Statutory Residence Test - HM Revenue & Customs

Days spent in the UK
Example 26
Angela is a self-employed consultant whose job is to carry out safety
assessments on international aircraft at Heathrow airport. She does not travel
with the aircraft in order to do her work. As the services which Angela
provides are not provided while the aircraft is making cross border trips, she
does not have a relevant job.
3.26 Examples of relevant jobs may include pilots, airline cabin crew, crosschannel
ferry staff, mariners, fishermen and lorry drivers where substantially
all of the trips are cross-border trips. Although each case will turn on its own
facts, you are likely to be considered to have a relevant job if 80% or more of
your trips involve cross-border trips.
3.27 In deciding whether or not you fall within one of the categories of relevant
job you should ignore duties or activities of a purely incidental nature. For
instance, where a pilot whose job consists of making long haul international
flights also attends a training course, the duties spent undertaking training are
incidental to the duties of flying the plane and so can be ignored.
Example 27
Preeya is a member of a cabin crew on board flights between London and
Switzerland for a short haul airline. For one month during the year, she
changes her shifts and works on UK domestic flights. However, substantially
all of the trips she makes in performing her duties are cross border ones;
Preeya does have a relevant job.
3.28 You will not have a relevant job simply because you occasionally work
during a journey from one country to another, for example, if you catch up on
business emails during a flight from your base in one country to visit a client in
another country.
Workers with relevant jobs and the third automatic UK and
overseas tests
3.29 If you have a relevant job at any time during the year, neither the third
automatic UK test nor the third automatic overseas test will apply to you if you
make at least six cross-border trips in the year that either begin or end in the
UK. This means that you cannot be UK resident on the grounds that you work
full-time in the UK and that you cannot be non-UK resident on the grounds
that you work full-time overseas. However, you can still determine your
residence status by reference to the other automatic tests where they apply to
you. If you do not meet any of the other automatic tests, you will need to
consider the sufficient ties test to determine your residence status.
RDR3 42