personal-tax offices (services des impôts des particuliers), whose acknowledgment letter starts the six-month silence period, so keep that letter as carefully as the assessment itself. A defined-benefit promise is the most valuable thing most savers will ever give up; the paperwork deciding its fate deserves the same seriousness.
Conclusion
Moving a final-salary pension to France after Brexit means passing two gates, and the first gate is unique to defined benefits. The British gate is the CETV with its three-month validity, the compulsory regulated advice above £30,000, the scam filter around both, and above all the 25 per cent overseas transfer charge from which only the same-country transfer and the employer scheme escape, with a five-year tail that re-tests the exemption if you move again. The French gate is residence under Article 4 B, exclusive French taxation of the private pension capital under Article 18 of the 2008 convention, declaration on forms 2047 and 2042 with the 10 per cent allowance, the quotient that alone makes a six-figure CETV bearable, and social levies that the Conseil d’État’s October 2024 decision upholds on foreign pensions. Where both gates bite at once, the treaty credit as interpreted in the February 2020 opinion offers relief to the taxpayer who declared in Britain, even without having paid there. Request the CETV only once the adviser is lined up, verify the receiving scheme on the day you act, claim the treaty forms on both sides of the Channel, and challenge a wrong assessment within its deadline. The law rewards the saver who documents each step and punishes the one who reconstructs them afterwards.