Moving to the UK: arrivals and returners

Since April 2025 the UK taxes new arrivals under the Foreign Income and Gains (FIG) regime: if you've been non-resident for the previous ten years, your first four years of UK residence can be free of UK tax on foreign income and gains — dividends from your company back home, interest, rent, gains — and you can bring the money into the UK freely, which the old remittance rules never allowed. After four years, worldwide taxation applies like everyone else.

What we do for arrivers

• Confirm your start of residence and split-year position — the date matters for what the UK can tax.
• FIG regime claims on your return, each year of the four — it's a claim, not automatic, and claiming costs you the personal allowance, so we check year by year that it's actually worth it.
• Registration for Self Assessment, and the return itself.
• Employment structuring facts — overseas workday relief where it applies to your first years' earnings for duties performed abroad.
• Coordination with the tax system you're leaving, so nothing is taxed twice and nothing falls through the gap.

Returning Brits

Ten years away? You qualify for the same four-year FIG window as any other arriver. Fewer than five years away? Watch the temporary non-residence rules — gains and certain income realised abroad can be taxed on the year you come back. The review covers both.

How the review runs

1. Before the call: your arrival date (or options), the ten-year residence history, and an inventory of foreign income sources and unrealised gains.
2. The session: your FIG qualification confirmed, arrival timing weighed against the tax-year boundary, and a four-year plan sketched — what to realise, what to sweep, what to leave.
3. Within 48 hours: the written plan, Self Assessment registration if you want us to run it, and the first-year claim strategy modelled both ways.

What we'll need from you

• Your residence history for the last ten years, roughly
• Foreign income sources: companies, portfolios, property, pensions
• Any large unrealised gains — the window is for them
• Your intended arrival date, if flexible even by a few weeks

The four-year window, and why it is not the old non-dom regime

The non-domicile rules ended in April 2025. What replaced them is the foreign income and gains regime: if you have been non-UK-resident for the ten tax years before you arrive, your first four years of UK residence can have foreign income and gains completely free of UK tax — and, unlike the old remittance basis, you can bring that money into the UK and spend it here without triggering a charge.

Three things about it catch people out. It is claim-based: nothing happens automatically, and a year not claimed is a year lost. It costs you the personal allowance and the CGT annual exemption for any year you claim it, so for someone with modest foreign income it can be worse than not claiming. And the ten-year clock is strict — nine years away does not qualify you, and people who spent a stray year back in the UK partway through often do not realise they have broken it.

What the arrival review does

• Fixes your start-of-residence date under the split-year rules, which decides what is in scope from day one.
• Tests whether you qualify for the four-year window, properly, against the ten-year condition rather than an assumption about it.
• Models the claim year by year — because the right answer is often to claim in the two years with large foreign income and not in the two without.
• Registers you for Self Assessment and sets up the filing.
• Lines up the other side. Your former country of residence usually has a departure position of its own, and the two need to agree about dates.

Returners

Coming home after a long stint abroad is the same analysis with an extra question: what you did in the years away. Assets sold while non-resident can be dragged back into UK tax if you return within five years, foreign pensions have their own rules, and the ten-year test for the FIG regime is exactly the kind of thing a returner is likely to fail by a single year. It is worth checking before you book the flights rather than after.

The review is £249 and is credited against your first year's return.