The Temporary Repatriation Facility, Explained Without the Jargon

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The Temporary Repatriation Facility, or TRF, is a two-year tax discount. If you used to claim the remittance basis as a non-dom, you can bring foreign income and gains that built up before 6 April 2025 into the UK and pay a flat 12% tax on them. The normal cost of doing this runs as high as 45%. The 12% rate runs until 5 April 2027, then climbs.

That is the whole idea in three sentences. The rest of this guide covers how you actually use it, why you do not need to move a single pound to lock in the rate, and how much a typical client saves.

For years, non-doms sat on a frustrating problem. You might have a seven-figure sum sitting in an account in Geneva or Dubai, fully yours, fully legitimate, and almost untouchable. The moment you wired it to a UK bank, HMRC treated it as a remittance and taxed it. So the money stayed offshore, earning a return but doing nothing for the life you actually live here.

The 2025 abolition of the non-dom regime created this window deliberately. The government wants that capital onshore, spent on UK property, UK businesses, UK life. The TRF is the carrot. If you are still getting to grips with the wider reform, our guide to the UK FIG Regime covers the system that replaced non-dom status.

How the TRF Works Designate First, Move the Money Whenever You Want

Here is the part most people miss, and it changes everything about your cash flow.

You do not have to move the money to claim the rate. The TRF runs on a mechanism HMRC calls designation, set out in their internal manual at RDRM73000. It works in three steps:

  • Designate. On your Self Assessment return, you nominate a set amount of your offshore funds for the TRF. Say £1,000,000.
  • Pay. You pay 12% tax on that £1,000,000 now.
  • Remit on your own schedule. That money is now clean. You can leave it offshore for a decade and bring it into the UK whenever suits you, with nothing further to pay.

You buy the cheap rate today and decide later what to do with the cash. No need to liquidate a portfolio, break a fixed-term deposit, or interrupt an investment that is performing well. You only need the right amount of foreign income and gains under the FIG regime on the books to designate against.

TRF Tax Rates: 12% Now, 15% Later, Then the Cliff

The rate is not fixed. The government built in a rising price to push people to act early. Wait too long and the discount shrinks, then vanishes.

Phase Tax Year Window TRF Rate What It Means
Phase 1 6 Apr 2025 to 5 Apr 2027 12% The cheapest the rate will ever be.
Phase 2 6 Apr 2027 to 5 Apr 2028 15% Still a strong discount, but a third more expensive than Phase 1.
Phase 3 From 6 Apr 2028 Standard UK rates, up to 45% The facility closes. Historic offshore funds revert to full remittance tax.

The jump from 12% to 15% is not the part that should worry you. The part that should worry you is Phase 3. Once the facility closes, a £500,000 remittance that would have cost £60,000 under the TRF can cost £225,000 instead. There is no reopening, no extension built into the legislation. When it closes, it closes.

If you know you will eventually want offshore money in the UK, the maths almost always favours designating during Phase 1.

What You Actually Save Two Worked Examples

The case for paying tax voluntarily sounds odd until you see the alternative. Here are two clients, two different sums.

Example 1

£2,000,000 property purchase. You want to buy a UK home with money held offshore.

Method Amount Remitted Tax Rate Tax Payable You Save
Standard remittance £2,000,000 45% £900,000 Nothing
TRF designation, Phase 1 £2,000,000 12% £240,000 £660,000

The TRF turns a £900,000 tax bill into £240,000. That £660,000 is a discount on your house, in effect.

Example 2

The £250,000 top-up. Not everyone is moving millions. Say you want to bring £250,000 across to clear a mortgage or fund a child’s education.

Method Amount Remitted Tax Rate Tax Payable You Save
Standard remittance £250,000 45% £112,500 Nothing
TRF designation, Phase 1 £250,000 12% £30,000 £82,500

Even at this level, the TRF saves £82,500. The facility is not only for the ultra-wealthy. If you have meaningful offshore funds you expect to use here within the next several years, the numbers reward you for acting now.

The Mixed Fund Solution

This is the most powerful technical advantage of the TRF. Many of our clients hold mixed funds: offshore accounts where clean capital, income, and capital gains are all jumbled together. Under the old rules, remitting from these accounts was toxic, because HMRC assumed you were bringing out the highly taxed income first.

The TRF Fix

The new rules let you designate a specific amount from a mixed fund. Designated amounts are treated as remitted in priority to other funds. So you can use the TRF to drain the taxable income out of a polluted account at 12%, which cleans the account and leaves the remaining balance as pure capital you can bring across tax-free.

How to Designate Funds for the TRF A Step by Step Walkthrough

Designation is not a separate form or a special HMRC account. It happens inside your normal Self Assessment return. The process looks like this.

  1. Confirm you are eligible. You must have used the remittance basis in at least one tax year before 2025/26. If you always paid UK tax on worldwide income, the TRF does not apply to you.
  2. Identify what you can designate. This means foreign income and gains that arose before 6 April 2025. Pull together your offshore account statements and work out how much qualifying FIG you actually hold.
  3. Decide the amount. You do not have to designate everything at once. You can designate a slice this year and more next year, as long as you act before the window closes.
  4. Make the designation on your tax return. For the 2025/26 tax year, you record the designated amount on your Self Assessment tax return and pay 12% on it.
  5. Pay the tax by the deadline. The payment follows the normal Self Assessment timetable. For 2025/26, that means 31 January 2027.
  6. Keep your records. Once an amount is designated and taxed, it is clean capital. Keep clear evidence of which funds were designated so that a future remittance is not questioned.

One practical warning. If you pay the 12% charge using offshore money, that payment is itself a remittance. The fix is simple but easy to forget: make a second TRF designation to cover the tax payment, so it too is taxed at only 12%. Get the order of operations wrong here and you create an accidental tax charge. This is the single most common mistake we correct on TRF cases.

3 Ways to Use the TRF

The TRF is not only for people buying a house next month. It rewards forward planning. If your wider position involves offshore structures or estate questions, it is worth reading this alongside our advice on non-dom and non-resident tax.

The War Chest

Even if you do not need the money in the UK today, you might need it in five years for university fees, a house deposit, or retirement. Designating a lump sum now creates a tax-paid war chest you can draw on freely later. Because long-term wealth planning also runs into estate questions, weigh this against the new residence-based Inheritance Tax rules.

Structure Winding Up

If you hold old offshore trusts or companies that no longer work under the new FIG regime, the TRF gives you a cheap exit. You can liquidate the structure, pay 12% on the extracted cash, and close the costly offshore entities for good.

The Illiquid Asset Cleanse

You are not limited to cash. You can designate foreign assets such as artwork or private equity shares. You pay 12% on the foreign income used to buy them, and when you eventually sell the asset, the proceeds can come into the UK tax-free. If you also hold foreign assets you plan to sell directly, read our guide to CGT rebasing under the new rules, which can reset the cost base on those disposals.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does TRF stand for?

TRF stands for Temporary Repatriation Facility. It is a time-limited UK tax measure that lets former remittance-basis users bring pre-2025 offshore income and gains into the UK at a reduced flat rate.

You can use the TRF if you claimed the remittance basis in at least one UK tax year before 2025/26 and you hold foreign income or gains that arose before 6 April 2025. It is aimed at former non-doms and long-term UK residents who lost remittance-basis access when the rules changed. Our expatriate tax planning service covers eligibility checks in detail.

For the 2025/26 tax year, you make the designation on your Self Assessment return and must file and pay by 31 January 2027. The 12% rate itself runs until 5 April 2027, after which it rises to 15%.

Yes, but with care. Using offshore foreign income to pay the UK tax counts as a remittance in its own right. To stay at 12%, make a separate TRF designation that covers the tax payment.

Yes. The TRF covers foreign income and gains arising in any tax year before 6 April 2025, as long as you were a remittance-basis user in those years.

Once Phase 3 begins on 6 April 2028, the facility ends. Bringing historic offshore income into the UK then reverts to standard remittance tax, which can reach 45%. There is no extension written into the legislation. You can review the official position in HMRC’s Residence and FIG Regime Manual.

The Window Is Real and It Is Short

The Temporary Repatriation Facility is a one-off. It exists because the government wants offshore capital onshore, and it priced the offer to make you move quickly. For Phase 1, that price is 12%. After April 2028, the same money can cost you up to 45%, permanently.

The decision is rarely as simple as “designate everything.” You need to model how much to designate, in which tax year, and against which funds, balanced against your wider plans for CGT rebasing and your exposure to the new residence-based Inheritance Tax rules. Designate too little and you leave savings on the table. Designate clumsily and you trigger charges you did not need to.

Book a TRF Readiness Review with IBISS & CO and we will model the exact figure for your situation before the rate moves.