Selling a house or flat in France raises one question before all others for a British owner: how much of the sale price will the French tax authority keep. The gain on the sale, the plus-value immobilière, is taxed in France whether you live in the Dordogne full time or fly in from Manchester twice a year, and Brexit changed none of that. French tax follows the building, not your passport. The sale must pass through a French notaire, the public officer who draws up property deeds, and in most cases it is the notaire who calculates the tax, withholds it from the price and pays it to the Treasury on the day of signing. What you receive is therefore the price minus the tax, which is why understanding the calculation before you sign the preliminary contract matters so much.
The rules divide sellers into two very different situations. If France is still your tax home, the sale of your main residence is fully exempt, and even a second home becomes exempt after a long enough holding period. If you have moved back to Britain, a special levy for non-residents applies, but two valuable exits exist: one for the house that used to be your main home, and one capped relief that has become much harder for British sellers since Brexit. Around these rules sits the double tax treaty between France and the United Kingdom, which gives France the first right to tax the gain but obliges Britain to relieve double taxation, and a body of court decisions that shows exactly where assessments go wrong and how sellers have won.
This guide is written for a British reader in plain English with UK spelling, and every French legal term is explained the first time it appears. It shows who pays what, which exemptions to claim, how the bill is worked out and paid, and how to challenge it when the figures are wrong.
I. Who pays French tax when a British owner sells, and what escapes it
The first step is to establish where you stand. French law taxes property gains differently depending on whether you are resident in France or not, and the boundary between the two is drawn by a small number of precisely worded tests. Getting this classification right decides everything that follows: the rate, the reliefs and even which office collects the money.
A. If you still live in France, your main home sale is exempt and time heals second homes
If your tax home, your domicile fiscal, is in France, the starting principle is welcoming. The gains covered by the regime are those, in the words of the statute, realised on the sale for consideration of built or unbuilt property, and the same code then carves out the family home in equally plain language: the regime does not apply to buildings “Qui constituent la résidence principale du cédant au jour de la cession”, meaning property that is the seller’s main home on the day of the sale. The test is applied on that single day. If the house you are selling is where you actually and habitually live when the deed is signed, the entire gain is exempt from both income tax and the additional social levies, whatever the amount and however short your ownership. No minimum holding period, no cap and no reinvestment condition apply to the genuine main home.
Residence for tax purposes is itself defined by three alternative tests, and meeting any one of them makes France your tax home. The statute treats as domiciled in France persons who have, in its words, “en France leur foyer ou le lieu de leur séjour principal”, their household or their principal place of stay in France, those who carry on a professional activity in France unless it is merely ancillary, and those who have “en France le centre de leurs intérêts économiques”, the centre of their economic interests, in France. A retired British couple living year-round in their Lot farmhouse, with their bank accounts, doctors and daily life in France, plainly meets the first test even if the children and grandchildren remain in Leeds. Conversely, a couple splitting the year who spends most nights in Kent and keeps the centre of its working and financial life in London will struggle to claim French residence, and the treaty tie-breaker then decides. Keep evidence of where you actually live: flight records, utility bills, French tax returns, doctors’ letters and school records all help, because the exemption for the main home stands or falls on the facts of occupation.
Three situations around the main home deserve attention because they trap sellers every year. First, the house you have already left. If you moved out before the sale, for example into rented accommodation while waiting for completion, the exemption survives only if the property has not been let or occupied by anyone else and the sale follows promptly; a house left empty for a normal marketing period remains your former main home in substance, but a house re-let to tenants or lent to relatives becomes an investment asset and the exemption is lost. Second, the outbuildings and the garden. Garages, sheds and land that are the immediate and necessary dependencies of the home share its exemption, but only when they are sold at the same time as the house itself, so never sell the paddock separately a month later and expect the same treatment. Third, the first-time buyer relief. A seller who has not owned their main home during the previous four years can exempt the gain on the first sale of another dwelling, up to the fraction of the price reinvested within twenty-four months in buying or building a new main home. This reinvestment relief suits the British renter in Paris who sells a small provincial flat inherited from a parent in order to buy a first Paris home, but the twenty-four-month clock and the reinvestment condition are strict, and missing either reopens the whole gain to tax for the year of the failure.
Where the property is a genuine second home, a holiday house that was never anyone’s main residence, time does most of the work. The taxable gain shrinks the longer you have owned the property through a relief for holding period, the abattement pour durée de détention, applied year by year after the fifth year of ownership. The relief runs faster for income tax than for the social levies: after twenty-two years of ownership no more income tax is due on the gain, and after thirty years the social levies disappear as well, so that a very long-held house can be sold free of all French capital gains tax. The practical lesson is to check the anniversary before accepting an offer. Completing a sale a few months before the twenty-second anniversary, when waiting would have wiped out the income tax slice, is an expensive impatience. Ask the notaire for a calculation on both sides of each anniversary whenever the dates are close.
A final resident-side relief helps the British owner who leaves France and sells soon after. When the property was your main home in France on the date you transferred your tax home abroad, a dedicated exemption can apply if the sale is completed no later than 31 December of the year following the departure and the house has not been made available to any third party, free or for payment, between the departure and the sale. That no-occupation condition is absolute: even a rent-free stay by friends or family between your move to Britain and the completion destroys the exemption. The lesson from the courts, examined below, is to freeze the property completely, keep dated proof of your departure, and sell within the window.
B. If you have moved back to Britain, the non-resident levy applies but two exits remain open
Once your tax home has left France, the general exemption for residents no longer protects you and a special levy for non-residents takes over. The code provides, “Sous réserve des conventions internationales”, subject to international treaties, that the French-source gains defined by the statute are subject to a withholding levy, and it then catches, in its own words, “Les personnes physiques qui ne sont pas fiscalement domiciliées en France au sens de l’article 4 B”, individuals who are not domiciled in France for tax purposes. Gains on buildings situated in France are expressly treated as French-source income: the statute lists among French-source gains those, and the official wording covers gains, “lorsqu’elles sont relatives : 1° A des biens immobiliers situés en France ou à des droits relatifs à ces biens”, relating to immovable property situated in France or rights over such property. A British resident selling a cottage in the Charente therefore pays French tax on the gain before any question of British tax even arises, and the levy is collected at the notaire’s office on completion, as explained in Part II.
The headline rate applied to comparable residents is nineteen percent: the code states that “Les plus-values réalisées dans les conditions prévues aux articles 150 U à 150 UC sont imposées au taux forfaitaire de 19 %”. Non-residents have historically faced higher headline rates, and the difference has generated the most important litigation in this field. In a leading decision, the Council of State, the Conseil d’État which is France’s supreme administrative court, laid down the method every challenge must follow: the court requires “comparer la charge fiscale supportée respectivement par ce contribuable et un contribuable résident de France placé dans une situation comparable”, comparing the tax burden on the non-resident with that on a French resident in a comparable situation, and where the non-resident is treated less favourably the assessment must be reduced enough to restore equal treatment. In that case, decided on 23 June 2022 under appeal number 445785, a Swiss national resident in Monaco who had paid the levy at over thirty-three percent on a Nice property obtained a partial discharge down to the nineteen percent borne by comparable residents, and the court confirmed the reasoning by holding that “la cour n’a entaché son arrêt d’aucune erreur de droit”. The practical point for a British seller is direct: always compare the rate on your assessment with the nineteen percent baseline, and if the levy exceeds it, the comparison test from that decision is the legal route to a reduction. Social levies, the prélèvements sociaux that fund French welfare and are added on top of the income tax slice, must be included in the comparison, and their amount should be checked line by line against the official calculation rather than assumed correct.
Two exits can remove the levy entirely, but Brexit narrowed one of them and the other demands rigorous proof. The first exit is the former-main-home relief described above: sale by 31 December of the year after departure, no third-party occupation in between, and a country condition requiring a tax assistance convention with France, a mutual recovery assistance convention of similar scope to the European recovery directive, and a jurisdiction that is not blacklisted as non-cooperative. Britain has a long-standing double tax treaty with France containing assistance provisions, but the recovery-assistance limb must be verified as it stands on the date of your sale, so ask your adviser to confirm both conventions are in force before relying on this exit. Note also that a seller who has already used the capped relief below cannot use this one: the statute bars cumulating the two on the same taxpayer.
The second exit is the capped relief for one dwelling, and this is where Brexit bites. The provision exempts, up to one home per taxpayer and one hundred and fifty thousand euros of net taxable gain, the sale of a dwelling in France by an individual who is not French-resident, but only if the seller is a national of a European Union Member State or of another State party to the European Economic Area agreement that has signed an administrative assistance convention with France, and only if the seller was continuously domiciled in France for at least two years at some point before the sale. Since 1 January 2021 British nationals are no longer Union nationals, so a British seller relying solely on a British passport falls outside this relief as the nationality condition now stands. The relief then applies, within its cap, either to sales completed by 31 December of the tenth year following the year the seller left France, or with no time limit where the seller has had free disposal of the property at least since 1 January of the year before the sale. Where a British seller also holds Irish or another Union nationality, or sells jointly with a spouse who does, the position must be examined person by person and share by share, because the cap and the one-home limit operate per taxpayer. Do not assume the relief is available; have the nationality, domicile history and dates tested before exchange.
II. How the bill is worked out, paid at signing and challenged afterwards
Knowing the regime is only half the task. The gain must be calculated correctly, declared and paid through the notaire at completion, coordinated with the British tax return, and challenged promptly when the figures are wrong. Each stage has its own traps, and the decided cases show precisely which evidence wins.
A. Working out the gain, the treaty share and the British side of the bill
The taxable gain is the difference between the sale price and the corrected purchase price, and both sides of that subtraction reward good record-keeping. The sale price is the price in the deed plus any charges and indemnities the buyer assumes. The purchase side starts with the price you originally paid and adds the real costs you can prove: the notaire’s fees and registration duties on acquisition, either at their actual amount with receipts or at a statutory flat percentage where the official conditions allow, the estate agent’s commission on purchase where documented, and the cost of building work that qualifies, meaning construction, reconstruction, extension or improvement carried out by a proper business and supported by invoices, never the value of your own labour and never routine maintenance or decoration. A British owner who replaced the roof and rewired a stone barn with a registered French artisan and kept every invoice will lawfully shrink the gain by tens of thousands of euros; the owner who paid cash-in-hand for cosmetic work with no paperwork adds nothing. The holding-period relief is then applied to the net figure, so the sequence is costs first, relief second, and any error in the ordering changes the answer.
The double tax treaty concluded between France and the United Kingdom, signed in London on 19 June 2008, allocates the taxing rights over the gain. Its immovable property article follows the international standard: gains from selling immovable property situated in France may be taxed in France. France therefore taxes first, and Britain, where the seller is British-resident, taxes the same gain under its own capital gains rules but must give credit for the French tax paid, within the limits of the British liability on that gain. The treaty does not exempt you in either country; it prevents you paying twice on the same euros of profit. Concretely, a British resident who sells a French second home declares the gain to HM Revenue and Customs, converts the figures at the proper exchange rates, claims foreign tax credit relief for the French levy and social charges within the allowable limits, and pays Britain only the excess if British tax on the gain is higher. The British return is separate from the French declaration at the notaire, and the deadlines run independently, so diarise both. Guidance on declaring foreign income and gains is published by the British government, and the reporting and payment service for property gains is the place to confirm current British deadlines and rates before filing.
Currency movements deserve a warning because they silently change the British bill. The French gain is computed entirely in euros, but the British calculation converts acquisition costs and sale proceeds at the exchange rates applicable to each date. A house bought when sterling was strong and sold when it is weak can show a larger sterling gain than the euro figures suggest, and the foreign tax credit, computed in sterling, may then cover less of the British charge than expected. Run both calculations side by side before completion so that no shortfall comes as a surprise.
Companies and shared ownership structures face their own calculation fork, and a 2018 Council of State decision shows why the characterisation matters. A company formed under the law of Delaware in the United States had bought a Paris building in 1986, made it available free of charge to relatives of its shareholders, and sold it in 2008 with a declared taxable gain of over 1.8 million euros computed under the corporate calculation method. It argued that its free provision of the building was not a profit-making activity and that the individual-style calculation should apply instead. The Council of State disagreed with the appeal court, holding that “En jugeant que cette activité présentait un caractère lucratif, la cour administrative d’appel de Paris a inexactement qualifié les faits qui lui étaient soumis”, and it drew the consequence plainly: “L’arrêt du 17 novembre 2015 de la cour administrative d’appel de Paris est annulé”. For British families holding a French house through a company or a property investment structure, the message is that the calculation method follows the true nature of the activity, gratuitous family use points away from the corporate method, and the point must be argued with the entity’s accounts and occupation history, not asserted. Most British owners hold directly in their own names and never meet this problem, but those with structures should have the method verified before the sale, because the two computations can differ enormously.
B. Paying through the notaire, keeping proof and challenging errors
Payment in France is unusual by British standards: the seller does not pay the capital gains bill months later with a tax return, but at the signing table. The notaire draws up the deed of sale, the acte authentique de vente, calculates the gain and the tax from the documents in the file, withholds the amount from the sale price, and pays it directly to the Treasury with the property declaration, the déclaration de plus-value, at the land registry formalities. You sign, the buyer pays the price to the notaire’s client account, the tax is diverted to the State, and you receive the balance. This system makes the notaire your most important counterpart. Send the complete file early: the original purchase deed, proof of acquisition costs, all works invoices with the builders’ registration details, evidence of the holding dates, proof of main-home occupation or of the departure date where an exemption is claimed, and details of any earlier relief already used. A notaire can only apply the reliefs the file proves. Arriving at completion with a carrier bag of unsorted receipts invites the maximum bill.
The cases show that proof, or its absence, decides challenges. In a 2023 decision of the Marseille administrative appeal court, a couple of Irish and Australian nationality resident in Australia sold a house in Eygalières in October 2019 and claimed the former-main-home exemption, saying they had moved to Australia in 2018. The court refused, because they had filed no French income return for 2018 after filing for 2017, produced Australian assessments covering a period ending in June 2018 rather than June 2019 as claimed, and never even specified the date of their move, relying only on an income tax notice sent to the French address and council tax bills for the house. The court’s conclusion is a warning every British seller should memorise: “à défaut de produire les éléments qu’ils sont seuls en mesure de produire afin d’établir que la cession de la maison a été réalisée au plus tard le 31 décembre de l’année suivant celle du transfert de leur domicile fiscal en Australie, M. et Mme B… ne peuvent bénéficier de l’exonération”, without the documents that only they could produce to prove the sale fell within the year-after-departure window, no exemption. Build your file to survive that test: dated proof of the actual departure such as shipping records, flight bookings, foreign tax registrations and consulate registration, proof the house stood empty and unoccupied until completion such as meter readings and insurance schedules for an unoccupied dwelling, and the completion date itself within the window. Where the exemption turns on the 31 December deadline, instruct the notaire from the start that completion must occur before that date, and if the buyer’s mortgage delays completion past it, renegotiate or accept that the exemption is lost rather than discovering it afterwards.
When the assessment is wrong, French law offers a clear ladder, but every rung has a time limit printed on the notice and a late claim fails whatever its merits. Start with the notaire: a calculation error in the declaration, a forgotten invoice, a misapplied anniversary or a wrongly refused exemption can often be corrected by an amended declaration while the file is still open. Then use the formal complaint, the réclamation contentieuse, addressed to the tax office that issued or received the assessment, setting out the facts, the legal basis and the precise amount claimed, with copies of every supporting document. The administration must answer within six months, and silence at six months counts as a refusal that opens the door to the administrative court, the tribunal administratif, of the place where the property lies. Interest runs while you argue, so pay the undisputed part of the bill where possible and contest only the balance; a challenge is not a reason to ignore the whole demand. Typical winning arguments, drawn from the decisions above, are the exemption wrongly refused where the departure file is complete, the rate exceeding the comparable resident’s burden under the comparison test, the calculation method wrongly applied to a company or shared structure, and deductible costs wrongly rejected for want of invoices that can still be obtained from the builder.
Three practical scenarios cover most British files. The retiree couple selling the Dordogne main home to move nearer the grandchildren in Yorkshire owes nothing in France if the house is still their main home on completion day, but should keep occupation evidence until the assessment period expires. The second-home owner selling a long-held cottage should have the notaire model the bill on each side of every holding anniversary and never complete just before one. The owner who left France last year and sells now must treat the 31 December deadline and the no-occupation rule as absolute, freeze the house, and assemble departure proof before marketing. In each scenario the British return follows separately, with credit for the French tax, so keep the French declaration, the completion statement and the proof of payment for the British file.
Official guidance helps at every stage. The service-public.fr information service publishes a guide to property capital gains tax at https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F31304, the tax administration publishes its detailed commentaries on the official public tax doctrine database at https://bofip.impots.gouv.fr/, and the British government publishes guidance on reporting gains and on foreign income at https://www.gov.uk/report-and-pay-your-capital-gains-tax and https://www.gov.uk/tax-foreign-income. Read them before you sign, not after, and check that you are reading the version in force on your completion date, because rates, thresholds and treaty positions move.
Conclusion
A British owner selling a French home after Brexit faces a French tax on the gain in almost every case, but the size of that tax is largely within the seller’s control. Establish residence first, because the main-home exemption turns entirely on occupation at completion. Count time second, because each year of ownership reduces the bill and long ownership can remove it. Test the two non-resident exits third, remembering that the capped relief now normally excludes British-only nationals while the former-main-home exit rewards the seller who freezes the property and completes within the year-after-departure window. Calculate in euros, declare in France through the notaire at signing, declare again in Britain with credit for the French tax, and keep every deed, invoice and proof of dates until all time limits expire. And when the figures look wrong, challenge them in the right order and on time, armed with the comparison test, the departure file and the correct calculation method. The sales that go well are those prepared months before completion; the disputes that succeed are those documented from the start.
Need a quick opinion on your case.
If you are selling your French home, get advice before you sign the preliminary contract. Our firm offers a telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm to review your residence position, your gain calculation and your exemptions. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 or write to us through our contact page with a copy of your purchase deed, your works invoices and your completion timetable.