The 4-Year FIG Regime Explained: Foreign Income & Gains Relief (2026)

If you have moved to the UK - or are about to - and you have income or assets abroad, the rules that used to protect them changed fundamentally on 6 April 2025. The old "non-dom" remittance basis is gone. In its place is the Foreign Income and Gains (FIG) regime: a four-year relief for people arriving in the UK after a long spell abroad. Whether you qualify does not depend on your nationality or domicile - it depends on your UK residence history, which is determined by the Statutory Residence Test.

Key points

• From 6 April 2025, all UK residents are taxed on the arising basis on worldwide income and gains - the remittance basis is abolished
• The FIG regime lets a "qualifying new resident" claim relief on foreign income and gains for their first 4 tax years of UK residence
• To qualify you must be UK resident and have been non-UK resident for at least 10 consecutive tax years immediately before your year of arrival
• Nationality and domicile are irrelevant - the whole test runs on your SRT residence status year by year
• You must claim the relief on each year's Self Assessment return - it is never automatic - and claiming costs you your personal allowance and CGT annual exempt amount for that year
• Only foreign income and gains arising on or after 6 April 2025 can be relieved

What replaced the remittance basis

Before 6 April 2025, individuals who were UK resident but non-UK domiciled could elect the remittance basis - foreign income and gains were only taxed if brought ("remitted") into the UK. That regime, and the concept of domicile that underpinned it, has been withdrawn (RFIG41000).

Now every UK resident is taxed on the arising basis: your worldwide income and gains are in scope as they accrue, wherever they sit. The FIG regime is the transitional relief that softens this for genuinely new arrivals. Instead of a status tied to where you are domiciled, eligibility is tied to how long you have been non-resident - a cleaner, purely residence-based test.

Crucially, the money is no longer trapped offshore. A qualifying new resident who claims relief on foreign income or gains can bring those funds to the UK at any time, during or after the 4 years, with no further UK tax charge (RFIG41000).

The core eligibility: "qualifying new resident"

Everything turns on being a qualifying new resident. Under s845B ITTOIA 2005 (RFIG44000), you are one for your first qualifying year if you meet all of these:

• you are UK resident for the tax year
• you have not been UK resident for at least 10 consecutive tax years immediately before that year
• you are not a member of the House of Commons or House of Lords for any part of the year
• you are at least 10 years old at the start of the year

For the following 3 tax years, you remain a qualifying new resident as long as you are UK resident and not a member of either House. That gives a maximum 4-year window: the year of arrival plus the three after it.

A few things to note:

• The window is fixed by your arrival year. It does not pause. If you are non-resident in, say, year 2, you simply lose that year - you cannot push it to a fifth year (RFIG44000, "A period of non-residence during the first 4 years").
• You do not have to claim every year. You can claim in year 1, skip year 2, and claim again in years 3 and 4 - but an unused year is gone for good.
• Only income and gains arising on or after 6 April 2025 can ever be relieved, even if your qualifying window technically began earlier (someone who arrived in 2022-23 could be a qualifying new resident, but can only claim from 2025-26 onwards).

Why the Statutory Residence Test decides everything

The eligibility test is a residence test in disguise. To qualify you must show 10 consecutive tax years of non-UK residence immediately before you arrive - and UK residence for every one of those years is determined by the Statutory Residence Test. Get one year wrong and the 10-year chain breaks.

Two traps make this harder than it looks, and both are pure SRT questions:

1. Split years still count as full residence years. If you left the UK part-way through a year and claimed split year treatment, that year is still a full year of UK residence for the FIG clock - the overseas part does not help you (RFIG44000). So a departure in, say, 2015-16 with split-year treatment means your 10 clear years cannot start until 2016-17 at the earliest.

2. Treaty residence elsewhere does not help either. Even if a double taxation treaty deemed you resident in another country under a tie-breaker, you are still UK resident for the FIG criteria if you were resident under the SRT (RFIG44000, Example 4). HMRC's own example has an individual who spent a single one-year contract in the UK years earlier, was treaty-resident in Italy for it - and is still disqualified, because that stray SRT-resident year sits inside her prior decade.

This is exactly why the arithmetic matters. Before you assume you qualify, you need a defensible view of your UK residence status for each of the last ~11 tax years. The free SRT calculator works through any single year against HMRC's RDR3 guidance and gives you a clear determination with full reasoning - the building block you need for each year of the chain.

Worked example: a returning expat

Amina left the UK for Canada and was non-UK resident for the 20 tax years that followed. She returns to the UK and is UK resident for 2025-26.

• Is she a qualifying new resident in 2025-26? She is UK resident, and she had not been UK resident for at least 10 consecutive tax years immediately before 2025-26. Yes.
• Her 4-year window is 2025-26 to 2028-29.
• She has foreign investment income and a foreign gain from selling her Canadian home in 2025-26. She makes a foreign income claim and a foreign gain claim on her 2025-26 return, and can bring the relieved funds to the UK whenever she likes with no further UK tax.
• She skips claims in 2026-27 and 2027-28 (only small foreign amounts, not worth losing her allowances), paying normal UK tax on them, then claims again in 2028-29.
• In 2029-30 she can no longer use the regime at all - it is her fifth year of residence. The only way back in would be another 10 consecutive years of non-residence (RFIG42100, Example 2).

Now change one fact: suppose Amina had returned to the UK for a single tax year eight years ago and was SRT-resident then. That one year breaks the 10-consecutive-year requirement, and she would not qualify at all. The difference between relief and no relief comes down to a residence determination for one historic year.

What the relief actually covers

Qualifying foreign income (RFIG45100) is broadly the investment and business income you would have sheltered under the old remittance basis, including:

• foreign interest and dividends from non-UK companies
• profits of a trade or profession carried on wholly outside the UK
• profits of an overseas property business
• foreign pension income and certain foreign social security benefits
• certain trust, estate, and offshore-fund income

Foreign employment earnings are not qualifying foreign income. If you work in the UK for an overseas employer, relief on the foreign-duties portion is claimed separately under the reformed Overseas Workday Relief (OWR), not through a foreign income claim (RFIG45100, EIM43550).

Foreign gains (RFIG45500) that can be relieved include gains on the disposal of assets situated outside the UK (provided the asset does not derive 75%+ of its value from UK land), and certain gains attributed from non-resident companies and trusts.

The catch: what a claim costs you

FIG relief is not free money, and it is never automatic - there is no de minimis and no default application (RFIG42100). You make a claim on your Self Assessment return, source by source, year by year, quantifying each amount. And making any claim for a year - foreign income, foreign gains, or an OWR election - means you lose the following for that year (RFIG43000):

• your personal allowance
• your CGT annual exempt amount
• the blind person's allowance and the married couple / civil partner allowances
• relief on certain overseas property loan costs, and some foreign loss reliefs

So a claim only makes sense when the foreign income or gain being sheltered comfortably outweighs the allowances you give up. For someone with a large foreign dividend it is obvious; for someone with a few hundred pounds of foreign interest it is often not worth it. This is a per-year calculation worth modelling before you file.

Time limit: a claim (or an amendment) must be made by the anniversary of 31 January following the end of the tax year - i.e. 12 months after the normal filing date. For 2025-26, that deadline is 31 January 2028 (RFIG42300). There is no general discretion to accept late claims.

What this means in practice

If you are arriving in - or returning to - the UK with foreign income or assets, the sequence is:

1. Establish your residence status for the arrival year and confirm you have 10 consecutive non-UK-resident years behind you. This is a Statutory Residence Test question for each year - start with the free SRT calculator, and read the pillar guide to the SRT if you are new to the test.
2. Watch for the split-year and treaty traps - a departure year with split-year treatment, or a stray year of UK residence, can quietly disqualify you.
3. Decide, year by year, whether a FIG claim beats keeping your allowances.
4. Claim on each year's Self Assessment return, source by source, within the time limit.

The FIG regime is genuinely valuable for the right person - four years of relief on worldwide investment income, with no requirement to keep it offshore. But the gateway is a residence test, and the traps are residence traps. Because the tax consequences are significant and personal, treat this guide as a map of the rules (all references are to HMRC's Residence and FIG Regime Manual) and take the numbers themselves to a qualified adviser before you file.