A year into the FIG regime: the three mistakes new arrivals keep making

April 2025 retired the word 'domicile' from mainstream UK tax. In its place: the Foreign Income and Gains regime — arrive in the UK after ten consecutive years of non-residence, and your first four tax years can be entirely free of UK tax on foreign income and gains, with the money freely remittable. No offshore quarantine, no ancestral archaeology, one clean test.

A full Self Assessment season into the new world, the pattern of errors is established. Three mistakes account for nearly all of them.

Mistake one: treating it as automatic

The regime is a claim, made on a tax return, each year, with income and gains elections made separately. The arrivers most at risk are precisely the ones with the least UK income: "everything I earn is foreign and exempt, so I don't need to file" is exactly backwards — no return, no claim, no relief, and by the time the misunderstanding surfaces the claim windows for early years are burning down. If you arrived after April 2025 with foreign income and haven't registered for Self Assessment, that's the to-do list, top line.

Mistake two: claiming when it costs more than it saves

A claim year forfeits the personal allowance (£12,570) and the CGT annual exempt amount. For an arriver with meaningful foreign dividends or gains, that trade is overwhelmingly right. For one with £600 of foreign interest and a UK salary, claiming can literally raise the bill — the allowance lost is worth more than the interest sheltered. This is a year-by-year arithmetic decision, not an identity: plenty of our clients claim in years one and three and skip year two. Run both computations every January; it takes minutes and it is the whole game.

Mistake three: wasting the window

Year five is a cliff — worldwide taxation, no taper. The four years are a reorganisation window: retained profits swept out of the foreign company as dividends while they're UK-tax-free; accrued portfolio gains realised; structures simplified while simplification is cheap. The people who treat year one as 'plenty of time' arrive at year four with everything still to do and a deadline shaped like 6 April. The arrivers doing this well have a dated plan for all four years within months of landing.

Two groups with homework of their own

• Returning Brits. Away ten years or more? You qualify identically to any foreign arriver — the biggest population of accidental non-claimants, because nobody told them coming home included a tax holiday. Away less than five years? The temporary-non-residence rules can tax gains you realised abroad the year you land — the opposite of a holiday, and worth checking before you sell anything in your final months away.
• Old non-doms. Pre-2025 foreign income and gains still sitting offshore under the old remittance rules remain taxable if brought in; a Temporary Repatriation Facility offered a reduced-rate amnesty window for exactly this money. If that's you, this is specific, dated advice territory — general FIG logic doesn't cover the archaeology.

And one piece of timing worth real money

Four tax years, not 48 months: arrive on 20 March and your first 'year' lasts a fortnight. Anyone with genuine flexibility about a spring arrival should know that landing after 6 April can be worth an entire additional year of relief. It is the cheapest planning win in the whole regime.

The arrival review (£249, credited against your first return) covers the ten-year test, your split year, and the four-year plan — most usefully before you book the flight, but at any point in year one it still pays for itself many times over.

What a well-run four years actually looks like

The arrivers getting full value share a pattern. Year 0 (before the flight): the ten-year non-residence count verified, arrival timed just after 6 April where life allows, and a written inventory of foreign income sources and pregnant gains. Year 1: Self Assessment registration immediately, both FIG elections modelled before the first January, remittances made freely — the era of quarantined offshore accounts is over. Years 2–3: the heavy lifting — retained profits dividended out of foreign companies, appreciated portfolios rebased by sale and repurchase, structures collapsed while collapsing is free. Year 4: nothing new started; the final claim filed; and a forward plan for year five's worldwide taxation, including whether remaining foreign income sources should be restructured, retained or simply accepted as taxable. None of these steps is exotic — the entire value is in doing ordinary things inside an extraordinary window rather than three months after it shuts.