Creative industries are built on movement and fluidity that’s often borderless. A shoot may shift location at short notice. A tour schedule might add additional stops and air miles to the calendar. A festival run often follows a press circuit. For many creative professionals and everyone working within the industry, international travel isn’t the exception but the operating model.
Tax residency, however, doesn’t move with the same fluidity.Tax residency rules still recognise borders and take seriously whether visits are for work or leisure. And layered on top of this: increasingly data-driven tax systems, automatic exchange of financial information between jurisdictions, and tax residency rules that rely on detailed factual patterns.
So we sat down with Richard Paul, Partner at Nyman Libson Paul, to understand how globally mobile creatives can navigate these two worlds and stay compliant. His firm has spent decades advising clients across film, television, theatre and music. And his central observation is simple:
Creatives are uniquely exposed to the risks of getting travel records wrong because their lives are both global and fast-moving. But the solutions are there, and they can be simple.
The pandemic didn’t reduce mobility long term but it did reshape how many of us go about our lives. For some creative professionals, it triggered relocation. For others, it accelerated long-standing plans to split time between jurisdictions. And for many, the years after have made global mobility and work projects a lot more intentional.
As Richard explained, clients are increasingly reassessing where they live, spend time with, and even where they want to – or don’t want to – retire.
“Nearly all of our clients trade internationally,” he says. Many are “so accustomed to having homes abroad… or living or working in different jurisdictions” that significant time away from the UK feels entirely natural.
The challenge is that tax systems don’t measure intention. They measure presence. And presence is counted in days. And the cost of getting your day counts wrong is rarely just financial. It can become a time sink, a stress multiplier, and, in the worst cases, a prolonged, draining dispute. Because the hardest part isn’t always understanding the rule. It’s proving what happened.
One of the most revealing moments in the interview came when Richard described the difficulty of giving clients a definitive answer on tax residency.
“Sometimes you can’t give them one answer,” he says. “It might be three answers… depending on what they’ve done in a prior year and depending on what they’re doing in a current year.”
For creatives, this becomes especially thorny because irregularities are baked into their schedules. Workdays don’t always look like conventional employment. A short trip becomes longer. A rehearsal day turns into two.
UK tax residency rules can behave like a moving target because they depend not only on this year, but on the pattern of prior years. That’s why Richard’s practical advice is strikingly conservative:
“Our advice generally is go one level below what you can… Don’t push it.”
That principle captures something sophisticated. There is a difference between being technically within a threshold and being safely within it. Real-time visibility is vital because you’re always operating with clarity rather than wishful thinking.
Creative professionals face a layer of complexity that many other globally mobile individuals do not: public footprint. And this publicity may be trickier than it sounds. Richard offers an example almost unique to the industry:
“If we’re dealing with people who are in the public spotlight… it’s difficult to argue they weren’t in the UK on a particular day if they’re shaking hands with the King.”
“It’s difficult to argue they weren’t in the UK on a particular day if they’re shaking hands with the King”
Even outside celebrity status, creative work leaves traces:
The issue is that this visibility might seem like an easy way to support your narrative. But what if it actually undermines your records or flags issues where there are none? If your movements are already partially documented by the outside world, your own records need to be tighter, not looser.
Many globally mobile people default to a spreadsheet. On paper, it looks like an organised and responsible way to count days. But there’s a difference between counting days and proving them.
A spreadsheet introduces human error and compliance risk because, as Richard says, “You can’t… prove that it wasn’t faked. Prove that it was timestamped. You need that.”
And so, if authorities challenge a day count for tax residency claims, you’re suddenly having to build a casefile to support that spreadsheet.
“Putting together a record of everything you’ve done over a period of time… is enormous,” Richard says. “It’s best done in a contemporaneous way.”
Richard gives a telling example of how granular enquiries can become:
“HMRC asks for a copy of an email to prove where the email was sent… then they say, ‘No, you sent me a PDF. I need to see the actual email.'”
Whether common or not, it signals the direction of travel: when questions arise, the burden sits with the individual and their advisers to answer clearly and quickly.
Having to prove your tax residency narrative can come as a shock to people. And Richard said, “It [tax enquiries] puts people under emotional strain.”
“It [tax enquiries] puts people under emotional strain.”
Even when confident in the underlying position, prolonged questioning creates uncertainty. Investigations consume a lot of time and mental energy, and they can disrupt daily life and even creative flow.
For advisors, the task to handle an enquiry means, as Richard put it, “trying to hit it out of the park on the first shot.”
That phrase captures the objective perfectly. If you can answer clearly and comprehensively at the outset with structured, timestamped, defensible records, you reduce not only the emotional toll but also the financial cost of scrambling to put evidence together.
The answer isn’t to turn creatives into administrators. Richard acknowledges that many rely on teams. Personal assistants often handle logistics. The solution, therefore, isn’t more paperwork; it’s better systems.
Best practice rests on four simple principles:
Or, as Richard puts it:
“It’s that Boy Scout motto, isn’t it? Be prepared.”
“It’s that Boy Scout motto, isn’t it? Be prepared.”
Preparation doesn’t restrict movement or creativity, but allows you to know where you stand at any time. If life throws you into a production meeting in London, you don’t need to worry about day count thresholds.
For creative professionals, travel is part of both the craft and the lifestyle. But mobility across borders comes with rules that don’t adapt to busy schedules or intuitive narratives. They rely on evidence.
The creative mobility trap is the assumption that, because travel is a normal part of daily life, record-keeping can be casual.
Richard’s view is the opposite: the more complex and visible your life is, the more you need a simple, defensible record that keeps you — and your advisers — out of reactive mode.
Mobility creates opportunity, and preparation protects it.
And true freedom isn’t the absence of rules.
It’s confidence that you are operating within them.
Created in partnership with industry experts, tackle the complex challenges of day counting and tax record-keeping.
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