RSUs and Irish Tax: At Vest, and At Sale

If you work for Amazon, Google, Meta, Stripe, Workday or any of the other large employers clustered around Dublin, a meaningful share of your pay probably arrives as Restricted Stock Units rather than cash. RSUs are attractive compensation, but they generate two entirely separate tax events under two entirely different tax regimes, and only one of them is handled for you.

The single most expensive misunderstanding in this area is the belief that because tax was taken at vest, the shares are “done”. They are not. What follows sets out who owes what, and when.

The three dates that matter

Every RSU has three dates. Only two of them are tax events.

Grant. Your employer promises you a number of units, subject to a vesting schedule. Nothing happens for tax purposes. You own nothing yet, you are taxed on nothing, and you have no filing obligation. A grant is a promise, not property.

Vest. The vesting condition is satisfied and the shares are delivered to you. This is an income tax event. Your employer handles it through payroll.

Sale. You dispose of the shares. This is a capital gains tax event. Nobody handles it for you.

Keeping these apart is the whole game.

Event one: vesting

Revenue's position is direct. You pay Income Tax, USC and PRSI on the market value of the shares at the date of vesting, and your employer makes the deductions through payroll and pays the tax to the Collector-General.

The taxable amount is simply the market value of the shares on the vesting date, less anything you paid for them, which for a standard RSU is nothing. If you receive 100 shares worth €200 each on the day they vest, you have €20,000 of employment income. It is treated exactly like a bonus of the same amount.

What that costs in 2026

For an employee already above the standard rate cut-off point — €44,000 for a single person in 2026, and most people receiving substantial RSUs are well past it — the vest is taxed at the top marginal rate:

One timing point worth knowing: employee PRSI rises from 4.2% to 4.35% on 1 October 2026. A vest landing in the fourth quarter carries a marginal rate of 52.35% rather than 52.2%. It is a small difference, but on a large vest it is real money.

Residency is decided on the vesting date alone

This catches out internationally mobile employees. RSUs are fully taxable in Ireland if they vest at a time when you are Irish tax resident, and the benefit cannot be apportioned by reference to any part of the vesting period during which you were resident elsewhere. Conversely, if you are not Irish tax resident when the units vest, there is no Irish charge on the benefit.

So an employee who spent three of a four-year vesting period in Seattle and moved to Dublin last year is taxed in Ireland on the full value. There is no pro-rating. Relief for tax paid elsewhere may be available under a double taxation agreement, and employers can operate real-time double taxation relief through payroll, but that is a separate mechanism and it needs to be actively claimed.

Sell-to-cover, and why the withheld amount may be wrong

Most large employers operate sell-to-cover. On the vest date the plan administrator sells enough of your shares to fund the tax and delivers the remainder to your brokerage account. On 100 vested shares at the top rate, roughly 52 are sold and about 48 land in your account.

Two things to watch here.

First, the withholding is a payroll estimate, not a final assessment. If your income for the year is lower than payroll assumed, you may have overpaid and be due a refund. If you have multiple income sources, or your credits are allocated across two employments, you may have underpaid. Either way, the responsibility for getting your annual position right sits with you, not your employer.

Second, the sell-to-cover transaction is itself a disposal. The shares are sold at or very close to the vest price, so the gain is usually negligible or nil. But it is a chargeable disposal, and it belongs in your CGT return for that year. Almost nobody realises this.

Event two: selling the shares

Here is where the obligation shifts entirely onto you. Revenue's wording is unambiguous: if you dispose of your shares you may be liable to CGT, you must report the disposal even if no tax is due, and your employer will not deduct any tax or report the disposal for you.

Your base cost is the vest-date value

This is the point that saves people from double taxation, and the point people most often get wrong in the opposite direction by treating the full sale proceeds as a gain.

The market value at vest was already taxed as income. That same figure becomes your acquisition cost for CGT purposes. You are taxed only on the movement in value after vesting.

Chargeable gain = sale proceeds − market value at vest − allowable costs

Allowable costs include brokerage commissions and dealing charges on both the acquisition and the disposal.

The mechanics

• Rate: 33% on chargeable gains.
• Annual exemption: the first €1,270 of net gains each year is exempt. It is per individual, cannot be transferred between spouses, and cannot be carried forward. Use it or lose it.
• Losses: capital losses offset gains in the same year, and unused losses carry forward indefinitely. Keep records even in loss years. Note also the four-week rule, which restricts a loss where you buy back the same shares within four weeks of the disposal — a genuine risk if you sell into a loss shortly before a new tranche vests.
• Matching: where you hold shares acquired on different dates, First In First Out applies. Your oldest tranche is treated as sold first, and it carries its own vest-date base cost. This is why per-tranche records matter.

The two deadlines nobody tells you about

CGT operates on a payment-first, file-later basis, and the payment date comes long before the return.

You calculate the liability yourself and pay it through ROS or myAccount before Revenue has seen a single figure. The formal return follows almost a year later, on Form CG1 if you are otherwise a PAYE taxpayer, or within your Form 11 if you are a chargeable person. Interest on late payment runs at 0.0219% a day — a little under 8% a year — so missing 15 December is not a costless administrative slip.

A worked example

Aoife is a single, higher-rate taxpayer in Dublin. On 15 May 2026, 100 RSUs vest. The shares trade at $220 and the ECB rate that day is 1.10, giving a euro value of €200 per share.

At vest:

Her employer sells 53 shares to cover the €10,440. Aoife keeps 47 shares with a base cost of €200 each, or €9,400 in total.

At sale. On 10 September 2027 she sells all 47 shares at $260, with the exchange rate at 1.05, giving €247.62 per share.

Aoife pays €319 by 15 December 2027 and files her CG1 for 2027 by 31 October 2028. Had she sold nothing, she would owe nothing and file nothing on the CGT side — but the 53 shares sold to cover in May 2026 still needed reporting in her 2026 return.

The currency point

Amazon, Alphabet and Meta shares are denominated in dollars. Irish tax is computed in euro. You must translate both the vest-date value and the disposal proceeds at the exchange rates prevailing on those respective dates.

The consequence is that exchange rate movement is part of your taxable gain. If the share price is flat but the dollar has strengthened between vest and sale, you have a chargeable gain in euro terms even though your brokerage statement shows no profit. The reverse is also true, and produces an allowable loss. Broker statements are almost always dollar-denominated and will not do this for you.

Dividends, if the shares pay any

If your shares pay dividends while you hold them, that is a third, separate stream of income. Foreign dividends are taxable in Ireland at your marginal rate, and unearned income above €5,000 a year also attracts PRSI. Filing a W-8BEN with your broker reduces US withholding tax to the 15% treaty rate, and that withheld tax is generally creditable against your Irish liability. Dividend income goes on your annual return; it is not handled by payroll.

How Pegora handles this

All of the above is bookkeeping that has to survive years, and the piece people lose is the per-tranche record the matching rules depend on. Pegora keeps it. Upload your plan's export — or a screenshot, if your administrator won't give you a file — and each vest is stored with its own date, quantity and vest-day value, which is the base cost every later sale is measured against. Dollar amounts are converted at the rate for the actual day, at both ends, so the exchange-rate part of your gain is in the figure rather than a surprise. When you sell, the oldest tranche is matched first, losses and the €1,270 exemption are applied, and the 15 December payment date appears before the October return rather than after it. Before your first vest it will also tell you, in euro, what each release method actually costs — the number the plan site never shows. Everything is encrypted on your own device with a key we do not hold, which is worth saying out loud about a record that amounts to a map of your compensation. Start with your RSUs.

This article is general information, not personal tax advice. Rates and thresholds change in the Budget each October, share plans differ in how they are structured, and an internationally mobile career adds wrinkles no article can cover — if yours is substantial, talk to a qualified tax adviser.