The UK and Ireland settled long ago who may tax what.

The double taxation convention decides on salary, pensions, property, companies and much other income. Anyone who reads only Irish tax law therefore sees only half the truth.

Which convention applies

Much of what is written about the UK-Ireland convention online quotes it without the changes of recent years.

It was signed on 2 June 1976, entered into force on 23 December 1976 and was amended by protocols of 28 October 1976, 7 November 1994 and 4 November 1998. Since then the multilateral instrument (MLI) has modified it: the UK ratified on 29 June 2018, Ireland on 29 January 2019, and in the UK the changes have had effect from 6 April 2020 for income tax and capital gains tax, 1 April 2020 for corporation tax. HMRC publishes a synthesised text with the MLI changes in place, prepared with the Irish competent authority; any statement about UK-Irish taxation is checked against it.

The convention covers income tax, corporation tax and capital gains tax in both countries, and in the UK petroleum revenue tax as well. It does not cover VAT, nor, and for families this is the more important point, inheritance tax. For that the two countries have a convention of their own, which comes up at the end of this page and is set out in more detail on the page Inheritance and gifts.

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Who is resident when both countries claim you

Both countries often treat the same person as resident: the UK through the statutory residence test, Ireland through days in the country. Anyone who keeps a house in the UK, spends enough time there and crosses the day limit in Ireland meets both.

For the convention that cannot be. The Irish tax administration puts it unusually plainly in its own manual: for the purposes of a treaty a person cannot be resident in both states. Article 4(2) therefore decides the question in a fixed order.

The order of Article 4(2)

Step	Criterion
1	permanent home available to you
2	centre of vital interests: where your personal and economic relations are closer
3	habitual abode
4	nationality
5	mutual agreement of the two tax authorities

A permanent home need not be owned; a rented home available to you on a lasting basis is enough. The next step is examined only if the previous one gives no clear result.

Source: UK-Ireland convention, Article 4(2), HMRC synthesised text on GOV.UK; Revenue, Tax and Duty Manual Part 34-00-01, section 6.3.3. As of: convention read 6 November 2026, Revenue as verified on the German page.

Two points belong here because they are often confused. First, the convention does not end your UK residence under UK law: if the residence test makes you UK resident, you stay so, with a return to file, even if the convention gives your residence to Ireland. HMRC then calls you treaty non-resident, and such a year does not count as one of sole UK residence for the five-year rule. Second, the second step is a question of fact: where a family lives, where the children go to school, where the business relations are. It cannot be arranged by a declaration. On the Irish side, residence begins with registration at Revenue; we take that on together with the first Irish return as the tax registration as a non-dom.

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Shares, gains and the three-year clause

Article 14(5) gives gains, in principle, to the country where the seller lives; gains on land, and on unlisted shares that draw most of their value from land, stay with the country where the land lies. For a family that sells a business share after the move, the residence rule is the one that counts.

Two sentences follow that are easy to miss. The first is a proviso in the same paragraph: where an individual is taxed in the country of residence only on the gains received there, the rule does not apply to the part not received. For a non-dom in Ireland that means: a gain left outside Ireland is not protected by the convention. The second is Article 14(6): the convention does not affect the right of a country to tax, under its own law, gains of an individual who lives in the other country but was resident in the first at any time in the 3 years before the sale.

Some treaties with Ireland add a step-up for gains already taxed on departure. The UK convention has none, and needs none: the UK does not tax individuals when they leave. What it has instead is the five-year rule on temporary non-residence, which says of itself that no double taxation arrangement prevents its charge (section 1M(4) of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992). What that means for your timetable is on the page Leaving the UK: what is taxed.

Gains in the convention at a glance

Point	Content
Basic rule	Article 14(5): taxable only in the country where the seller lives
Remittance proviso	Article 14(5): not for gains an individual taxed on the remittance basis does not receive in that country
Land	Article 14(1) and (2): also in the country where the land lies, including shares deriving most of their value from it
Three-year clause	Article 14(6): a former resident’s gains may still be taxed under that country’s law for three years after leaving
UK five-year rule	section 1M of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992; section 1M(4): not prevented by the convention

Source: HMRC, “Synthesised text of the Multilateral Instrument and the 1976 UK-Ireland Double Taxation Convention” and “1976 UK-Ireland Double Taxation Convention as amended by the 1998 Protocol”, both on GOV.UK (updated 13 August 2019). As of: read 6 November 2026.

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Pensions: who taxes what

Article 17 gives pensions paid in consideration of past employment, and any annuity, to the country where the pensioner lives, and to that country only. For a British reader in Ireland, a workplace pension or an annuity from the UK is therefore taxable in Ireland, and the UK gives it up under the convention.

Article 18 makes the exception for government service. A pension paid by the state, a political subdivision or a local authority for services of a governmental nature stays with the paying country, unless the pensioner is both resident in and a national of the other country. Staff of educational institutions paid mainly from public funds fall under the same rule.

What a non-dom’s pension left in the UK means under Article 6 follows in the next section; drawing a pension in Ireland is covered on the page Pensions in Ireland.

Pensions in the UK-Ireland convention

Kind of payment	Article	Who taxes
Pensions for past employment, annuities	Article 17	only the country of residence
Pensions for government service	Article 18(2)	only the paying country, unless the pensioner is resident in and a national of the other
Pensions from a business run by a state or local authority	Article 18(4)	as for private pensions, Article 17

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Article 6, the clause that limits the benefit

Near the front of the convention, between the definitions and the articles on income, stands Article 6, Limitation of relief. For a family that uses the remittance basis in Ireland, it is the most important clause of the whole treaty.

It says, in substance: where the convention relieves income from tax in one country, and the other country taxes an individual on that income only to the extent it is remitted to or received there, then the relief applies only to the part remitted or received. What stays outside Ireland stays within the reach of the UK.

Its reach is narrow: it bites only where the UK gives relief under the convention. Read with Article 17, our reading is that a UK pension a non-dom leaves in the UK loses the convention’s exemption from UK tax for the part left there. Where the UK holds back under its own law, the clause has nothing to limit: a non-resident’s UK dividends and bank interest are charged, under HMRC’s helpsheet HS300, only to the tax deducted at source. The dividend case is on the page The UK compared with Ireland; what the clause means in practice is on the page The remittance clause.

The remittance rules of the convention

Subject	Where	Effect
Income	Article 6, Limitation of relief	convention relief only for the part remitted to or received in Ireland
Gains	Article 14(5), proviso	residence rule does not cover the part of a gain not received in Ireland

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What the convention does not settle

A convention creates no tax. It only divides rights that national law has already created. Three limits follow from this that you will not find on any advertising page.

First: it does not switch off the UK’s five-year rule. Whoever returns to the UK within five years can be taxed on gains made in between, and the statute says expressly that no double taxation arrangement prevents that.

Second: since the MLI, a benefit of the convention is refused where obtaining it was one of the principal purposes of an arrangement or transaction, unless granting it is in line with the object and purpose of the provision concerned. A structure built only to reach a treaty benefit does not reach it.

Third: it does not cover inheritance tax. That is the job of a second convention, on estates, inheritances and gifts, brought into UK law in 1978; Ireland has such a convention with only two countries, the UK and the United States. Under it, a long-term UK resident is treated as domiciled in the UK, each country keeps its own right to tax, and where both tax the same property, the rules on where assets are situated and on credit decide which country gives way.

Two conventions, two jobs

Convention	Taxes	In UK law
Income and capital gains, 1976	income tax, corporation tax, capital gains tax	Double Taxation Relief Orders of 1976, 1995 and 1998
Estates, inheritances and gifts	UK inheritance tax; Irish capital acquisitions tax	SI 1978/1107

Source: The Double Taxation Relief (Taxes on Estates of Deceased Persons and Inheritances and on Gifts) (Republic of Ireland) Order 1978, SI 1978/1107, legislation.gov.uk; HMRC Inheritance Tax Manual IHTM27161, IHTM47020 and IHTM47071. As of: read 6 November 2026.

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