You own a house in France, your children live in Britain, and you want them to have the house without waiting for your death, while you carry on living in it. After Brexit this is one of the most common plans British owners bring to a French notaire, and it is also one of the most misunderstood. A lifetime gift of French bricks and mortar is not an English gift with a French address on it. It is a French civil-law deed with French tax, French forced heirship rules and, where you still count as domiciled in Britain, a possible second tax bill in London if you die too soon after signing.
This article explains the two deeds that do the job, the donation-partage and the outright gift with reserved usufruit, with the exact articles that govern them and the exact words the Cour de cassation uses to police them. You will see what the gift costs in French gift tax with a worked example in euros, why France taxes the house even when the donor lives in London, what the British seven-year rule adds on top, and how your children or the tax office can attack the gift years later, with the deadlines that decide who wins. Every French term is explained the first time it appears.
I. Which deed puts your French house in your children’s hands while you stay living in it
A. Donation-partage or outright gift with reserved usufruit: what each deed actually does
A donation is a lifetime gift made by notarial deed. For a house in France the deed must pass before a French notaire, who registers it and publishes it at the land registry, because only registration makes the transfer enforceable against third parties. There are two ways to give the house and keep the roof over your head, and they do not protect your family in the same way.
The donation-partage is a combined gift and advance division of your estate between your children. Article 1075 of the Civil Code opens the door in plain terms: “Toute personne peut faire, entre ses héritiers présomptifs, la distribution et le partage de ses biens et de ses droits.” Your héritiers présomptifs, your presumptive heirs, are the people the law expects to inherit from you, in practice your children. Each child receives a lot, a share, in the same deed, and each lot is accepted on the spot. What makes this deed powerful is that it freezes values. Article 1078 of the Civil Code provides that “les biens donnés seront, sauf convention contraire, évalués au jour de la donation-partage pour l’imputation et le calcul de la réserve, à condition que tous les héritiers réservataires vivants ou représentés au décès de l’ascendant aient reçu un lot dans le partage anticipé et l’aient expressément accepté, et qu’il n’ait pas été prévu de réserve d’usufruit portant sur une somme d’argent.” In ordinary language: if every protected child got a lot and accepted it, later rises in house prices do not reopen the division when you die. That single sentence is the reason French practitioners reach for the donation-partage first when there are two or more children.
The alternative is a simple outright gift of the house, or of the nue-propriété, the bare ownership, of the house, while you keep the usufruit, the lifelong right to live in the property or to let it and keep the rent. Usufruit plus nue-propriété equals full ownership, and the two reunite in your children’s hands when you die. This works perfectly well with one child. With several children it leaves the hard questions open: who got what, whether the gift counts against their inheritance share, and whether a child who got less can demand compensation at your death.
That question is the rapport, the legal duty to account. Article 843 of the Civil Code states: “Tout héritier, même ayant accepté à concurrence de l’actif, venant à une succession, doit rapporter à ses cohéritiers tout ce qu’il a reçu du défunt, par donations entre vifs, directement ou indirectement”. A gift made as an avancement de part, an advance on the child’s inheritance share, is brought back into the division. A gift made hors part, outside the share, with an express exemption from rapport, is kept by the child but counts against the quotité disponible, the free portion you may give to anyone. Getting this clause right in the deed decides whether your children divide the estate peacefully or instruct lawyers.
Above all of this sits the réserve héréditaire, the forced share that French law guarantees your children and that no deed, French or English, can simply wish away for assets in France. Article 913 of the Civil Code provides: “Les libéralités, soit par actes entre vifs, soit par testament, ne pourront excéder la moitié des biens du disposant, s’il ne laisse à son décès qu’un enfant ; le tiers, s’il laisse deux enfants ; le quart, s’il en laisse trois ou un plus grand nombre.” With one child, half your estate is untouchable; with two children, two thirds; with three or more, three quarters. If your lifetime gift overshoots, the injured child can bring an action en réduction, a court claim to cut the excessive gift back. If you are still hesitating between giving now and writing a will instead, read our analysis of choosing English law for your French house and living with the réserve before you decide, because the will route obeys different conflict-of-laws rules and deserves its own reasoning.
British families often add an English reflex at this point: give cash so a child can buy, rather than giving the house itself. French law sees through the form to the substance. In a decision of 17 October 2019, the First Civil Chamber of the Cour de cassation held, on article 922, that “la subrogation prévue par ce texte inclut toutes les donations, y compris celles de sommes d’argent” (Cass. 1re civ., 17 Oct. 2019, no 18-22.810). A mother had given her son 350,000 francs which he used the same day to buy the nue-propriété of a building of which she took the usufruit, and the Court quashed the appeal judgment that had refused to treat the replacement asset as the gift for the réduction calculation. Money given to buy the bare ownership is treated as the bare ownership. Structure the funding honestly in the deed, because the court will reconstruct it anyway.
B. What the gift costs your children in French gift tax, euro by euro
French gift tax, the droits de donation, is paid by each child who receives, on the value of what that child receives, after a personal allowance. The allowance between a parent and each child is generous and it is per child: article 779 of the General Tax Code provides that “il est effectué un abattement de 100 000 € sur la part de chacun des ascendants et sur la part de chacun des enfants vivants ou représentés par suite de prédécès ou de renonciation.” Each child deducts 100,000 euros before any rate applies. A couple with three children can therefore pass 600,000 euros of value before any gift tax bites, provided earlier gifts do not eat the allowance first, a point to which we return below.
When you keep the usufruit, the taxable value is not the price of the house. It is the value of the nue-propriété alone, fixed by a statutory age scale. Article 669 of the General Tax Code sets the split: under 61 the usufruit is worth 50 per cent and the nue-propriété 50 per cent; from 61 to 71 the usufruit counts 40 per cent and the nue-propriété 60 per cent; from 71 to 81 the usufruit counts 30 per cent and the nue-propriété 70 per cent; from 81 to 91 the usufruit counts 20 per cent and the nue-propriété 80 per cent; above 91 the usufruit counts 10 per cent. The older you are when you sign, the smaller the taxable base, which is why notaires invite owners in their sixties and seventies to stop postponing the deed.
Above the allowance, the progressive scale in the direct line runs from 5 per cent on the first 8,072 euros to 45 per cent beyond 1,805,677 euros, with the middle brackets at 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40 per cent under article 777 of the General Tax Code. Take a worked example. You are 70, you own a Dordogne house worth 600,000 euros, and you give the nue-propriété to your two children in equal shares while keeping the usufruit. At 70 the nue-propriété is 60 per cent, so the taxable gift is 360,000 euros, 180,000 per child. Each child deducts the 100,000 euro allowance and is taxed on 80,000 euros: 5 per cent on the first 8,072 euros, 10 per cent from 8,072 to 12,109, 15 per cent to 15,932, and 20 per cent on the rest up to 80,000, which comes to roughly 14,200 euros per child. The family keeps a 600,000 euro house across the generations for under 30,000 euros of gift tax, plus the notaire’s bill. Change one fact and the price moves: sign at 82 instead of 70 and the nue-propriété is 70 per cent, not 60; give the full ownership instead of the nue-propriété and the whole 600,000 euros is taxable.
Two additions regularly surprise British donors. First, earlier gifts are remembered. Article 784 of the General Tax Code provides that “La perception est effectuée en ajoutant à la valeur des biens compris dans la donation ou la déclaration de succession celle des biens qui ont fait l’objet de donations antérieures, à l’exception de celles passées depuis plus de quinze ans”. The tax office adds back gifts made less than fifteen years earlier to push the new gift into higher brackets. A cash gift you made to the same child in 2018 still counts in 2026; one made in 2010 does not. Tell the notaire about every earlier gift, including English ones, because an incomplete disclosure produces the reassessment described in Part II. Second, the notaire must be paid, and for a deed containing a building the land registry must be paid too. The official service-public guide to the donation-partage warns that where the deed includes a building you pay land publicity charges, and that, according to the official service-public guide to the donation-partage (service-public.fr, Faire une donation-partage), the notaire’s scheduled fees are worked out on the full-ownership value of the assets given. Note the sting: part of the fee base stays at full value even when you only give the nue-propriété. Ask for the fee note, the note de frais, before signing, and check every line of the statement, because errors in the base or the scale are the easiest reassessments to get cancelled.
II. What London and the French tax office each take on the same gift, and how to challenge a bill or an attack
A. France taxes the French house even if you live in London, and London may tax it again
Brexit did not move a single French house out of the French tax net. Article 750 ter of the General Tax Code draws a simple line. Where the donor has French tax residence, France taxes everything given, in France or abroad; where the donor does not, France still taxes what sits in France: “Sont soumis aux droits de mutation à titre gratuit : 1° Les biens meubles et immeubles situés en France ou hors de France […] lorsque le donateur ou le défunt a son domicile fiscal en France au sens de l’article 4 B” and “2° Les biens meubles et immeubles […] situés en France […] lorsque le donateur ou le défunt n’a pas son domicile fiscal en France”. A Londoner giving a Dordogne house pays French gift tax on the Dordogne house. Giving through a company does not help either, because the same article reaches buildings held indirectly through legal entities. The notaire collects the gift tax on registration, so this is not a bill that arrives later; it is part of the signing appointment.
London then applies its own logic to the same event, and its clock runs for seven years. The official gov.uk guidance on gifts (gov.uk, How Inheritance Tax works: gifts) works on survival: no inheritance tax is due on gifts where the donor lives for seven years afterwards, while death within seven years can bring a charge, up to 40 per cent for gifts made in the last three years of life, with a sliding scale called taper relief for gifts made three to seven years before death. Two traps matter for the French-house plan. First, taper relief only helps once total gifts in the seven years exceed the 325,000 pound tax-free threshold, so modest gifts get no sliding scale at all. Second, the gift-with-reservation rules: a gift the donor goes on enjoying can be treated as still part of the estate A British donor who gives the house but carries on living in it rent-free should expect HM Revenue and Customs to look hard at whether the gift counts as still part of the estate, whatever the French démembrement says. The gov.uk page ends with unglamorous but decisive advice: the person dealing with your estate must reconstruct seven years of gifts, so keep the French deed, the valuation, the proof of French tax paid and the dates together where your executor will find them. Our guide for the British executor facing the French notaire and the bank shows what happens when that file is missing.
Clients often ask whether the old Franco-British estate tax convention removes one of the two bills. Be careful. The 1963 convention was built for deaths, and a lifetime gift is a different taxable event from a succession. Do not assume any treaty article shelters your donation, and do not let anyone tell you that paying in France automatically wipes out the London bill. Ask the notaire to state in the file which convention, if any, is being relied on for this specific gift, and keep that note with the deed. What the two systems both reward is paperwork: a dated deed, a reasoned valuation at the signing date, receipts for French tax, and a record of earlier gifts on both sides of the Channel. Every successful challenge described below starts from that file; every failed one starts from its absence.
B. When a child or the tax office attacks the gift, and how you fight back
The most painful attack comes from inside the family. A child who received nothing, or visibly less than a brother, can ask the court to cut the gift back to protect the réserve. Only the protected people may sue: article 921 of the Civil Code provides that “La réduction des dispositions entre vifs ne pourra être demandée que par ceux au profit desquels la loi fait la réserve, par leurs héritiers ou ayants cause : les donataires, les légataires, ni les créanciers du défunt ne pourront demander cette réduction, ni en profiter.” A creditor cannot use your children’s protection as a weapon, and a disappointed beneficiary cannot sue in their place. The same article sets the modern deadlines, and they are short: “Le délai de prescription de l’action en réduction est fixé à cinq ans à compter de l’ouverture de la succession, ou à deux ans à compter du jour où les héritiers ont eu connaissance de l’atteinte portée à leur réserve, sans jamais pouvoir excéder dix ans à compter du décès.” The notaire settling the estate must warn any heir whose protected share looks threatened, individually and before any division, of the right to seek réduction. In practice this means a donation-partage that included every child with an accepted lot almost never falls, while a gift to one child that ignored the others is litigated at the opening of the succession, within months, not years.
Older gifts obey older clocks, and the Cour de cassation applies them strictly. On 23 October 2024 the First Civil Chamber recalled that “L’action en réduction, que l’article 921, alinéa 1er, du code civil reconnaît à ceux au profit desquels la loi fait la réserve et à leurs héritiers ou ayants cause, présente le caractère d’une action personnelle soumise à la prescription quinquennale prévue à l’article 2224 du même code, quand bien même elle aurait pour effet de résoudre la question de l’existence d’un droit réel sur les biens donnés ou légués” (Cass. 1re civ., 23 Oct. 2024, no 22-19.365). For successions opened before 1 January 2007 the thirty-year period cut to five years by the 2008 reform had, the Court held, “expiré au plus tard le 18 juin 2013 à 24 heures”. The lesson for British families is not the old transitional date but the method: courts count réduction deadlines to the day, starting from the death or from proven knowledge of the harm, and article 2224, which provides that “Les actions personnelles ou mobilières se prescrivent par cinq ans à compter du jour où le titulaire d’un droit a connu ou aurait dû connaître les faits lui permettant de l’exercer”, leaves no room for a child who slept on clear facts. If you receive the notaire’s warning letter, see a lawyer within weeks; if you send one, expect the same urgency from the other side.
A second family trap concerns the usufruit you kept. Suppose years after giving the nue-propriété to your children, you give the usufruit itself to one of them, perhaps the one who looks after you. That second gift does not create a fresh lifelong right for that child. On 5 January 2023 the First Civil Chamber, in a case about a mother who had given the nue-propriété of two buildings to her three children in 1983 and the usufruit to her son in 2013, held that “en cas de donation d’un usufruit déjà constitué à titre viager, l’usufruit s’éteint à la mort du donateur et non du donataire” (Cass. 1re civ., 5 Jan. 2023, no 21-13.966). The usufruit died with the mother, the son occupying the buildings owed an occupation indemnity to the estate, and the appeal court was quashed for holding otherwise. Never give away your retained usufruit expecting it to protect the donee for life; it ends at your death, and the siblings can charge rent from that day.
Beyond the family, the donor himself can in narrow cases take the gift back. The service-public guide lists revocation for ingratitude, for non-performance of the conditions attached to the gift, and for the later birth of a child, each with short deadlines running from knowledge of the facts, from the failure to perform, or from the birth (service-public.fr, Faire une donation-partage). These are emergency exits, not planning tools: ingratitude means serious facts a court accepts as such, and the clock runs in months, so contemporaneous notes and the notaire’s file decide the outcome.
The tax office attacks differently, with a proposition de rectification, a reassessment proposal, usually aimed at the valuation or at a forgotten earlier gift. Answer on the facts within the stated deadline, with the valuation report used at signing, comparable sales from the same commune and year, and proof of every allowance claimed. If the reassessment is maintained, file a réclamation, a formal claim, then appeal to the tribunal administratif, the administrative court, within its deadline. Most British files are won or lost on the valuation date point: the gift is taxed on the value at the signing date, proved by documents from that year, not by what the neighbour’s house fetched three years later.
In Paris and the Île-de-France these fights have a local shape worth knowing. British-owned flats in the capital and the inner suburbs are routinely valued above one million euros, which pushes each child’s taxable share into the 30, 40 or even 45 per cent brackets after the allowance, so the donation-partage with a reserved usufruit saves proportionally more here than in the provinces. Paris notaire offices handle British files weekly and will insist on the English documents that slow maire offices elsewhere: proof of identity and capacity, and where an English will exists, a translation, because the notaire must check that the gift does not collide with a choice-of-law clause made for the death. Civil challenges go to the Paris judicial court, whose family divisions see a steady flow of réduction claims over Paris flats, while tax disputes go to the administrative court of your tax residence. If your file spans London and Paris, keep one bilingual bundle, the French deed, the valuation, the tax receipts, the English will if any, and the seven-year gift record for London, and give a copy to the child most likely to need it. Paper assembled on signing day is what lets a challenge be answered in weeks instead of litigated for years.
Conclusion
Giving your French house to your children while you keep living in it is entirely possible after Brexit, and for many British families it remains the cleanest way to pass the house on: a donation-partage with a reserved usufruit, signed before a French notaire, freezes the division, cuts the taxable base through the age scale, and uses each child’s 100,000 euro allowance. But the deed only works if it respects the réserve of every child, discloses the gifts of the last fifteen years, values the house honestly at the signing date, and keeps the file London will ask for within seven years. A gift that ignores a child invites a réduction claim within five years of the death; a usufruit given away ends with the donor; a valuation plucked from the air invites a reassessment. Sign the right deed, pay the right tax once, and keep the proof, and the house your children received in life will not have to be fought over after your death.