Simpson Bay is one of the Caribbean's main superyacht hubs, and almost nobody explains what that means for the people working on the boats.
Yacht crew occupy an unusual position. You may spend a significant part of the year in Sint Maarten waters, be paid by an entity registered somewhere else entirely, hold a passport from a third country, and have no fixed home in any of them. Each of those facts pulls in a different direction, and the question of where you are tax resident does not answer itself.
The mistake that costs crew the most is assuming that because nobody has asked, nothing applies. Residency is a factual question determined by tests, not by whether a form has arrived. Crew who establish their position deliberately, and can evidence it, are in a very different place from crew who discover the question when a bank, a mortgage lender or an authority raises it.
Day count is one factor and frequently not the decisive one. Where your home is, where your family is, where your economic interests sit and where you are registered can each outweigh it. Crew with no fixed base often assume they are resident nowhere, which is a position that has to be capable of being demonstrated rather than simply asserted.
Crew income is commonly paid by an entity in a jurisdiction unrelated to where the vessel is, where the owner is, or where you are. That structure has consequences in each connected jurisdiction, and the fact that it was chosen by someone else does not make it neutral for you.
Positions like this turn on facts: where you were, for how long, and what you did there. Those facts are cheap to record at the time and extremely expensive to reconstruct three years later from crew lists, flights and memory. Beginning a simple contemporaneous record costs nothing and materially improves the position.
This is when the question usually surfaces. A lender or a bank asks where you are tax resident and where your income arises, and the answer needs to be documented rather than improvised. Crew who have never filed anywhere find this harder than they expect.
Some crew step ashore, whether into a shore-based role, a business, or retirement, and that transition is a relocation with all the usual sequencing consequences. Almost all of the available value in a relocation sits before the move rather than after it, so the conversation is worth having while the change is still prospective.
Where income can be restructured around it, eligibility for the Penshonado regime is worth assessing. It applies a flat 10% rate to the total worldwide income of a qualifying resident, and the conditions must be met on application and maintained afterwards.
It may be entirely correct, and it may be a position that cannot be evidenced if examined. Those are very different situations that look identical until someone asks. Establishing which one you are in is the useful first step.
Where you were, and in what capacity, are facts that feed into a residency assessment. Whether they are decisive depends on the whole picture rather than on any single element, which is why it is assessed rather than answered generically.
Where income is paid from is one factor. Where it arises, where the work is performed, and where you are resident all matter too, and they can point in different directions. That combination is exactly what a cross-border assessment is for.
Expect to evidence where your income comes from and where you are tax resident. Transfer tax is charged at 4% of the purchase price or assessed value, whichever is higher, and annual land tax follows for as long as you hold it.
Yes, and it is a more common starting point than you would think. A Position Review establishes what your actual position is before anything is filed, which is the right order.
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