PR residency requirements vs IRS Bona Fide residency requirements

The key thing to note here is that in order to qualify for act 60, you must be in compliance with 2 overlapping and distinct systems and requirements: the IRS and the Puerto Rican government. The IRS requires that you are a BFR-PR to not pay them taxes. The govt of PR (through your decree) requires that you satisfy the much more lenient PR residency requirements.

If you satisfy the Bona Fide Residency (BFR) requirements, then you are automatically a resident in the eyes of PR. The converse is not true, i.e. you can satisfy PR residency requirements while failing Bona Fide residency requirements.

The reason one might care about PR residency requirements per se (short of meeting BFR-PR), is that for some (all?) of us, our Act 22 / Act 60 decrees merely require PR residency to be valid, not BFR-PR. I believe there are other benefits that only require PR residency as well.

Just to be crystal clear, if you qualify for PR residency but not BFR-PR, you will still owe Federal taxation on your global income. BFR status is necessary to avoid the US Federal tax net. But even if you have an Act 22 / Act 60 and it is valid for the year by (via being a PR resident for that year), then you will not enjoy the tax reductions of the Acts on the types of income they cover.

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Around 2016/2017, PR adopted an amendment that says exactly what winslow says: qualifying as a BFR for PR through the IRS’s US IRC 937 means PR sees you as a resident of PR.

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Thank you, Brady, for posting info about this important amendment.
Where did you find the amendment and its language? I looked at the text of the Puerto Rico code and didn’t see the amendment there (in the section defining “resident individual”), and internet searches for the amendment text aren’t producing any results for me. Thanks for your help.