You bought a stone cottage in the Dordogne or a flat in Paris before Brexit, you still live in Manchester or Edinburgh, and every autumn two French tax bills land in your inbox: the taxe foncière (the annual local property tax paid by the owner) and the taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires (the council-type tax on furnished second homes, universally known by its initials THRS). Since 2023, the second of these bills has grown sharply in thousands of communes that voted a surcharge of up to 60 per cent, and British owners — now third-country nationals without the EU shield — are among the first to feel the increase. This guide explains, for a British reader with no French legal training, what each tax is, who is liable when you live in the United Kingdom, how the bill is calculated, which reliefs survive for a holiday home, and, above all, how to challenge a wrong bill within the strict French time limits. Every decisive proposition below rests on the statute or the court decision cited inline, quoted word for word from the official text.

I. What a British Owner of a French Holiday Home Pays Each Year: Taxe Foncière and Taxe d’Habitation on Second Homes

A. How Much Is the Taxe Foncière on Your French Holiday Home and How Is It Calculated?

The taxe foncière sur les propriétés bâties — the built-property land tax — is the unavoidable annual charge on ownership itself. The rule is stated in one sentence at Article 1380 of the General Tax Code: “La taxe foncière est établie annuellement sur les propriétés bâties sises en France à l’exception de celles qui en sont expressément exonérées par les dispositions du présent code.” In plain English: every built property in France is taxed each year unless the Code expressly exempts it. There is no exemption for living abroad, no discount for being British, and no credit for paying Council Tax in the United Kingdom. If your name is on the title deeds (titre de propriété) on 1 January, you owe the whole year’s charge. That timing rule is itself statutory. Article 1415 of the General Tax Code provides that “La taxe foncière sur les propriétés bâties, la taxe foncière sur les propriétés non bâties et la taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires sont établies pour l’année entière d’après les faits existants au 1er janvier de l’année de l’imposition.” If you sell on 15 January, you still owe the full year; the notary (notaire, the public officer who conveys French property) normally apportions the cost between seller and buyer in the completion statement, but that apportionment is contractual whereas liability to the Treasury is indivisible.

The base of the tax is the valeur locative cadastrale — the notional annual rental value recorded for the property in the land registry, not the rent you could actually obtain on Airbnb. For ordinary houses and flats that value is now set under the reformed method of Article 1498 of the General Tax Code, whose opening words are: “I. – La valeur locative de chaque propriété bâtie ou fraction de propriété bâtie, autres que les locaux mentionnés au I de l’article 1496, que les établissements industriels mentionnés à l’article 1499 et que les locaux dont la valeur locative est déterminée dans les conditions particulières prévues à l’article 1501, est déterminée selon les modalités prévues aux II ou III du présent article.” The machinery that follows — evaluation sectors (secteurs d’évaluation) grouping communes with a homogeneous rental market, tariffs per square metre by category, a weighted surface area, and a location coefficient — matters to you for one practical reason: most successful challenges to the taxe foncière attack the comparison, not the rate. The older case law, still applied, shows the method. In its decision of 21 December 2018, No. 417417, the Conseil d’État (the supreme administrative court) recalled the former wording of the same logic, beginning: “La valeur locative de tous les biens autres que les locaux visés au I de l’article 1496 et que les établissements industriels visés à l’article 1499 est déterminée au moyen de l’une des méthodes indiquées ci-après”, and it upheld the comparison method only where the reference premises (locaux de référence) were genuinely comparable in the commune. The full reasoning is published at Conseil d’État, 21 December 2018, No. 417417. For a British owner this means that if your cottage has been misclassified — recorded as a four-room stone house with central heating when it is a two-room barn conversion with no heating — or if the reference rents used in your commune are drawn from new-build flats in the prefecture town twenty miles away, the base itself is challengeable, and the saving repeats every year because the corrected base carries forward.

The rate is voted locally each spring by the commune and the intercommunal body (établissement public de coopération intercommunale), applied to half of the cadastral rental value after a fixed 50 per cent allowance for costs, plus the waste-collection tax (taxe d’enlèvement des ordures ménagères, known as TEOM) shown on the same bill. You cannot challenge the rate itself before the tax judge — it is a political vote — but you can check that the published rate on your notice matches the rate actually voted and published in the prefecture tables, because a clerical rate error is a straightforward computation error (erreur de calcul) giving a discharge. One genuine relief survives for new building work. Article 1383 of the General Tax Code opens with: “I.-Les constructions nouvelles, reconstructions et additions de construction à usage d’habitation sont exonérées de la taxe foncière sur les propriétés bâties durant les deux années qui suivent celle de leur achèvement.” New residential building, rebuilding and extensions are therefore exempt for the two years after completion, although the commune and the intercommunal body may by deliberation reduce the exempt share to 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90 per cent of the base, and the exemption must be claimed by filing the H1/H2 declaration with the land registry within ninety days of completion. British owners who renovate a ruin often miss that filing and lose two years of relief outright. The impots.gouv.fr portal (the official French tax website) and the service-public.fr factsheets (the official French public-service information site) describe the declaration, and the gov.uk guidance on living in France reminds British nationals that French local taxes remain payable in full despite United Kingdom residence — there is no treaty credit for taxe foncière because it is not an income tax covered by the France–United Kingdom double tax convention.

In practice, the autumn routine for a non-resident owner is therefore simple but unforgiving. The notice (avis d’imposition) appears in your online impots.gouv.fr personal account in September, payment is due in mid-October, and direct debit from a French or SEPA bank account remains the safest method because a late-payment penalty of 10 per cent applies automatically. Keep the title deeds, the H1/H2 filing receipt if you built, photographs proving the state of the property on 1 January, and the commune’s voted-rate table. Those four documents decide 90 per cent of disputes. Readers who hold their French home through a family property company will find the companion analysis of the SCI for British families buying and holding a French home useful, and owners who let the property should read it alongside the firm’s French property-law resources on letting and local taxation.

B. Do You Still Pay Taxe d’Habitation on a Second Home and Which Communes Add the 5 to 60 Per Cent Surcharge?

Many British owners remember that France “abolished” the taxe d’habitation and assume the bill they received must be a mistake. It is not. What was abolished from 2021 to 2023 was the tax on the main home (résidence principale); the tax on second homes was kept and renamed. Article 1407 of the General Tax Code now states: “I. – La taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires est due pour tous les locaux meublés conformément à leur destination d’habitation autre qu’à titre principal, y compris lorsqu’ils sont imposables à la cotisation foncière des entreprises.” If the flat is furnished and kept at your disposal on 1 January — even if you spent only two weeks there that year, even if it stood empty the rest of the time — the THRS is due. The liable person is the occupant with disposal (disposition), which for a second home kept for your own holidays is you, the British owner, not a tenant. Only premises used exclusively for professional purposes escape, and the statutory exclusions for emergency accommodation, school boarding and university residences listed in the same article do not help an ordinary holiday-home owner. A common misunderstanding must be cleared up at once: letting the cottage furnished for three summer months does not convert it into a main home and does not remove the THRS; at best it raises separate questions of rental-income tax and registration, while the THRS remains due because the property was still at your disposal on 1 January.

The painful novelty is the surcharge (majoration). Article 1407 ter of the General Tax Code provides: “I. – Dans les communes mentionnées au B du I de l’article 1406 bis, le conseil municipal peut, par une délibération prise dans les conditions prévues à l’article 1639 A bis, majorer d’un pourcentage compris entre 5 % et 60 % la part lui revenant de la cotisation de taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires due au titre des logements meublés.” In communes classified in the tight-housing zones, the municipal council may therefore add between 5 and 60 per cent to its share of the bill. The classification mechanism sits in Article 232 of the General Tax Code, which defines the tax on vacant dwellings and states: “I. – La taxe annuelle sur les logements vacants est applicable : 1° Dans les communes appartenant à une zone d’urbanisation continue de plus de cinquante mille habitants où il existe un déséquilibre marqué entre l’offre et la demande de logements”, extended by a 2° to smaller communes with a marked imbalance characterised in particular by high rents, high prices or a high proportion of dwellings not used as main homes. The operative list was radically widened by Decree No. 2023-822 of 25 August 2023, which added several thousand communes — including many mountain resorts and coastal villages where British ownership is concentrated — to the surcharge-eligible zone. Owners in Paris, the inner suburbs, Lyon, Bordeaux, much of the Côte d’Azur, the Alps and large parts of Brittany and the Basque coast now routinely face the full 60 per cent voted by their council.

That extension was challenged by second-home owners all the way to the Conseil d’État, which rejected the challenge and thereby confirmed the legal solidity of the surcharge. In Conseil d’État, 8th–3rd chambers combined, 21 December 2023, No. 488601, the Court set out the mechanism as amended by Article 73 of the Finance Act for 2023, recalling that in listed communes the municipal council may “majorer d’un pourcentage compris entre 5 % et 60 % la part lui revenant de la cotisation de taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires et autres locaux meublés non affectés à l’habitation principale due au titre des logements meublés”. The applicants — the federation of mountain-resort residents and four individual second-home owners — argued excessive burden on their ability to pay and manifest error in listing small mountain communes; the Court held the constitutional question lacked seriousness and that the decree correctly applied the statutory imbalance criteria assessed at commune level. The consequence for a British reader is blunt: do not expect a court to strike down the surcharge as such. Winnable cases attack your individual situation — wrong classification as a second home when the property is genuinely your main home, double billing where you also pay in another commune, exemption you were denied — or the arithmetic of your own bill, never the policy of the surcharge itself.

Three statutory discharges from the surcharge, and only three, are written in paragraph II of the same Article 1407 ter, and each is claimed by formal complaint (réclamation) within the deadline of Article R*196-2 of the Tax Procedure Book: first, the person obliged for professional reasons to live somewhere other than the main home, for the dwelling near the workplace; second, the person who was living in the dwelling as a main home before moving permanently into a care institution covered by Article 1414 B; third, any other person who, for a cause beyond their control (pour une cause étrangère à leur volonté), cannot use the dwelling as a main home. The third head is the only one that can occasionally help a British owner — for example a property rendered uninhabitable by a natural disaster or an administrative prohibition on occupation — but a free choice to keep the French house as a holiday home while living in Kent is not a cause beyond your control, and the tax administration applies that reading strictly. Note that these discharges, when granted, are borne by the commune and charged against its state allocations, which explains why town halls examine them with little indulgence. Check before paying whether your commune actually voted the surcharge and at what percentage: the deliberation must have been taken under Article 1639 A bis before the statutory cut-off and published; an out-of-time or unpublished deliberation cannot found the supplement, and that single check has cancelled many inflated bills.

II. How a British Non-Resident Pays Without Penalty and Challenges a Wrong Bill Before the French Tax Judge

A. How Do You Pay French Property Tax From the United Kingdom and Which Paperwork Proves Your Case?

As a United Kingdom resident you are taxed exactly like a French second-home owner for these two local taxes; Brexit changed your residence-permit and visa position, not your rating liability. Both notices arrive in the autumn in your impots.gouv.fr account — the taxe foncière typically at the end of August for payment in mid-October, the THRS in November for payment in mid-December — and paper notices are increasingly the exception. If you never created the online account, or if it is still attached to an old French address you left a decade ago, create or recover access now through the non-resident assistance service (service d’assistance aux non-résidents) before the deadline, because “I never received the bill” is not a ground for discharge once publication of the assessment roll (mise en recouvrement du rôle) is proved. Payment from a British bank is possible by credit card on the impots.gouv.fr site within the published ceiling, but a SEPA direct debit (prélèvement) monthly or at maturity from a French or other euro-area account remains the only method that protects you against postal delay and automatically adjusts to the corrected amount if your complaint succeeds. Keep proof of every payment: after a successful claim the Treasury repays with statutory interest, but only against documented payment.

The file that wins complaints is assembled on 1 January, not in October. Because both taxes are, under Article 1415 quoted above, assessed for the whole year by reference to the position on 1 January of the tax year, everything turns on the position at New Year: who owned, who occupied, whether the dwelling was furnished, whether building work was complete, whether the commune’s surcharge deliberation existed. Photograph each room showing furnished or unfurnished state, keep the electricity and water consumption records showing vacancy or occupation, keep the lease if a tenant occupied on 1 January (because a let unfurnished year-round dwelling is the tenant’s THRS problem as occupant, while an empty dwelling kept at your disposal is yours), keep the completion certificate (procès-verbal de réception) and the H1/H2 filing for new work, and download the commune’s rate and surcharge deliberations from the prefecture website or the town-hall notice board. British owners should also keep the gov.uk pages they relied on — for instance the Foreign Office travel and living-in-France guidance — not because they are law, but to show good faith where a penalty for bad faith (mauvaise foi) or Wilful neglect is at stake; good faith does not erase the principal but it routinely removes the surcharge for deliberate default.

Two traps specific to British owners deserve emphasis. First, the 90-day declaration duty when you buy, build or convert: the land registry (service de publicité foncière) does not learn of your extension from the estate agent’s brochure, and without your H1/H2 the administration keeps the old base or denies the Article 1383 new-build relief. Second, the change-of-address trap: if the tax office still writes to a French address where you no longer live, time still runs from publication of the roll, and the complaint deadline below is a guillotine. Update the address in your impots.gouv.fr profile and designate a French contact address for service if you spend long periods unreachable. Owners who bought through an English will structure or who pass the house to children should keep this article with the firm’s guide to choosing English law for a French house and protecting children, because the property-tax file and the succession file share the same title deeds, valuations and occupancy proofs, and an error in one often reveals an error in the other.

B. How Do You Challenge an Excessive Taxe Foncière or an Unfair Second-Home Surcharge and Win?

French local-tax litigation is written, reasoned and winnable, but it obeys a procedure that forgives no improvisation. The foundation is jurisdictional. Article L.190 of the Tax Procedure Book states: “Les réclamations relatives aux impôts, contributions, droits, taxes, redevances, soultes et pénalités de toute nature, établis ou recouvrés par les agents de l’administration, relèvent de la juridiction contentieuse lorsqu’elles tendent à obtenir soit la réparation d’erreurs commises dans l’assiette ou le calcul des impositions, soit le bénéfice d’un droit résultant d’une disposition législative ou réglementaire.” A wrong cadastral classification, a wrong surface, a forgotten new-build relief, a THRS charged on an unfurnished ruin, a surcharge applied in a commune that never validly voted it — each is an error in the base or the calculation, or the denial of a statutory right, and each belongs to the contentious judge (juge contentieux), ultimately the administrative court (tribunal administratif). What does not belong there is a grievance about fairness in the abstract: the judge applies the statute, and since the Conseil d’État’s No. 488601 decision of December 2023 the surcharge policy itself is settled law.

The deadline is the guillotine. Article R*196-2 of the Tax Procedure Book requires: “Pour être recevables, les réclamations relatives aux impôts directs locaux et aux taxes annexes doivent être présentées à l’administration des impôts au plus tard le 31 décembre de l’année suivant celle, selon le cas : a) De la mise en recouvrement du rôle, de la notification d’un avis de mise en recouvrement ou de l’émission d’un titre de perception”. For the autumn 2026 bills, the complaint must therefore reach the tax office no later than 31 December 2027; a letter posted on 30 December but received on 3 January is late, whereas an online complaint filed in your impots.gouv.fr messaging space on 31 December at 23:50 with its acknowledgement of receipt is in time. File online wherever possible, attach every exhibit as a numbered PDF, state precisely whether you seek total discharge (décharge) or reduction (réduction), quantify the corrected base you assert, and cite the article number: 1380, 1383, 1407, 1407 ter, 1415 or 1498. A complaint that says “the bill is too high” without a legal ground and a figure is routinely rejected as unreasoned. The administration must then decide within six months. Article R*198-10 of the Tax Procedure Book provides: “La direction générale des finances publiques ou la direction générale des douanes et droits indirects, selon le cas, statue sur les réclamations dans le délai de six mois suivant la date de leur présentation.” If it cannot decide in time it must warn you before expiry and state the additional period, capped at three months, and any total or partial rejection must be reasoned (“En cas de rejet total ou partiel de la réclamation, la décision doit être motivée”). Silence for six months without warning is an implied rejection you may take to court; an unreasoned express rejection is already vulnerable on that ground alone.

The grounds that actually succeed, in order of frequency, are these. First, occupancy errors on the THRS: the ruin without furniture taxed as a furnished second home, the dwelling let unfurnished year-round to a tenant taxed to you instead of the occupant, the main home mislabelled because you split time between London and Lyon — each falls under Article 1407 quoted above, which taxes only furnished premises kept otherwise than as a main home. Second, base errors on the foncière: wrong consistence (consistance, the physical description), wrong category, reference rents borrowed from an incomparable sector, new-build relief omitted — Articles 1380, 1383, 1415 and 1498 above, with the comparison reasoning of Conseil d’État No. 417417 at Conseil d’État, 21 December 2018, No. 417417 as your authority. Third, surcharge errors: commune not in the Article 232 list, deliberation missing, late or unpublished, rate applied above the voted percentage, or one of the three Article 1407 ter discharges wrongly refused — with Conseil d’État No. 488601 at Conseil d’État, 21 December 2023, No. 488601 proving both that the scheme is lawful and exactly what the administration must show to apply it. Fourth, computation errors: rate on the notice different from the voted rate, TEOM charged twice, 10 per cent late penalty maintained after the principal is discharged. In each case quantify, exhibit and cite; the judge cannot guess your figure.

If the administration rejects or ignores your complaint, you have two months from notification (or from the implied rejection) to petition the administrative court of the property’s location — for a Dordogne cottage, Bordeaux; for a Paris flat, Paris — with a stamped application (requête) that repeats the ground, joins the complaint and the rejection, and states the exact sum claimed with interest. Ask the court for a stay of payment (sursis de paiement) only with a guarantee, because the complaint itself does not suspend recovery: without a formal deferral the bailiff (commissaire de justice, formerly huissier) may still pursue while you litigate, and British bank accounts with a French branch presence are not beyond reach under European enforcement instruments that survive Brexit for tax claims through national law. Conversely, once the court discharges, the Treasury repays the principal with moratory interest and must correct the base for the following years — the point many owners miss is to ask expressly for the carry-forward correction (report de la correction sur les rôles ultérieurs), without which you will be relitigating the same classification error every autumn. Throughout, United Kingdom tax is irrelevant to the French judge: Council Tax, UK income tax on rents and UK capital-gains tax neither increase nor reduce the French local taxes, and the France–United Kingdom treaty offers no credit against them, because Articles 6 and 24 of that treaty allocate immovable-property income and capital while leaving local rating charges where they fall — on the French property itself.

Conclusion

A British owner who lives in the United Kingdom and keeps a French holiday home owes two local taxes in full: the taxe foncière on ownership, established annually unless expressly exempted and fixed for the whole year by the position on 1 January, and the taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires on any furnished dwelling kept otherwise than as a main home, now increased by a municipal surcharge of 5 to 60 per cent in every commune classified in the tight-housing zones. The surcharge policy has survived its constitutional and administrative challenge before the Conseil d’État in December 2023; individual bills remain challengeable for occupancy error, base error, missing relief, invalid deliberation or arithmetic mistake, by reasoned online complaint no later than 31 December of the following year and, if necessary, by petition to the administrative court within two months of rejection. Assemble the 1 January file now — deeds, photographs, consumption records, H1/H2 receipts, the commune’s voted rates — pay by SEPA direct debit so a dispute never becomes a penalty, and plead the article number with a quantified correction. The autumn bill is then no longer a fatality but a verifiable assessment, and each correction carried forward reduces every future autumn after it.