Will I be taxed in both India and Ireland the year I move?

Both countries can call you resident in the same year

Nothing about leaving India makes you non-resident there, and nothing about arriving in Ireland makes you resident here. Each country applies its own day count, they run on different calendars, and in the year you move it is normal — not a mistake — for both to say yes.

The two calendars are the first thing to get straight. India’s tax year runs 1 April to 31 March. Ireland’s is the calendar year. So a move in, say, September lands in the middle of one and the middle of the other, and the same weeks get counted twice, once by each set of rules.

When Ireland says you are resident

Revenue’s test is days present, and a day counts if you are here for any part of it.

• 183 days or more in a tax year, or
• 280 days or more across the current tax year and the one before it, taken together.

There is a floor under the second one: you are not resident if you are here for 30 days or less in a tax year. That stops a long stay one year dragging a brief visit the next year over the line.

You can also choose to be resident in the year you arrive, if you arrive intending to be resident the following year. That sounds like a strange thing to volunteer for, and sometimes it is the right move — it is what opens the door to a full year’s tax credits against a part year’s pay. It is a written election to Revenue, not a box that ticks itself.

Ordinarily resident is a second, slower status

Three consecutive years resident, and you become ordinarily resident from the start of the fourth. It matters most on the way out: once you have it, leaving does not immediately shed it. You stay ordinarily resident for three consecutive tax years after you stop being resident.

While you are ordinarily resident but not resident, Irish tax still reaches your worldwide income, with exceptions — a trade or profession carried on wholly outside Ireland, an employment whose duties are all performed outside Ireland, and other foreign income up to €3,810. Above that figure the whole amount is taxable, not just the excess.

Domicile is a third thing again, and it is not day-counted: broadly, the country you treat as your permanent home. Someone Irish-resident but non-Irish-domiciled is taxed on foreign income differently from someone who is both. If your affairs are anywhere near that line, this page is not the thing to decide it on.

When India says you are still resident

India’s test sits in section 6 of the Income-tax Act, and for someone moving away the important part is the exception, not the rule.

The general tests are 182 days or more in the previous year, or 60 days or more in that year combined with 365 days or more across the four preceding years.

But for an Indian citizen who leaves India for the purposes of employment outside India, the second test does not apply in the usual way — the 60-day limb is read as 182 days. In practice that is the provision that decides most moves: leaving part-way through the Indian tax year for a job abroad, what matters is whether you were in India for 182 days or more of that year.

Two further provisions catch higher earners. For an Indian citizen or person of Indian origin with total income above ₹15 lakh other than from foreign sources, the 60-day limb is read as 120 days rather than 182 on a visit. And under section 6(1A), an Indian citizen with Indian-source income above ₹15 lakh who is not liable to tax in any other country is deemed resident in India regardless of days — a rule aimed at people who are tax-resident nowhere, which is precisely not the position of someone paying PAYE in Ireland.

Resident but Not Ordinarily Resident is India’s intermediate status, and it is mostly a returning-to-India question rather than a leaving-India one. It matters later, if you come back. It is fact-specific enough that it is worth paid advice rather than a web page.

What the treaty does about the overlap

Ireland and India have a double taxation convention, signed at New Delhi on 6 November 2000. Two of its articles do the work.

Article 4 breaks the tie when both countries call you resident. It is a sequence, not a balance of factors — you stop at the first one that answers:

1. where you have a permanent home available to you;
2. if both or neither, where your centre of vital interests is — your personal and economic relations;
3. if that cannot be determined, where you have an habitual abode;
4. if both or neither, the state you are a national of;
5. and if that still does not settle it, the two tax authorities agree it between them.

Article 15 covers employment income. The default is that your salary is taxable only where you are resident, unless the employment is exercised in the other country — in which case that other country may tax it too. The exception that sends it back to one country only requires all three of:

• you are present in the other state for no more than 183 days in aggregate in any 12-month period beginning or ending in the fiscal year concerned, and
• the pay comes from an employer who is not resident in that other state, and
• the pay is not borne by a permanent establishment there.

Someone who has moved to Ireland to work for an Irish employer fails the second condition immediately. That is the ordinary case, and the ordinary answer: Ireland taxes the work done in Ireland.

Article 23 says what happens to the tax you have already paid. Relief is by credit, both directions — not exemption. India allows Irish tax paid on Ireland-source income as a credit against Indian tax on the same income, capped at the Indian tax attributable to it; Ireland allows Indian tax on India-source income as a credit against Irish tax computed on the same income. You are not taxed twice on the same money, but you do effectively pay at the higher of the two rates on it, and you have to claim it — a credit is a thing you put on a return.

What this means in the year you actually move

Expect to file in both countries for that year. That is not a sign anything has gone wrong.

The practical shape of it: Ireland taxes what you earn here from the day you start, through PAYE, whether or not you have passed 183 days — PAYE does not wait for the day count. India assesses its own year separately, applies the 182-day employment test to decide whether you were resident there, and gives credit under Article 23 for Irish tax where the same income is caught twice.

Two things are worth doing before the year ends rather than after:

• Check the Irish election. If you arrived late in the year, electing to be resident can be worth real money in credits — or nothing at all. It is a calculation, and it has to be made in writing to Revenue.
• Count your Indian days properly, for the Indian tax year rather than the calendar year. The difference between 181 and 182 is the difference between two tax positions.

What is not here

This page does not cover: capital gains on assets you still hold in India, rental income from Indian property, PF and gratuity on exit, ESOPs that vest across the move, or the remittance basis for non-domiciled residents of Ireland. Each of those is genuinely individual, each can be expensive to get wrong, and none of them is improved by a general page. If any apply to you, the fee for an hour with someone who does this for a living is smaller than the mistake.