France Tax Residency

Key parameters
Threshold	6 months (effectively 183 days)
Period / Window	Calendar year (1 Jan – 31 Dec)
Counting	Any part of a day
Alternative	Home, professional activity, economic interests

You are a French tax resident for a calendar year if you meet any one of these criteria, in any order:

• Home — France is where you and your immediate family normally live, on a settled and permanent footing. Temporary work abroad doesn't break it while your family stays put.
• Principal place of stay — this applies only if you have no settled home at all. It asks where you were actually present most, with more than six months in France taken as the usual guide.
• Professional activity — you carry out a job or a business in France, unless you can show that the activity there is only ancillary. What decides it is where you spend the most working time, not where the most income arises.
• Centre of economic interests — France is where your main investments sit, where your business is based, or where your assets are administered. Where income comes from several countries, the largest share points the way.

Meeting any one criterion makes you a French tax resident, taxed on worldwide income. Falling short of all of them makes you a nonresident, generally taxed only on French-source income.

• Staying under 183 days does not make you a nonresident. It's the most common misreading of the French rules — there is no statutory day threshold, and three of the four criteria have nothing to do with time at all.
• Directors of large French-headquartered companies are presumed to work mainly in France. Where the company's annual revenue is above a set threshold, that presumption stands unless the director proves otherwise.
• Leaving France with substantial holdings can trigger an exit charge. Unrealised gains on significant shareholdings can be taxed on departure, though the tax can often be deferred.
• A special regime can cut tax for people moving to France for work. The impatriate regime exempts part of the pay and some foreign income for a set number of years, but it's claimed separately from your residency status.
• Residency is assessed person by person, not household by household. A couple sharing a home can end up with different answers if only one of them meets a criterion, even though they file a single return together.

Getting your domicile wrong leaves you with late-payment interest of 0.20% a month, plus a surcharge of 10% for a late return. That rises to 40% where the tax administration finds a deliberate breach, and 80% for fraudulent conduct or for income traced to undeclared foreign accounts. Professional tax advice is strongly recommended in situations like this.

A family move that settles it immediately

You move to Lyon in March with your partner and children, rent a family home, and enrol the children in school. Your household is settled in France from that point, so you're a French tax resident for the year — nobody ever needs to count your days.

No settled home, and France wins on time

You gave up your lease everywhere and spend the year travelling: 150 days in France, 120 in Spain, the rest scattered. With no settled home to point to, the principal-place-of-stay test compares the countries, and France comes out ahead despite being well under six months.

Working abroad while the money stays in France

You take a job overseas, spend under 30 days a year in France and keep no home there, but most of your income comes from a French business you own and a French rental portfolio. The centre-of-economic-interests criterion alone can still make you a French tax resident.

• impots.gouv.fr — Resident of France
• Bulletin officiel des finances publiques (BOFiP) — Income tax: taxable persons and tax domicile
• Code général des impôts, Article 4 B — tax domicile