Income tax declarations open online from today

This year – unless you do not have internet access – online declaration is a legal obligation if your revenu fiscal de référence net income as shown on your last tax statement was €28,000 or more.

Paper forms pre-filled with details known to the tax offices should also be arriving now for households who have declared before; this year’s blank ones are still not available for download from the tax website, but should be soon. Note that you now find them with a search in the general search box, not in a dedicated ‘forms’ section of the site.

Declaration deadlines are here and Connexion has published the latest version of our annual guide to the French tax forms, available to buy in our helpguides section here.

According to the OECD grouping of major world economies, which has released a new study on taxation of work income, France remains a high taxation country for the average worker, despite government measures such as tax reductions for lower income families and a slight reduction in employers’ social charges.

Using a figure called a ‘tax wedge’, France was placed top in the OECD for a one-earner family with two children at 40%, compared to an OECD average of 26.6%. ‘Tax wedge’ refers to total income tax and social charges paid by employee and employer as a percentage of the total labour cost to the employer for employing a worker at an average wage.

However, for childless single workers Belgium, Germany and Hungary were placed higher than France (Belgium was 54%, France 48.1%).

The OECD found that the part of overall taxation represented by ‘employer’s’ social charges was especially high in France.