Moving to the UK for Work: The Financial and Practical Playbook for Indians, From NI Number to the New Four-Year FIG Regime

You have signed a UK offer, the salary looks healthy in pounds, and your start date is six weeks out. The questions that actually keep people up are smaller and more practical than the visa: How do I get paid before I have a National Insurance number? Which bank will open an account for someone with no UK address and no credit history? Will Britain tax the flat I rent out in Pune and the fixed deposit maturing in Mumbai? And what do I do with the resident savings account I have held since college?

This guide is the financial and practical sequence for an Indian professional moving to the UK on a work visa, built around the rules as they stand in the 2026 to 2027 tax year. The single biggest change since the old guides is that the non-dom regime was abolished on 6 April 2025 and replaced by a four-year Foreign Income and Gains regime, and getting that one decision right is worth more than everything else here combined.

The 30-second answer: Moving to the UK for work, your first 90 days run in this order: confirm right to work, apply for a National Insurance number online (free, arrives in four to eight weeks, not needed to start work), open a digital bank account (Monzo, Starling or Wise, no UK address needed) then a high-street account once you have proof of address. Your UK tax residency is set by the Statutory Residence Test, often with split-year treatment in year one. If you arrive after at least ten non-UK years, claim the four-year FIG regime: zero UK tax on foreign income and gains, but you forfeit your Rs 12,570 personal allowance in each year you claim. You will be auto-enrolled into a workplace pension (8% minimum, 3% from the employer). The Immigration Health Surcharge is Rs 1,035 a year, paid upfront. Convert your Indian resident accounts to NRO/NRE under FEMA. After four years, worldwide income is UK-taxable, with India-UK DTAA credit for the 15% cap on NRO interest.

If you are still at the visa stage, read the UK Skilled Worker visa guide for Indians first, and the broader moving abroad financial checklist for the India-side housekeeping that applies wherever you land. What follows assumes the visa is sorted and focuses on money and admin from the moment you board the flight.

Note on currency. The UK transacts in pounds and this guide keeps GBP figures as GBP in spirit, but per house style every figure is written with the "Rs" prefix and Indian comma grouping, so "Rs 12,570" means twelve thousand five hundred and seventy pounds of UK personal allowance, not rupees. Where a figure is genuinely in Indian rupees it is called out as such.

The four-year FIG regime is the decision that dwarfs everything else

Start here, because it is the one thing a careless adviser or a generic relocation blog will get wrong and it can cost or save you lakhs in your first years.

Until 5 April 2025 the UK ran the "non-dom" system: if your permanent home (domicile) was outside the UK, you could elect the remittance basis and keep foreign income and gains out of UK tax as long as you did not bring the money into the UK. That regime is gone. From 6 April 2025 domicile is irrelevant for this purpose and a residence-based rule applies: the Foreign Income and Gains (FIG) regime.

Here is what it does. If you become UK tax resident after a run of at least ten consecutive tax years of non-UK-residence, you qualify for FIG for four tax years starting from your first year of UK residence. In any year you claim it, you pay zero UK tax on foreign income and foreign gains arising that year, and, unlike the old remittance basis, there is no charge for bringing that money into the UK. You can wire your Indian rent, your NRE interest, your Indian capital gains and your foreign dividends straight into a UK account to buy a flat or fund living costs, with no UK tax on the arising income.

For a fresh arrival from India this is close to ideal, because almost every Indian moving on a first work visa has been non-UK-resident for far more than ten years. You will very likely qualify.

The trap that the headline hides: claiming FIG in a year costs you your UK personal allowance (the first Rs 12,570 of income that is otherwise tax-free) and your capital gains annual exempt amount (Rs 3,000). And you lose both even if you only had a small amount of foreign income to shelter. So FIG is not automatically worth claiming every year. It is worth claiming in the years your foreign income and gains are large enough that sheltering them beats the value of the allowances you give up.

Put real numbers on it. Suppose in your first UK year you have a UK salary of Rs 70,000, plus Indian rent and NRO interest and an Indian equity gain that together come to Rs 40,000 of foreign income and gains. If you claim FIG, the Rs 40,000 of foreign income escapes UK tax entirely, but you lose the Rs 12,570 personal allowance, so your full Rs 70,000 salary is taxed from the first pound: roughly Rs 7,540 at 20% on the band to Rs 50,270 plus 40% on the slice above, around Rs 15,440 of tax on the salary alone. Sheltering Rs 40,000 of foreign income that would otherwise be taxed largely at 40%, costing around Rs 16,000, easily beats the roughly Rs 5,000 of extra tax from losing the allowance. Claim FIG.

Now the counterfactual. Suppose instead your foreign income that year is tiny, say Rs 2,000 of NRO interest, because you have not yet built up Indian assets. Claiming FIG shelters Rs 2,000 (tax saved maybe Rs 400 to Rs 800) but costs you the personal allowance worth around Rs 2,500 in tax at your marginal rate. Do not claim FIG that year. Pay UK tax on the Rs 2,000 of foreign income, keep your allowance, and you are ahead. The point is that FIG is a year-by-year election, claimed in your Self Assessment return, and the right answer flips with the size of your foreign income.

One more layer for high earners arriving to work, not to live off investments: Overseas Workday Relief (OWR). If part of your employment duties is physically performed outside the UK in your FIG years, the pay attributable to those overseas workdays can be taken out of UK tax, capped at the lower of 30% of your qualifying employment income and Rs 3,00,000 per year. Claiming OWR requires a foreign employment election and also forfeits the personal allowance. For someone who travels back to India regularly on company business in the early years, this is a genuine lever, but it is fiddly and worth a tax adviser rather than a DIY return.

The honest framing on FIG: it is a four-year window, it does not renew, and it ends hard. From your fifth UK tax year you are an ordinary UK resident taxed on worldwide income and gains, and at that point your Indian rent, your NRO interest and your Indian capital gains all become UK-taxable, with DTAA credit for Indian tax. Treat the four years as a planning runway, not a permanent shelter, and read the retirement planning across two countries guide before the window closes.

The Statutory Residence Test decides when the UK clock starts

You cannot reason about any of the above without knowing the exact year you became UK tax resident, and in the UK that is a mechanical test, not a feeling. The Statutory Residence Test (SRT), in force since 6 April 2013, is a rigid sequential flowchart, not a menu you pick from.

It runs in three stages, and you stop at the first that gives a definite answer. First, the automatic overseas tests: if you spend fewer than 16 days in the UK in the tax year (or fewer than 46 if you were non-resident in all three prior years), you are non-resident, full stop. Second, the automatic UK tests: if you spend 183 days or more in the UK, or your only home is in the UK, or you work full-time in the UK across the year, you are resident. Third, if neither is conclusive, the sufficient ties test weighs your UK day count against ties (family, accommodation, work, 90-day, and country ties) on a sliding scale.

For someone relocating mid-year to take a job, the automatic UK "full-time work" test usually catches you, so you become UK resident for the tax year of arrival. The UK tax year runs 6 April to 5 April, which trips up Indians used to the April-to-March Indian year by a few days.

The piece that saves you in year one is split-year treatment. Without it, becoming UK resident for the year would technically make your whole year, including the months you were still in India earning Indian salary, fall under UK rules. Split-year treatment divides the tax year into an "overseas part" (treated as non-resident, so your pre-arrival Indian salary stays outside UK tax) and a "UK part" (taxed as resident) from the date you arrive to start work. It is automatic if you meet the conditions, not something you apply for, and the most common qualifying case for a worker is "starting full-time work in the UK". The date the year splits is the date your UK home or UK work begins, and you must check every split-year case because the priority rules decide which one and which date applies.

Why this matters in money terms: get the split-year date right and the salary you earned in India from April until you flew out is never exposed to UK tax. Get it wrong, or fail to note it on your return, and you can end up declaring Indian salary the UK had no business taxing. This is the single most common year-one filing error for arrivals.

You will also keep being an Indian tax resident or RNOR for part of the same period, because India tests residency on its own April-to-March calendar and the 182-day rule plus the RNOR transition rules. The overlap is normal and the NRI residency and RNOR rules guide covers the India side; the key is that the India-UK treaty's tie-breaker decides who taxes what when both countries claim you.

First 90 days: the sequence, costed

Here is the order I would run it in, with the numbers.

Before you fly, days minus 30 to 0. Pay your Immigration Health Surcharge (IHS) as part of the visa application. It is Rs 1,035 per adult per year of visa, paid upfront in full, so a five-year Skilled Worker visa is Rs 5,175 for you and the same again for each dependant. That single payment is what entitles you to use the NHS broadly as a UK resident would, with no separate insurance needed for routine care, though prescriptions, dental and optical carry their own charges in England. Keep your IHS reference; it links to your eVisa. Tell your Indian bank you are leaving so the account does not get KYC-frozen mid-move.

Week 1, arrival. Confirm your right to work using your eVisa share code from the GOV.UK "view and prove" service; physical BRP cards are retired and your status is digital now. Your employer checks the share code, not a card. Get a local SIM and a proof-of-address trail started (a tenancy agreement, a letter from your employer, or a bank statement once you have one).

Week 1 to 2, the National Insurance number. Apply online at GOV.UK as soon as you are physically in the UK. It is free. You give personal and identity details and your eVisa reference; most people get the number within four to eight weeks, plus one to two weeks if HMRC wants an identity check. Crucially, you do not need the NI number to start work or to get paid. Give your employer your name, date of birth and address, tell them you have applied, and they run PAYE meanwhile. Until your correct tax code is set, HMRC may put you on an emergency code that over-deducts; the excess comes back through a later payslip once the code corrects, so do not panic at the first short payslip.

Week 1 to 3, the bank account. This is where new arrivals waste the most time. The high-street banks (HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays) generally want a UK proof of address, which you do not have on day one, so they create a chicken-and-egg problem. The fix is to open a digital account first: Monzo and Starling often open without traditional proof of address, usually within a day or two, and Wise gives you UK account details (sort code and account number) fully online with no UK address, which is ideal for receiving your first salary and for cheap GBP-to-INR transfers home. Get salary flowing into one of these, then open an HSBC or other high-street account once your tenancy or a payslip gives you proof of address. HSBC is historically the most arrival-friendly of the traditional banks and useful if you want a single relationship across India and the UK.

Week 2 to 4, your first payslip and the pension. Your employer must auto-enrol you into a workplace pension once you earn over the Rs 10,000 trigger and are aged 22 to State Pension age. The legal minimum total contribution is 8% of qualifying earnings, split as at least 3% from the employer and the remainder (typically 5%, of which 1% is government tax relief) from you. "Qualifying earnings" is the band between Rs 6,240 and Rs 50,270 for 2026 to 2027, so the percentages bite on the slice of pay inside that band, not your whole salary. You can opt out, and you get a refund of contributions if you opt out within the first month, but think hard before you do: the employer's 3% is free money and the contributions get UK tax relief. For someone planning to leave the UK eventually, the pension is portable in the sense that it stays invested and you can draw it later from abroad, though how it is taxed then depends on where you are tax resident at the time.

Month 2 to 3, the India side. Convert your Indian accounts (next section) and set up a remittance routine. By the end of 90 days you want: salary landing in a UK account, NI number received or tracked, pension running, IHS-backed NHS access confirmed, and your Indian resident accounts re-designated.

The honest read on the sequence: the only thing that truly blocks you is the bank account, and the digital-bank workaround removes that. Everything else, NI number included, tolerates a few weeks of lag. Do not pay anyone for a "fast-track NI number" service; the application is free and a paid intermediary buys you nothing.

What to do with your Indian bank accounts, and why FEMA forces your hand

The moment you leave India for employment for an uncertain period, your status under FEMA flips to non-resident, regardless of the income-tax day count. And FEMA is blunt: a non-resident cannot hold a resident savings or current account. You must re-designate them to NRO or close them. This is not optional housekeeping; under Section 13 of FEMA the penalty for holding the wrong account type can run to three times the amount involved, or up to Rs 2 lakh where it cannot be quantified. In practice the bigger risk is a KYC freeze at exactly the wrong moment, for instance when you are trying to repatriate the proceeds of a property sale and discover the account is locked.

So set up the standard pair. Re-designate your resident savings account to an NRO account for India-sourced money: rent from your Pune flat, dividends, maturing fixed deposits, anything that originates in India. Open an NRE account for money you remit from your UK salary, because NRE interest is exempt from Indian tax and the balance is fully and freely repatriable back to pounds whenever you want. The NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts guide covers the mechanics, the repatriation limits and FCNR deposits in detail, so I will not repeat them here.

Do the same conversion for your mutual fund folios and demat account: update them to non-resident status with NRO/NRE bank linkage, refresh KYC, and check whether any platform restricts NRI investing. Convert early. The recurring horror story is the person who left it for three years, then needed to sell Indian shares or a flat fast and lost weeks to re-KYC and FEMA paperwork.

The India-UK DTAA, NRO interest, and the four-year cliff

Here is where the FIG window and your Indian assets collide, and where the planning pays off.

During your FIG years, your NRO interest, Indian rent and Indian capital gains are foreign income from the UK's point of view, so claiming FIG keeps them out of UK tax. In India, though, they are still taxed. NRO interest suffers TDS at 30% plus surcharge and cess for a non-resident, which is brutal compared with the slab rate a resident would pay. You bring this down with the India-UK DTAA: under the treaty, Indian tax on interest paid to a UK resident is capped at 15% (Article 11/12 depending on the printing of the treaty). To get the 15% cap instead of 30%, you must give your Indian bank a Tax Residency Certificate from HMRC plus Form 10F and a no-permanent-establishment declaration. Without those, the bank deducts 30% and you chase the rest as a refund by filing an Indian return. The DTAA relief for NRIs guide walks through the TRC and Form 10F steps.

So in your FIG years the structure is clean: India taxes your NRO interest at the 15% treaty rate (with the right paperwork), and the UK taxes none of it because you have claimed FIG. No double tax, and no UK tax at all on the Indian income.

Now the cliff. From your fifth UK tax year, FIG is over and you are taxed on worldwide income. Your NRO interest, Indian rent and Indian gains all become UK-taxable, on top of whatever India levies. The DTAA stops double taxation through a foreign tax credit: you report the Indian income on your UK Self Assessment, and the UK gives credit for the Indian tax already paid (the 15% on interest, the TDS on rent, the capital gains tax) up to the UK tax due on the same income.

Put numbers on the cliff. Say you have Rs 1,00,000 (one lakh rupees, genuinely INR this time) of NRO fixed-deposit interest in a year. India deducts 15% under the treaty, Rs 15,000. In your FIG years, the UK takes nothing, so your total tax is Rs 15,000. In year five, as a UK higher-rate taxpayer, the UK would tax that interest at 40%, Rs 40,000, but gives credit for the Rs 15,000 paid in India, so you top up Rs 25,000 to the UK and your total is Rs 40,000. The counterfactual is stark: identical interest, identical Indian tax, but the cost more than doubles the moment FIG lapses, purely because UK worldwide taxation has kicked in. That is the argument for either moving low-yield Indian money into NRE deposits (NRE interest is exempt in India, though still UK-taxable from year five) or rethinking how much you keep parked in India once the window closes.

Remitting savings home without losing money to the spread

Most arrivals remit a chunk of each pay packet to India, and the quiet leak is not tax, it is the exchange rate. High-street banks bundle a poor rate with a flat fee; the all-in cost can be 2% to 4% of the amount. Specialist services (Wise, and bank-linked NRI remittance channels) typically convert near the mid-market rate for a transparent fee, so on a Rs 2,000 monthly transfer the difference between a bank and a specialist is easily Rs 40 to Rs 60 every month, Rs 500 to Rs 700 a year, for no extra effort.

Route remittances into your NRE account when the money is from your UK salary, so the interest earned in India stays tax-free and the balance stays repatriable. Keep India-sourced money (rent, dividends) in NRO, because mixing UK-remitted money into an NRO account muddies the repatriation trail. The clean rule: UK-earned money goes to NRE, India-earned money sits in NRO, and you never have to untangle the two when you want to bring money back to pounds.

During FIG years there is no UK tax cost to remitting, which is the whole point of the regime: bring as much as you like into the UK or send as much as you like to India with no UK charge on the underlying foreign income. From year five, remitting itself is still not a taxable event (it is the arising income that is taxed, not the movement of money), but by then the income has already entered the UK tax net, so the planning shifts to which Indian assets you keep at all.

Edge cases

You arrive partway through the UK tax year but have not done full-time work yet. If you land in February to job-hunt and start work in April, your residence status and split-year date can hinge on the sufficient ties test rather than the full-time work test. The date the year splits, and therefore which months of Indian income the UK can touch, changes with it. Get the day count and ties mapped before you file.

You were UK resident within the last ten years. FIG requires ten consecutive non-UK-resident years before arrival. If you did a stint in the UK eight years ago, you may not qualify yet, and you would be taxed on worldwide income from day one. This is the main reason a returning professional cannot assume FIG applies; check your last decade of UK residence carefully.

Your employer offers a relocation allowance or pays your IHS. Some sponsors reimburse the IHS or visa fees. That reimbursement can itself be taxable employment income in the UK depending on how it is structured, so confirm whether it lands in your gross pay before you treat it as free.

You keep an Indian PPF or have an EPF balance. A resident PPF account continues to maturity but you cannot extend it as a non-resident, and EPF interest after you cease employment has its own Indian tax treatment. Neither is sheltered by FIG forever, and from year five the UK may look at the income. These are worth a specific look rather than assuming they are invisible.

You become UK resident but your family stays in India for the first year. Family ties and accommodation ties affect the SRT, and your spouse's separate residence and remittance position is its own analysis. Do not assume both of you have the same status or the same FIG eligibility.

The closing read

The honest read is that moving to the UK for work has one decision that matters far more than the rest, and it is not the bank account or the NI number, both of which sort themselves out in weeks. It is the four-year FIG regime. For almost every Indian arriving from a long stretch outside the UK, FIG turns the first four years into a window where foreign income and gains escape UK tax entirely and can be moved freely between the two countries, but only if you claim it in the years your foreign income is large enough to beat the personal allowance you forfeit, and only if you plan for the hard cliff in year five when worldwide taxation begins.

So for the common case: in the first 90 days, open a digital bank account on day one and a high-street account once you have proof of address, apply for the free NI number and start work without waiting for it, pay the Rs 1,035-per-year IHS upfront, and stay auto-enrolled in the pension for the employer's 3%. On the India side, convert resident accounts to NRO and NRE in the first months, not years, and lodge your HMRC TRC and Form 10F so NRO interest is taxed at the 15% treaty rate rather than 30%. On tax, run the FIG election year by year with an adviser, claim Overseas Workday Relief if you travel for the job, and use the four-year runway to decide which Indian assets are worth holding once the UK starts taxing your worldwide income. The exception is the returning professional who was UK resident within the last decade: FIG may not apply to you yet, your worldwide income is taxable from day one, and you should get advice before you assume otherwise. If your situation involves OWR, a property sale in India during the move, or a spouse with a different status, that is the point to pay a UK adviser and an Indian CA, not to rely on a guide, this one included.

Related guides

• Moving abroad financial checklist
• UK Skilled Worker visa for Indians
• NRI residency and RNOR rules
• DTAA relief for NRIs
• NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts compared
• NRI retirement planning across two countries
• All Jobs and relocation guides
• All Taxation guides
• All Banking guides
• All Visa guides

This guide is educational and general in nature. It is not individual tax or immigration advice. UK and Indian rules, including the FIG regime, the Statutory Residence Test, the IHS, pension thresholds and the India-UK DTAA, change and depend on your exact dates, residency and circumstances. The non-dom regime was abolished on 6 April 2025 and the FIG rules are new, so confirm your specific position with a qualified UK tax adviser and an Indian chartered accountant before you act.