HomeTax for foreigners
Tax · 个人所得税
The rules are published,
and almost nobody reads them.
Individual income tax for foreigners in Shenzhen — who counts as a tax resident, what the brackets are, which deductions you have to choose between, and the social insurance that comes out before any of it.
Last verified with Chinese Government sources:
Most foreigners here carry a confident theory about Chinese tax, and the theories fail in the same three places: that residency follows your visa, that the six-year rule can be outrun by leaving twice a year, and that your employer is quietly handling the filing. None of it holds.
Skip the theory — work out what you will actually pay
I am not an accountant and this is not professional advice — it is my reading of the published rules as they stood in August 2026. The rules change often, several concessions below carry hard expiry dates, and the bureau applies them case by case: two people with the same facts are sometimes told different things. The sources are public — the Individual Income Tax Law on chinatax.gov.cn ↗ and the ministry announcements on gov.cn ↗. If real money turns on the answer, pay a China-qualified adviser.
First question: are you a Chinese tax resident?
Your visa has nothing to do with it. Article 1 of the IIT Law sets two independent tests and either one makes you a resident. The first is domicile — habitual residence by reason of household registration, family or economic interests — which catches almost no foreigner. The second is the one that bites: presence in China for 183 days or more, cumulatively, in a calendar tax year.
Day counting is stricter than people expect. Count your own days with the calculator → Under the 2019 announcement from the Ministry of Finance and the tax administration, a day counts only if you were in China for a full 24 hours; arrival and departure days do not count. So cross to Hong Kong on a Friday evening and come back on the Sunday evening, and none of those three days counts towards your total — the departure day and the return day are each under 24 hours, and you were not in China in between. Weekend commuters sit closer to the line than they assume.
There is no part-year residency: status is decided for the whole calendar year. Below 183 days you are a non-resident, taxed only on China-sourced income month by month, with a ¥5,000 monthly deduction and none of the deductions below. A second threshold sits at 90 days — at or under it, only China-workday wage income paid or borne by a China employer is taxable; between 90 and 183, all China-workday income is taxable whoever pays it. A tax treaty usually replaces that 90-day limb with 183 days measured over the period its own employment article specifies, so read your own rather than assuming the calendar year. Both thresholds come from the 2019 announcement on non-domiciled individuals, published on gov.cn ↗; check it is still current before you plan around it.
The rule people get wrong
Work out your own number first
Everything below this is reference. If you only want to know what you will actually pay, start here — the detail is one tap away when you need it.
The six-year rule, properly
It is not five years, it is not automatic, and short trips do not reset it.
Tax residency does not by itself put your worldwide income into the Chinese net. Under the 2019 announcement, a non-domiciled resident is not taxed on foreign-sourced income paid by overseas entities so long as the run of consecutive years in which they were present 183 days or more is fewer than six.
The two ways the count breaks
A year under 183 days. It is not a qualifying year, so the run breaks and starts again from the next one.
A single continuous absence of more than 30 days, in a year you were present 183 days or more. That restarts the count from zero — 重新起算. The word that trips people is single: one unbroken trip. Several shorter absences adding up to 30-odd days do nothing.
Why 2026 is early days
The clock was reset to zero on 1 January 2019, wiping every earlier year. The first possible six-year run is 2019 to 2024, so the earliest anyone could be taxed on worldwide income under this rule is 2025 — 2026 is only the second such year.
Two conditions people miss
The exemption is not automatic: it requires record-filing, 备案, with your in-charge tax bureau, and without that filing you cannot have it. And even inside the window you stay taxable on China-workday income whoever pays it, and on foreign-work-period income paid by a China entity. The rule as summarised here is the Guangdong tax bureau's own explanation of the six-year provision ↗ — read it before you count anything.
What gets taxed, and at what rate
Residents pay on comprehensive income — 综合所得 — which pools wages, labour service remuneration, author's remuneration and royalties annually. From that you deduct ¥60,000 a year (¥5,000 a month), your own statutory social insurance and housing fund contributions, the special additional deductions, other statutory items such as an annuity or personal pension, and qualifying donations. What remains runs through seven progressive bands.
Annual comprehensive income, after deductions
- Up to ¥36,000
- 3% (quick deduction 0)
- ¥36,000–144,000
- 10% (2,520)
- ¥144,000–300,000
- 20% (16,920)
- ¥300,000–420,000
- 25% (31,920)
- ¥420,000–660,000
- 30% (52,920)
- ¥660,000–960,000
- 35% (85,920)
- Over ¥960,000
- 45% (181,920)
Tax = taxable income × rate − quick deduction. Bands and the ¥5,000 monthly deduction were unchanged for 2026 as at August 2026, and no rate-table change has been enacted since 2018 — but rate tables are exactly the kind of thing that moves without much warning, so check the published rate table on the Guangdong tax bureau site ↗ before you rely on a number here. An annual one-off bonus may still be elected out of comprehensive income and taxed separately under an August 2023 announcement on gov.cn ↗, a concession currently running to 31 December 2027.
How the tax actually reaches you
Your employer withholds monthly on a cumulative basis — 累计预扣法 — recomputing year-to-date taxable income each month and withholding the difference. The effect surprises new arrivals on a flat salary: net pay falls through the year as cumulative income crosses brackets. The true-up is the annual reconciliation, 汇算清缴, governed since February 2025 by the tax administration's measures for comprehensive income reconciliation ↗. The window is 1 March to 30 June of the following year — 2026 income falls due between 1 March and 30 June 2027 — and it is done in the 个人所得税 app, which has an English interface. Only residents file.
You must file if tax was under-withheld, if you want a refund, or if reporting needs correcting: multiple employers, income across categories, deductions never claimed. Published exemptions cover cases where extra tax is due but annual comprehensive income is ¥120,000 or less, or where the extra tax is under ¥400 — both stated to run to end-2027, though I confirmed them through the 2025 measures rather than the original announcement. If you are leaving for good you may reconcile before departure, and the law requires tax clearance before you go.
The seven special additional deductions
Available to residents, foreigners included — subject to the either/or choice below. Amounts have been current since January 2023 and are unchanged for 2026; Shenzhen's summary sits on the Shenzhen tax bureau site ↗.
- Children's education — ¥2,000 a month per child, age three to doctoral level, split between parents 100/0 or 50/50.
- Infant and childcare, under threes — ¥2,000 a month per child.
- Continuing education — ¥400 a month for degree or diploma study, maximum 48 months; or ¥3,600 once, for a recognised professional qualification.
- Serious illness medical costs — the portion you bear after reimbursement, above ¥15,000 and capped at ¥80,000 a year. Claimable only at the reconciliation.
- Housing loan interest — ¥1,000 a month on a first-home loan, maximum 240 months.
- Housing rent — ¥1,500 a month in Shenzhen, the top band. Not available if you or your spouse own a home in your work city, and not combinable with loan interest.
- Elderly care — parents aged 60 or over: ¥3,000 a month for an only child; non-only children share ¥3,000, each capped at ¥1,500.
Deductions are confirmed each December in the app for the year ahead. They do not silently roll forward.
The foreigner benefits-in-kind, and the choice you have to make
This is the item most often reported wrongly, so here is the chronology. The eight tax-exempt fringe-benefit categories for foreign individuals come from circulars issued in 1994 and 1997 and added to in 2004. A 2018 circular said they would end on 31 December 2021; a 2021 announcement extended them to 31 December 2023; an announcement issued in August 2023 ↗ extended them again, to 31 December 2027. As at 8 August 2026 I could find no official source announcing either a further extension or an early end — which is not the same as knowing what happens next. Of everything on this page, this is the item most likely to move: it has already been given a hard expiry date twice and rescued twice, and a whole expat pay structure hangs on it. Re-read the announcement above before each tax year rather than trusting this paragraph.
The categories: housing allowance; meals; laundry; relocation on taking up or leaving a China assignment; reasonable business travel allowances; home leave travel, in practice two trips a year for the employee only, on transport receipts; language training; and children's education fees in China. The conditions do the real work — in kind or reimbursed against genuine invoices, reasonable in amount, documents retained. A cash allowance without substantiation is taxable salary.
The trap is the election. A foreign individual who qualifies as a resident may take either the special additional deductions or the exempt benefits — 不得同时享受, not both. Once chosen it cannot be changed within the tax year. For higher earners the benefits route is usually worth far more, because substantiated housing and school fees are uncapped where the fixed deductions are not — but only if your package is genuinely structured for reimbursement. The authority has been data-matching returns and correcting people who claimed both, which brings back tax plus surcharges. Model it against the school fee ranges before you sign.
Social insurance, and the housing fund
Social insurance is mandatory for foreigners lawfully employed by China-registered entities, and has been since the 2011 interim measures, amended at the end of 2024. Five schemes: basic pension, basic medical, work injury, unemployment and maternity.
Foreigners here are normally enrolled in tier-one medical. Employee-side rates in Shenzhen are pension 8%, tier-one medical 2% and unemployment 0.2%; work injury and maternity are employer-only. Those deductions reduce your IIT base. On the employer side, tier-one medical rose from 5% to 6% on 1 January 2026 as the manufacturing-support rate cut expired, and unemployment is 0.8%. Work injury is commonly cited at 0.2%–1.4% by industry risk class, though I could not confirm the band-by-band table on an official Shenzhen page. The employer pension rate is where I have to be honest: payroll providers quote 16%, but I could not confirm that on an official Shenzhen source either, and older official tables show 13%–14%. Treat a total employer load of roughly 23%–27% of the capped base as an estimate, and have your employer confirm the current rates with the Shenzhen social insurance authorities rather than quoting me.
Shenzhen contribution bases, August 2026
- Medical & maternity
- ¥6,727–33,633 a month, calendar year 2026
- Pension
- ¥4,775–27,549 a month (Guangdong band)
- Unemployment & work injury
- Floor at the Shenzhen minimum wage, ¥2,520
The two bands run on different calendars, which is why they never line up. The medical and maternity band comes from the Shenzhen Medical Security Bureau notice ↗; the pension band is set province-wide by Guangdong. That pension band was due to expire on 30 June 2026, but as at August 2026 no replacement had been published, so the old figures were still being applied and a retroactive adjustment is expected — meaning these two numbers in particular are likely to be out of date by the time you read this.
Nationals of countries with a social security agreement with China may have some of this waived. As of October 2025 the ministry reported 13 agreements signed and 11 in force, including Germany, South Korea, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Spain, with France signed but reported as not yet in force. Treat that count as indicative rather than settled — published summaries do not all agree on it, and the list changes. Each agreement exempts only the schemes it names — usually pension, sometimes unemployment; medical, work injury and maternity generally stay payable. It is never automatic either: your employer needs a certificate of coverage from the home-country institution, filed with the local bureau. Confirm your own nationality's position, and which schemes it actually covers, with the Shenzhen social insurance authorities before assuming anything comes off your payslip.
Leave China before pension age and you may apply in writing to close the relationship and take a one-off payment of your individual account balance — the employer-funded pooling portion is not refunded — or preserve it and resume later. Since September 2025 a Supreme People's Court interpretation has also made any agreement not to pay social insurance void, and lets the employee resign and claim severance where contributions were missed.
The housing provident fund is different: not compulsory for foreigners here. You may contribute, through your employer or by voluntary agreement with the fund centre, at 5%–12% each side, and contributors can withdraw and borrow under the published rules on sz.gov.cn ↗, which expressly accept foreign passports. Contributions are deductible for IIT, which is the quiet argument for opting in.
The Greater Bay Area subsidy, if you qualify
A cash rebate, not a lower rate. You pay full Chinese IIT, then the local finance bureau refunds the amount by which tax actually paid exceeds 15% of taxable income — and the refund itself is exempt from IIT. It covers the nine Pearl River Delta cities including Shenzhen and runs to 31 December 2027.
Eligibility is narrower than the internet suggests: recognised overseas high-end or urgently-needed talent under the published catalogues, a contract with a Shenzhen-registered entity, 90 days or more worked here in the tax year, and IIT paid in Shenzhen. The cap is ¥5 million per person per year. The 2025 tax-year window ran 1 January to 31 March 2026; the 2026 equivalent had not been published as of August 2026, so watch the Shenzhen Finance Bureau notices ↗. Qianhai runs an overlapping version; you cannot stack them.
What to keep, and when to pay someone
Assume your employer does the monthly withholding and nothing else. They will not file your annual reconciliation, confirm your deductions in December, make the six-year record-filing, or mention that the benefits election you signed in January locked out the rent deduction.
Keep a dated record of every entry and exit — boarding passes and passport stamps. It is the only evidence of your day count, and the first thing anyone asks for if the 183-day or six-year position is questioned. Keep fapiao for anything reimbursed as a tax-exempt benefit — without them the benefit is just taxable salary. Keep the annual tax record the app generates as well; it is the cleanest evidence you have of what you earned and what was withheld, which tends to be useful well beyond tax season, including at a bank. Keep the contract behind your package too: it decides which election you can make.
Pay a professional when any of this is true: income outside China with the six-year clock running; a treaty position you want to rely on; equity, options or a foreign property sale in play; or a package where the benefits-versus-deductions choice is live. Since 2024 the authorities have been prompting individuals about unreported offshore income on the back of information exchange.
I am not that person — I do relocation and landing logistics, from ¥1,500 a day, and tax filings are not part of it. What I can do is point you at someone who does this properly.
Work with meThe benefit-in-kind exemptions, the bonus concession, the filing thresholds and the Bay Area subsidy all carry 2027 end dates, and the Guangdong pension band was overdue for replacement as I wrote this. Re-check anything you are about to act on. If you are still working out whether the numbers make sense at all, the cost of living page covers what your net pay has to carry.