Interactive tax-position tool

Permanent Establishment & Tax-Residency Risk Checker

Answer a focused set of questions and get a decision-first read on whether running your company from where you actually live creates a permanent establishment or a dual-residency tax exposure. It bands your OECD-model risk LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH using the 2025 home-office 50% benchmark, the >12-month construction rule, the dependent-agent contract test, and the place-of-effective-management flag — each with a linked OECD source. This is an education-only risk band, not a determination that you have a PE or are dual-resident.

Open the tool How we research

Access: Free; no account wall
Privacy: Local; inputs stay in browser
Use case: First read; not a filing service

Fields marked * are required. The rest are optional and only make the read sharper.

Your situation

Where is your company incorporated / formed? The jurisdiction whose company law you registered under (e.g. US LLC = Delaware/Wyoming/etc). This is one residency anchor. Where do YOU (founder/director) physically work day-to-day? The country where you are physically present and actually doing the work most of the time. Often differs from the incorporation country for non-resident founders. In your work country, do you use a fixed physical place for the business? OECD Art. 5(1): a fixed place of business (an office, a desk you keep, a workshop) with some permanence can be a permanent establishment (PE). If you work from home, what share of your total working time is from that home over a 12-month period? OECD 2025 update benchmark: under 50% of working time over any 12-month period is generally NOT treated as a place of business (a soft presumption, not a safe harbor). 50%+ triggers a deeper look. Why do you work from that home/place? OECD 2025 update: a home office is more likely a PE when the business REQUIRES the location for a commercial reason (e.g. serving local customers). Pure convenience, talent retention, or cost-saving is NOT a commercial reason. Do you have staff or a representative acting for the company in the work country? OECD Art. 5(5): a dependent agent who habitually concludes contracts, or habitually plays the principal role leading to contracts routinely signed without material change, can create a PE — even without a fixed office. Do you run a building site or installation project in the work country? OECD Art. 5(3): a building site or construction/installation project is a PE only if it lasts MORE THAN 12 months. Where are the company's key management and commercial decisions actually made? OECD Art. 4: a company can be tax-resident where its place of effective management sits — where key management and commercial decisions for the business as a whole are in substance made. This drives DUAL-RESIDENCY risk. Is there a double-tax treaty between your incorporation country and your work country? A treaty provides a tie-breaker for dual residency and limits source taxation to profits attributable to a PE. No treaty = far higher exposure to double taxation. Name the country where you physically work most (optional) Optional, education-only. Used only to phrase the report. It is never stored and never added to the shareable URL.

Workflow

How to use it

1 Choose your incorporation country, where you physically work, and how your management decisions are made — the required inputs.
2 Answer the fixed-place, home-office, agent, construction, and treaty questions to sharpen the risk band.
3 Read the decision-first verdict: LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH PE and dual-residency risk, with the OECD concept behind each finding.
4 Save the report as a PDF, copy the summary, or take the ranked actions to a cross-border tax professional.

Why this matters

Forming a company abroad does not move your taxes abroad. If you run a US LLC (or a UK Ltd, an Estonian OÜ, anything) from where you actually live, two things can quietly create a tax bill in your home country: a permanent establishment — a fixed place, a home office used heavily for a commercial reason, a dependent agent who closes deals, or a construction project over 12 months — and dual residency, where your place of effective management sits somewhere different from where you incorporated. The OECD 2025 update rewrote the home-office rule around a 50%/12-month benchmark, and the dependent-agent test can bite with no office at all. This tool weighs your specific incorporation-country, work-location, contracting, and management facts into a LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH band, hard-rails the soft-presumption nature of the 50% rule, and caveats the US-LLC transparency mismatch — so you arrive at a cross-border tax professional with the right questions, not a costly assumption.

Frequently asked questions

Does this tool tell me whether I have a permanent establishment?

No. It bands your OECD-model risk LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH and names the concepts (fixed place, home office, dependent agent, place of effective management) so you can ask better questions. It never states that you have a PE or are dual-resident. Whether you actually do is fact-specific and depends on domestic law and your treaty — confirm with a cross-border tax professional.

Is the under-50% home-office benchmark a safe harbor?

No. The OECD 2025 update says a home used for less than 50% of working time over any 12-month period is "generally not" a place of business — a soft presumption, not a statutory safe harbor. Other factors (a commercial reason, an agent who closes contracts) can still create a PE, so do not treat "under 50%" as a guaranteed no-PE result.

Why is the dual-residency flag caveated for US LLCs?

Because a US LLC is often fiscally transparent — its income flows to its members — and US treaties commonly use a limitation-on-benefits article. So the OECD model's corporate residency tie-breaker (Art. 4(3)) does not map cleanly to a US LLC. The tool raises a flag for review when your management and incorporation countries differ, but it never concludes that your LLC is dual-resident.

What makes a construction or installation project a PE?

Under the OECD model, a building site or a construction or installation project is a permanent establishment only if it lasts more than 12 months. Twelve months or less generally does not create a PE on that ground — but connected or sequential phases can be aggregated, so crossing 12 months changes the answer.

Could my treaty change the result?

Yes. This tool models the OECD Model Convention only. Each country's domestic law and the specific bilateral treaty override it, and the 2025 Commentary is interpretive, not binding treaty text. A treaty supplies a residency tie-breaker and limits source taxation to profits attributable to a PE, so reading the actual articles with a professional is essential.

Keep going

Where to incorporate Compare 13 jurisdictions before you pair an incorporation country with where you work. Find your jurisdiction Answer six questions to narrow your best-fit countries, ranked with reasons. Company setup report The full route: country, state, EIN, banking, and compliance. LLC cost by state Filing + annual fees for all 50 states, side by side, if you go US.

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