Taxes in France
In addition to payroll taxes that are deducted every month from your salary, you will also need to pay income taxes on your combined yearly salary. In general, this corresponds to about 1 month's pay. For your first year in France, it is likely that you will not have to pay income taxes, or that the amount will be very low, since you will have only worked for a portion of the fiscal year.
You will need to declare your income every year, sometime in April. The first time that you declare your income, you will need to fill out manually a 4 page form and send it to the government through the mail. This form (2042) can be found online here. For the following years, you will be able to declare your income online, and the government will pre-fill out most of the information for you. At the time of declaration online, they will give you an estimate of how much you owe, and you should receive the official amount in the mail later in the year (around september). During the year, you will be sent one or two mails asking you to pay about 1/3 of your estimated taxes. The final mail in september will deduct these payments from the total that is due.
In addition to paying income taxes, you should expect to also pay a "tax habitation" which will vary depending upon where you live.
Important information
- If you are a CNRS employee, after 1 year of work, you should receive a "restitution de carrière". In addition to having your seniority increased to account for previous jobs, you will receive a retroactive pay raise. This will be a lot of money paid in one lump sum. This will cause two problems: First, you will need to pay income taxes on this money the following year, so don't spend it all! Second, the following year when you declare your income, the government will assume that your salary was the same as the previous year. When asking you to pay your estimated taxes, they might overestimate the amount by a large factor. You should instead estimate how much money you owe, and pay this instead. If at the end of the year you overpaid your taxes, you will receive a reimbursement.
