BUZZ ACCOUNTINGUK tax from abroad, explained properly.
Long-form, plain-English, and written by the people who file these returns every week. Free — the same explanations our clients get.
The Statutory Residence Test, explained properly
Whether the UK taxes your worldwide income comes down to a mechanical test of days, ties and work. This is how it actually works — the automatic tests, the ties table, the split-year rules and the evidence that wins arguments with HMRC.
The Non-resident Landlord Scheme: keeping all of your rent
Move abroad and your letting agent is legally required to send 20% of your rent to HMRC — unless you stop them with one form. How the scheme works, what the annual return involves, and the allowance question that decides whether you owe anything at all.
Selling UK property from abroad: the 60-day rule
Every non-resident who sells UK land or property must file a return within 60 days of completion — profit or loss, tax or no tax. The rebasing choice that shrinks most long-held gains, the penalty clock, and the rescue routine when you find out late.
Moving to the UK: the four-year FIG regime
The non-dom era is over. Since April 2025, qualifying new arrivals get four tax years in which foreign income and gains are completely free of UK tax — money you can bring into the country freely. Who qualifies, what it covers, and the mistakes already costing people the relief.
Voluntary National Insurance from abroad: £3.50 a week for a bigger State Pension
For £3.50 a week, most working expats can keep their UK State Pension growing while they're away. It is the best-returning financial decision available to a British expat, and the majority never make it. Who qualifies for Class 2, what the six-year window means, and when buying is genuinely the wrong call.
Letting your home when you move abroad
The most common expat property story isn't an investor with a portfolio — it's a family who moved for work and kept the house. Everything that needs doing, in the order it needs doing: before you fly, when the tenancy starts, every year after, and when you eventually sell.
Filing UK returns from abroad: the plumbing nobody warns you about
HMRC's own website cannot file the pages that make you non-resident. Add a dead UK SIM, a locked Government Gateway and a helpline that opens at 3am your time, and January gets ugly. Here's the whole mechanical side, fixed in advance.
Double tax treaties: why you won't be taxed twice (if the paperwork is right)
Two countries can both have claims on the same income. Treaties decide who wins what, and credits mop up the rest — but every protection in a treaty is claimed on a return, not applied by magic. How the system fits together for the classic expat cases.
Where to start
These are the explanations we would give a client on a first call, written out properly. They are free, they are not gated behind an email address, and they are long enough to actually answer the question — which for most of these topics means somewhere between 1,300 and 1,700 words rather than a blog post that stops at the interesting part.
If you are not sure which one applies to you:
- Just left, or leaving soon — start with the Statutory Residence Test, then the guide to letting your UK home if you are keeping the house.
- Letting a UK property from abroad — the Non-resident Landlord Scheme guide explains the 20% deduction and the form that stops it.
- Selling a UK property — the 60-day rule, and read it before completion rather than after.
- Arriving in the UK — the four-year FIG regime that replaced the non-dom rules.
- Thinking about the State Pension — voluntary National Insurance from abroad, which is the highest-return decision on this list for most people.
- Facing a January filing deadline — the guide to filing when HMRC's own website will not let you.
Everything here reflects the rules as they stand for the 2025/26 UK tax year. Where a rule changed recently — and several have — the guide says what changed and when.
How these are kept current
UK expat tax has moved a lot recently, and a guide that was right two years ago can be actively misleading now. The non-dom regime ended in April 2025 and was replaced by the four-year FIG rules. The CGT reporting window for non-residents went from 30 days to 60. Mortgage interest stopped being a deduction and became a 20% tax reducer. National Insurance rates changed, and the temporary extended window for buying old years has now closed back to the normal six.
Each guide states the tax year it is written for and is revisited when a rule moves rather than when it is convenient. If you spot something out of date, tell us — that is a genuinely useful thing to receive and it gets fixed the same week.
None of this is advice for your circumstances. It is a proper explanation of how the rules work, which is what most people actually need before they know whether they have a problem.
Leaving the UK: the ten tax jobs worth doing early
Each one costs almost nothing done in the right month and four figures done in the wrong tax year. Three pages, in the order the deadlines actually arrive — day budget, split year, the P85, the NRL1, the April 2015 valuation, the ISA, your National Insurance and the two dates to diarise.
The download opens on the next page — no waiting for an email, no sequence, no sales calls.