The 2023 tax return is in full swing. For retirees, questions may arise about how to carry it out successfully. Here are the mistakes to avoid.
A retirement pension constitutes taxable income. The nearly 17 million withdrawals who receive an average pension of 1,420 euros net per month are therefore required to declare it before the deadline for the income declaration which runs until June 6 this year at the latest.
| Departments | Deadline for online declaration |
|---|---|
1 19 and non-resident households | THURSDAY May 2311:59 p.m. |
20 54 (including Corsica) | THURSDAY May 3011:59 p.m. |
55 and beyond (including the French Overseas Territories) | THURSDAY June 611:59 p.m. |
| For the declaration on paper (if it is impossible to declare on impots.gouv.fr) | |
| All departments | Tuesday May 21st11:59 p.m., |
Source: DGFiP
Concretely, the pension is taxed in the category of salaries and wages. Income in this category is identified by the number 1, with which the number of each box in this category begins. In this case, retirement pensions are declared in box 1AS for declarant 1, 1BS for declarant 2, 1CS for the first dependent and so on.
But what amount should be entered in these boxes? As for other categories of income, the principle is to declare the amount net taxable of income. This is what the administration needs to calculate the tax. It is different from net pay actually perceived by the withdrawal. This is the net amount of contributions, before deduction at source. A priori simple, there are nevertheless subtleties which complicate its determination, in particular the part of CSG called non-deductible. In fact, it is therefore very difficult for a withdrawer to determine the net taxable amount of his pension himself.
Taxes and life insurance: should the deductible CSG be corrected on your declaration?
How to do?
We must trust the pension fund calculations. Are they responsible for paying pensions? The difficulty is then to access their calculations. Nowadays, few funds send pension slips by post. Most often, you have to use their website to retrieve them. You still need to have access codes. If you do not have them, the only solution is to contact your fund to obtain them.
As a reminder, pensions are part of the income that can be pre-filled on your declaration. If this is the case, you can in principle rely on it, the errors both quite rare. Still, many withdrawals would like to be able to check the pre-filled amounts before signing. To do this, you must obtain pension slips from the funds.
People furthest from the Internet often have their bank account statement as their only source of information. In this case, it is not uncommon for them to modify the pre-filled amount on their declaration, to replace it by the addition of the payments made by the funds into their bank account. This approach is not recommended. It necessarily results in an error. The amount indicated on the bank account is the net payment and not the taxable net.
Taxes: 10 classic mistakes to avoid for your income tax return