How to get a UK certificate of residence

Certificate of residence or letter of confirmation?

HMRC issues a certificate of residence when there is a double taxation agreement in play and you are claiming relief under it. If there is no agreement with the country concerned, or you need proof of UK tax residence for some other reason entirely, you get a letter of confirmation of residence instead. Both come from the same application, so you do not choose between them on the form: you describe the country and the income, and HMRC issues whichever is appropriate. Foreign tax offices sometimes ask for a “certificate” by name and then accept the letter, so it is worth asking the requester what they actually need before disputing what arrives.

Who can apply

An individual or sole trader, a company, a partnership, a trust, a charity, a public body, a pension scheme, and a collective investment scheme or unit trust. An authorised agent can apply on a client's behalf. Pension scheme applications that need a third party's authority use the APSS146 forms, and are the fiddliest route in the set.

What HMRC asks you for

• The country you need it for. One certificate names one country, because it exists to satisfy that country's tax authority under that country's treaty with the UK.
• The type of income. Treaty rates differ by income type, so dividends, interest, royalties and pensions are not interchangeable on the form.
• The period it should cover. You cannot request a future date. HMRC certifies residence for a period that has already begun, which is the single most common reason an application comes back unusable.

You may be asked for more if your returns are not up to date, if the company is newly incorporated, or if the foreign authority has its own form it wants HMRC to sign. gov.uk publishes no service standard for how long any of this takes, so treat the timing as unknown and apply well before any foreign deadline rather than to one.

How to apply

Online is the main route, through HMRC's certificate of residence service, using either your existing sign-in details or just an email address. Agents sign in with their agent services account. If you cannot apply online, HMRC takes postal applications at different addresses depending on what you are: individuals, sole traders and partnerships write to Pay As You Earn and Self Assessment, BX9 1AS, and companies and public bodies to Corporation Tax Services, BX9 1AX. Trusts, charities, pension schemes and collective investment schemes each have their own address, listed on the gov.uk page in the sources below. Post an application to the wrong one and it will not be redirected quickly.

Why Revolut, Monzo and your bank ask about tax residency

This is a different thing from a certificate of residence, and confusing the two sends people looking for a document nobody asked them for. Banks and other financial institutions ask because of automatic exchange of information: they have to record where each account holder is tax resident and report it. What they want is a self-certification, a short declaration you make yourself, not anything issued by HMRC. Along with it they need your tax identification number, which for a UK resident is your National Insurance number.

What gets reported each year is your name, address and date of birth, your tax identification number, the account number and provider, and the year-end balance with interest and dividends. Your UK provider sends that to HMRC, which passes it to the tax authority of any country you have said you are resident in; the same happens in reverse for a UK resident with an account abroad, which is how HMRC learns about foreign accounts. Interest reported this way is also how a savings allowance quietly gets used up.

Ignoring the request is the expensive option. Your provider may report incorrect information to a foreign tax authority on your behalf, may refuse to open new accounts for you, and HMRC can charge a penalty of up to £300 for failing to give correct information about your place of residence or your tax identification number. Answering the question honestly costs nothing: it is a statement of where you are resident, not a new tax.

Relief before you pay, or a credit after

There are two ways round being taxed twice on the same income, and the certificate belongs to only one of them. If you want the foreign country not to tax the income in the first place, you claim in advance and you have to prove UK residence to do it, which is where a certificate of residence is needed. If the foreign tax has already been taken, you do not need a certificate at all: you claim Foreign Tax Credit Relief when you report the overseas income on your Self Assessment return. That credit is capped, so you will not always recover the whole of the foreign tax, either because the UK tax on the same income was lower or because the treaty sets a smaller figure.

This page describes the process, not your position. Whether you are UK resident in a given tax year is decided by the statutory residence test, and cases involving arrival or departure part-way through a year, domicile, or the remittance basis are genuinely complicated and worth taking to an accountant rather than settling from a web page.

Related guides

All 12 guides are listed on the guides index, and every calculator on the home page.