Residency and Domicile
California has no bright line. It has a record.
New York has a statutory residence test: a permanent place of abode and more than one hundred eighty-three days makes a resident. California has nothing comparable. What California has instead is a definition turning on whether presence is for a temporary or transitory purpose, a six-month provision that operates as a safe harbor rather than a threshold, and a nine-month presumption that can be rebutted.
The consequence is that residency is decided on facts and circumstances, and the connections maintained inside and outside the state become the evidence. Where the residences are and what they are worth. Where a spouse and children live and where the children attend school. Where the days are spent and why. Where returns are filed and what residence they claim. Where accounts and transactions originate, where vehicles are registered, where licenses are held, and where business interests are owned.
Domicile is the harder half. It is a separate concept from residence, it is driven by intent, a person holds only one at a time and retains it until another is acquired, and it determines whether income is community or separate. A departure planned around days alone often fails for that reason.
Timing decides outcomes. Whether a liquidity event was realised before a change in status, during it, or after it is frequently worth more than every other fact in the file combined.
The record
15
Years of residency planning and defense
60+
Residency examinations defended
$16B
Wealth planned out of California
The statutes, the regulations, and the FTB’s own residency manual are public documents. Anyone can read them, and lately everyone does. What they do not contain is the examination itself: which connections an auditor tests first, what a day log must look like to be believed, when an interview helps and when it hurts, how a settlement position is actually built. That knowledge does not come from reading. It comes from fifteen years across the table from the Franchise Tax Board, in more than sixty residency examinations, with single matters running to millions of dollars in dispute.
That experience produces judgment that survives contact with real facts. Received wisdom says a move fails if a home is retained, if a spouse remains in the state, if the children must continue schooling in California. It is not so simple. Residency is weighed, not counted; no single connection decides it; and a departure can be structured to real benefit by managing the connections that can move around the ones that cannot. The difference between a defensible move and an expensive one is rarely the law. It is the file, built as the move happens, by someone who knows what the state will ask because he has answered it sixty times.
The aftermath of failed residency planning follows a pattern: an examination, an assessment, and, not uncommonly, litigation against the advisor whose planning created the exposure. Residency advice is abundant right now, and much of it comes from generalists who have never sat through the examination their advice invites. In residency, the most expensive advice is usually the advice that came cheap.