Foreign dividends on your tax return
A dividend paid abroad usually arrives already reduced by tax withheld at source. A declaration asks for the gross figure, not the amount that reached your account.
When a foreign company pays you a dividend, its own country usually takes a cut before the money leaves — withholding tax. What lands in your account is the net. Most declarations ask for the gross amount and the tax withheld as separate figures, which is why the number in your bank statement is rarely the number the form wants.
Quantic reports what was actually withheld, taken from the row in your statement — not a treaty rate applied after the fact. It keeps each payment in the currency it was paid in, and converts to euros at the rate that applied on the payment date. Those two totals are deliberately separate: the currency totals need no exchange rate and are always exact, while the euro totals can only include payments whose pay-date rate is known.
Where to find it
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1
Import your dividend statements, or enter payments by hand.
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2
Open the tax report and pick the year. Every payment shows its gross, its withholding and its net.
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Check the flags. Anything Quantic could not verify is marked rather than quietly rounded away.
When the euro totals cover fewer payments than the ledger holds, they are a floor rather than a total, and the report says so instead of presenting a short sum as if it were whole. One known gap: MyInvestor's export carries no withholding column. That is a limit of the file, not of the bank — as a Spanish institution it withholds and reports what it withheld, so the figure exists, it just isn't in the download. Quantic marks those rows as unreported instead of reading the blank as a zero.
Key terms
- Withholding tax
- When you own a foreign stock, the company's home country usually skims a percentage off each dividend before it reaches you — say 15% on US shares. Quantic estimates this from where each holding is based and your tax residence, so your income reflects what actually arrives. It's the tax withheld at source only — not any tax your own country adds, nor amounts you can often reclaim or credit back under a tax treaty.
- Gross vs. net
- Gross is the dividend before tax; net is what actually lands after withholding tax. Quantic tracks both.
- ECB reference rate
- The euro exchange rates the European Central Bank publishes once each working day. EU tax administrations accept them, which is why Quantic's tax report converts foreign dividends and sales at the rate for their own date rather than at today's rate or your broker's. There is no rate on weekends or holidays, so the report uses the most recent one published before that date and tells you which day it used.
- ISIN
- The twelve-character code that identifies a security worldwide, regardless of which exchange it trades on or what ticker it uses there. Unlike a ticker, it doesn't change when a company renames itself — which is why an import identifies your holdings by ISIN where the file carries one, so a renamed company keeps its dividend history instead of splitting into two positions.
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