How to Find and Report Excess Reportable Income (ERI)

Hold an offshore ETF outside an ISA and you can owe tax on income that never reached you in cash and never showed up on a broker statement. It is called Excess Reportable Income, and most of the Irish-domiciled trackers UK platforms sell are subject to it. This guide covers how to find the figure for your own fund and report it properly.

What ERI actually is

A fund with UK reporting fund status has to declare the income it earned but did not pay out. That leftover amount is the ERI. HMRC taxes it as if you had received it, normally as a dividend, in the year it is deemed paid. Accumulating funds are the catch: they reinvest everything internally, so there is no cash and no obvious paper trail, but the tax is still due.

Step 1 — Confirm the fund has reporting status

ERI only applies to reporting funds, so start by confirming yours is one. The HMRC list of reporting funds is searchable by ISIN. A fund that is not on it falls under the offshore income gains regime instead, which is harsher and works differently. That is a separate article.

Step 2 — Find the ERI per unit

Every manager publishes an ERI figure once a year, per unit, listed by ISIN and reporting-period-end date. The number you want sits in the column headed something like "excess of reportable income over distributions", quoted per unit in the share class currency.

Three things have to line up: the ISIN, the period-end date, and the currency. Share classes matter more than people expect. The accumulating and distributing versions of the same fund have different ISINs and different ERI, so make sure you are reading the row for the class you actually hold.

Step 3 — Multiply by the units you held

ERI belongs to whoever held the units on the reporting-period-end date. Multiply the units you held that day by the per-unit figure, then convert to sterling using the HMRC rate for that date.

Step 4 — Mind the six-month timing

There is a timing twist. ERI counts as received six months after the reporting period closes, and that later date is what fixes the tax year. A fund with a 31 July 2024 period-end is deemed to pay on 31 January 2025, so it lands in 2024/25.

Step 5 — Report it, and adjust your cost basis

Put the sterling figure on your Self Assessment as foreign dividend income (the foreign pages, SA106, for non-UK funds). Then add the same amount to your Section 104 pool cost. Skip that second step and you will be taxed on the income twice: once now, and again as a bigger gain when you eventually sell.

Worked example

You hold 50 units of the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (CSPX) on its 31 July 2024 reporting date. iShares publishes ERI of $6.1919 per unit. Assume an HMRC USD/GBP rate of 0.78 for that date.

So you declare £241.48 of dividend income for 2024/25, and the pool cost goes up by £241.48. Miss the uplift and HMRC effectively charges you capital gains tax on that £241.48 all over again when you sell.

Funds we handle automatically

Doing this by hand, fund by fund and year by year, gets old fast. Our CGT Calculator ships with 7,900+ ERI entries for iShares, Vanguard, BlackRock and Invesco funds, including the ones people actually tend to hold: CSPX, SWDA/IWDA, EMIM, VWRP, VWRL and VUSA. Upload your transactions and it matches each holding to the published ERI, works out the deemed income, and applies the Section 104 uplift.

See a worked offshore-funds (ERI) example report, browse the bundled ERI data, or read the ERI documentation.

Sources

• HS265 Offshore funds — HMRC
• List of reporting funds — HMRC
• Offshore Funds Manual — HMRC
• Excess Reportable Income — CGT Calculator documentation