Your French company has stopped trading, you live abroad, and you do not want to close it yet. Perhaps the project is paused, the market never took off, or you are waiting for a better moment to restart. French law offers a middle path between keeping a loss-making structure running and dissolving it: the mise en sommeil, the temporary cessation of activity. The company survives, its legal personality continues, but it stops all commercial activity for a defined period. For a founder based in London, New York, Dubai or Singapore, this solution can preserve the company number, the bank history and the brand while cutting operating costs to a minimum.

It is not, however, a way to make the company disappear or to freeze every obligation. Accounts must still be prepared, tax returns must still be filed, the director (président of an SAS, gérant of a SARL) remains in office and affiliated to a social security scheme, and a strict two-year clock starts running: at the end of it, you must restart, dissolve or sell. Miss the deadline and the court clerk (greffier) can strike the company off the register on his own motion. This article explains, step by step, how to put a French SAS or SARL to sleep from abroad, what it really costs while dormant, and how to manage the lease, the staff, the bank and the tax filings during the sleep. It complements our complete guide to setting up a company in France as a foreign founder, from bank account and Kbis to VAT and first hire, which describes the life of an active company; the present guide covers the opposite situation, when activity stops but the company stays alive.

I. Putting your French company to sleep from abroad: the procedure that protects you

A. Who decides, where to file within one month, and what publicity follows

The decision belongs to the legal representative of the company: the président of an SAS (société par actions simplifiée, the flexible joint-stock company most foreign founders choose), the gérant of a SARL (société à responsabilité limitée, the limited liability company with stricter statutory rules), or the board where one exists. A shareholders’ meeting is not compulsory unless the articles of association (statuts) require one, but holding one is often wise when several shareholders are involved, because dormancy changes the use of their investment and the decision should be documented. Whatever the internal process, the decisive step is external: the temporary cessation must be declared, because French company law treats it as a registrable event, not as a private pause.

Since January 2023, every company formality in France goes through a single online portal, the guichet unique (company formalities desk) operated at formalites.entreprises.gouv.fr, which replaced the old network of business formalities centres. From abroad, the legal representative files there with an electronic signature; no trip to France is required. The filing is an inscription modificative, an amending entry on the company’s record. Article R. 123-66 of the Commercial Code (Code de commerce) sets the time limit in plain terms: “Toute personne morale immatriculée demande, par l’intermédiaire de l’organisme unique mentionné à l’article R. 123-1 , une inscription modificative dans le mois de tout fait ou acte rendant nécessaire la rectification ou le complément des énonciations prévues aux articles R. 123-53 et suivants .” In other words, you have one month from the decision to suspend activity to file the amending entry. The same obligation expressly covers the end of trading: article R. 123-69 provides that the filing duty includes “La cessation totale ou partielle d’activité dans le ressort du tribunal de l’immatriculation principale, même en l’absence de dissolution”, which means the declaration is due even though the company is not dissolved.

Two practical points deserve attention before filing. First, if the company operates secondary establishments (établissements secondaires, for example a branch office registered separately), those establishments must be closed on the portal before the dormancy itself is declared. Second, the declaration automatically produces publicity: the entry is amended in the National Register of Companies (Registre national des entreprises, RNE) and, for commercial companies, in the Trade and Companies Register (Registre du commerce et des sociétés, RCS), and an insertion is published in the Official Bulletin of Civil and Commercial Announcements (Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales, BODACC), the official gazette through which third parties, suppliers, banks and future contracting partners learn of the situation. Article R. 123-263 organises this publicity chain for the declarations companies file. No announcement in a legal gazette (journal d’annonces légales) is required for the temporary cessation itself, which keeps the cost of the formality modest: registry and BODACC fees only, typically a few dozen euros, plus any fee charged by the professional who files on your behalf.

Once registered, the company’s Kbis extract (the Kbis, the official identity card of a French company issued by the court clerk) bears the mention of temporary total cessation of activity. That mention is visible to banks, landlords and business partners, and it is also what protects you: a regularly published dormancy proves that the company stopped trading on a given date, which matters for dating liabilities, for tax, and for showing good faith if a creditor later questions the timeline. The company keeps its SIREN number (the unique identification number issued by the statistics institute), its bank accounts stay open, and its legal personality is untouched: only the activity stops.

One boundary is absolute, and foreign directors sometimes discover it too late. A company that cannot pay its debts as they fall due with its available assets, meaning it is in cessation des paiements (the state of insolvency defined by commercial law), has no right to dormancy: it must seek the opening of collective proceedings. A recent illustration comes from the Commercial Court of Melun, which examined a company with no activity whose director planned to put it to sleep while tax debts suggested insolvency: “Attendu qu’il résulte du rapport d’enquête que la société est actuellement sans activité, son dirigeant envisageant de la mettre en sommeil dans l’attente de démarrer une future activité, et que cette dernière est en état de cessation des paiements au regard des sommes dues au Service des impôts des entreprises de Melun” (Commercial Court of Melun, sitting in chambers, 1 April 2026, case no. 2026P00005). The court did not authorise a quiet sleep; it adjourned the case and ordered an updated investigation report, keeping the company on the insolvency track. The lesson is direct: check solvency before filing for dormancy, and if creditors are unpaid and cash is gone, talk to a lawyer about safeguard, restructuring or liquidation proceedings instead, because a dormancy filing never cures insolvency and never stops creditors from acting.

B. What the two-year clock really means, and the strike-off risk if you do nothing

Dormancy is temporary by design. For a company (as opposed to a sole proprietorship, which follows a shorter one-year renewable regime), the maximum duration of the temporary cessation is two years. The tax administration states the rule plainly on its official website: beyond the maximum duration of temporary cessation of activity, which is two years for a company, the court clerk may act to have the company struck off. The two-year period runs from the entry of the cessation on the register, not from the internal decision, which is another reason to file promptly: a late filing shortens nothing, but it exposes the director to a gap during which the company traded, or appeared to trade, without a published status.

The sanction for letting the clock run out is the radiation d’office, the striking off by the court clerk on his own motion. Article R. 123-130 of the Commercial Code provides: “Lorsque le greffier qui a procédé à l’immatriculation principale d’une personne morale pouvant faire l’objet d’une dissolution constate, au terme d’un délai de deux ans après la mention au registre de la cessation totale d’activité de cette personne, l’absence de toute inscription modificative relative à une reprise d’activité, il peut procéder, après en avoir informé la personne morale par lettre recommandée avec demande d’avis de réception adressée à son siège social, à la radiation d’office de l’intéressée. Toute radiation d’office effectuée en vertu du présent article est portée à la connaissance du ministère public.” Three features of this text matter in practice. First, the clerk acts only after informing the company by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt sent to its registered office (siège social): if you moved the registered office without updating the register, you may never receive the warning, which is why the registered address must remain valid and monitored throughout the sleep. Many foreign founders use a domiciliation company (société de domiciliation, a licensed provider of registered addresses); keep that contract alive during dormancy or the warning letter goes nowhere. Second, the striking off is reported to the public prosecutor, so it is not a discreet administrative cleanup. Third, being struck off does not liquidate the company properly: assets, debts and guarantees do not vanish, and directors can face the worst of both worlds, a company that officially no longer exists but whose liabilities survive.

If the striking off happens, a remedy exists but it is framed by short time limits. Article R. 123-138 states: “Lorsqu’une personne a été radiée d’office en application de la présente section, elle peut, dès lors qu’elle démontre qu’elle a régularisé sa situation, demander au greffier de rapporter cette radiation. Dans le délai de quinze jours à compter de la demande, il procède au rapport ou remet une décision motivée de refus au demandeur contre récépissé ou la lui adresse par lettre recommandée avec demande d’avis de réception.” The same article adds that the applicant can refer the supervising judge of the register (juge commis à la surveillance du registre) to challenge a refusal or a silence within fifteen days of the notified decision. In plain terms: regularise first, ask the clerk to reverse the striking off, and if he refuses or stays silent, seize the judge within fifteen days. Do not wait months before reacting; the procedure rewards the director who moves fast and punishes the one who discovers the striking off a year later when a bank freezes the account.

Well before that extreme outcome, the law offers three orderly exits at the end of the sleep, and the director must choose one: restart the activity, close the company definitively, or sell it. Restarting (reprise d’activité) requires a new amending filing on the company formalities portal, mirroring the entry filing; the company is then reactivated with the same legal personality and the same history. Closing definitively means voting the dissolution (dissolution) in a shareholders’ meeting, appointing a liquidator (liquidateur amiable, usually the director himself), and running a solvent liquidation: sell the assets, pay the creditors, approve the liquidation accounts and close. Article L. 237-2 of the Commercial Code frames this phase: “La société est en liquidation dès l’instant de sa dissolution pour quelque cause que ce soit sauf dans le cas prévu au troisième alinéa de l’article 1844-5 du code civil. Sa dénomination sociale est suivie de la mention ” société en liquidation “. La personnalité morale de la société subsiste pour les besoins de la liquidation, jusqu’à la clôture de celle-ci. La dissolution d’une société ne produit ses effets à l’égard des tiers qu’à compter de la date à laquelle elle est publiée au registre du commerce et des sociétés.” Once liquidation closes, the radiation of the dissolved company is entered “dans le délai d’un mois à compter de la publication de la clôture de la liquidation” on the liquidator’s declaration, as article R. 123-265 requires, so even the final step has its own one-month filing deadline. Selling, the third option, means transferring the shares (cession de titres) or the business itself (fonds de commerce, the bundle of assets, lease rights and goodwill through which the activity runs); the tax and social consequences differ between the two routes and should be modelled before signing anything.

A final warning closes this procedural part, and it concerns honesty. Dormancy never erases debts, and using it as a screen against creditors can backfire severely under the action paulienne, the creditor’s action to have acts done in fraud of their rights declared unenforceable against them. The Court of Cassation recalls the governing principle without ambiguity: “Il se déduit de ces textes et de ce principe que, lorsque la fraude du débiteur a empêché les créanciers d’exercer l’action paulienne à compter du dépôt d’un acte de cession de parts en annexe au registre du commerce et des sociétés, le point de départ de cette action est reporté au jour où les créanciers ont effectivement connu l’existence de l’acte” (Court of Cassation, Third Civil Chamber, 12 November 2020, appeal no. 19-17.156, published in the Bulletin, ECLI:FR:CCASS:2020:C300841). The mechanism applied there to a concealed transfer of shares expresses the broader maxim that fraud corrupts everything (la fraude corrompt tout): hiding assets, siphoning cash or organising insolvency behind a dormant façade exposes the director to personal claims. A clean, published dormancy of a solvent company raises no such issue; an opaque sleep designed to defeat creditors does.

II. Living with a dormant company: costs, taxes and contracts that continue

A. Accounts, taxes and social charges that survive dormancy

The most common misunderstanding among foreign founders is that a sleeping company costs nothing. It costs less than an active one, often much less, but several obligations survive, and ignoring them turns a cheap pause into an expensive mess of penalties, surcharges and forced strike-off. The logic is consistent: dormancy suspends trading, not the company’s legal existence, so everything attached to existence continues.

Accounting comes first. The director of a dormant company must still keep books, count the assets and have the annual accounts approved and filed. Article L. 123-12 of the Commercial Code imposes the foundation: “Toute personne physique ou morale ayant la qualité de commerçant doit procéder à l’enregistrement comptable des mouvements affectant le patrimoine de son entreprise. Ces mouvements sont enregistrés chronologiquement. Elle doit contrôler par inventaire, au moins une fois tous les douze mois, l’existence et la valeur des éléments actifs et passifs du patrimoine de l’entreprise. Elle doit établir des comptes annuels à la clôture de l’exercice au vu des enregistrements comptables et de l’inventaire. Ces comptes annuels comprennent le bilan, le compte de résultat et une annexe, qui forment un tout indissociable.” The annual meeting that approves the accounts must still be held, and the approved accounts must still be filed with the court clerk; only the figures change, with turnover at or near zero. From abroad, this means keeping an accountant (expert-comptable, the chartered accounting professional) on a reduced dormant-company fee rather than terminating the engagement: the savings come from simpler books, not from no books. Failure to file accounts exposes the company to registry fines and, over time, to the presumption of neglect that makes every later step, reactivation, sale or liquidation, harder and slower.

Corporate tax follows the same pattern: the return remains due, but it reports nothing. A company subject to corporate income tax (impôt sur les sociétés, IS, the French corporate profits tax) must file its annual results return even with no turnover, indicating nil amounts. Article 223 of the General Tax Code (Code général des impôts, CGI) fixes the deadline: “Toutefois, la déclaration du bénéfice ou du déficit est faite dans les trois mois de la clôture de l’exercice. Si l’exercice est clos le 31 décembre ou si aucun exercice n’est clos au cours d’une année, la déclaration est à déposer au plus tard le deuxième jour ouvré suivant le 1er mai.” A dormant company therefore files a nil return within three months of its year-end, or by the second working day after 1 May for a calendar-year company. Companies and partnerships taxed under the income-tax transparency regime (impôt sur le revenu, IR, with business profits taxed in the BIC or BNC categories on the partners’ returns) follow the same nil-reporting logic on their own calendar. Value added tax (taxe sur la valeur ajoutée, TVA, the French VAT) requires no payment with no taxable transactions, and the official business information service confirms that a sleeping company is dispensed from VAT declarations and payments during the sleep; keep the VAT number alive, however, because reactivation with a closed VAT account creates needless friction with the tax office (service des impôts des entreprises).

The local business tax deserves a closer look because it surprises many foreigners. The cotisation foncière des entreprises (CFE), the French local tax due on business premises and assessed yearly by municipalities, is in principle owed by anyone carrying on a habitual professional activity: article 1447 of the General Tax Code states that “La cotisation foncière des entreprises est due chaque année par les personnes physiques ou morales, les entités non dotées de la personnalité morale ou les fiduciaires pour leur activité exercée en vertu d’un contrat de fiducie qui exercent à titre habituel une activité professionnelle non salariée.” During dormancy, the official business information service explains that the sleeping company pays the CFE during the first twelve months of inactivity and is exempt beyond twelve months, and that companies with turnover of 5,000 euros or less are exempt in any event ( official dormancy fact sheet, tax section ). Concretely, budget one more year of CFE after the sleep begins, often a few hundred euros depending on the municipality, then nothing until reactivation. Paris founders should note that Paris CFE minimum bases are among the highest in France, so that final year can cost more in the capital than in a small town; it is still far cheaper than a year of rent, salaries and full accounting.

Social security is the last recurring cost, and its amount depends entirely on the director’s status. France knows two main regimes for company directors. A gérant holding a majority of a SARL belongs to the self-employed regime (TNS, travailleur non salarié): he remains affiliated during the sleep and keeps paying contributions, calculated on a minimum flat basis covering daily allowances, basic pension and disability-death risks, even with zero remuneration. A président of SAS, treated as an assimilated employee (assimilé salarié) for social security, pays contributions only on actual remuneration: with no salary during dormancy, no contributions are due, but no new pension quarters or health coverage accrue either, a point that matters for founders who relied on the French system for coverage. The exemption from contributions granted to new businesses under the ACRE scheme (aide aux créateurs et repreneurs d’entreprise) is preserved during the temporary cessation, which slightly softens the first year. As for staff, the official guidance is blunt: contributions for any remaining employees must still be paid during the sleep, which leads directly to the human-resources question examined below, because paying a full team for an activity that produces nothing is rarely sustainable beyond a few weeks.

B. Lease, employees, bank and partners: the contracts you must actively manage

Dormancy freezes trading; it does not freeze contracts. Every agreement the company signed before the sleep keeps producing effects, and the two years of inactivity test each of them. The founders who sleep well are those who renegotiated, terminated or secured each contract at the outset instead of discovering the problem at reactivation.

The commercial lease (bail commercial, the protective 3/6/9-year lease regime for shops, offices and workshops) is usually the largest fixed cost and the greatest legal risk. A dormant tenant may keep the premises: nothing in the dormancy forces surrender of the keys, and keeping a Paris address can be commercially useful for the restart. But many leases require the tenant to exploit the premises personally and without interruption, and prolonged closure can then trigger termination or a refusal to renew. The Paris Court of Appeal gave a textbook illustration in a case where the lease obliged the tenant to operate continuously: the court recalled that “L’article L. 145-41 du code de commerce dispose que toute clause insérée dans le bail commercial prévoyant la résiliation de plein droit ne produit effet qu’un mois après un commandement de payer demeuré infructueux”, noted that “l’article 2 obligeant le preneur à exploiter constamment dans les lieux loués une activité de « vins, liqueurs, traiteur- vente de journaux » à l’exclusion de toutes autres” had been breached, and therefore “Constate à la date du 10 avril 2023 l’acquisition de la clause résolutoire prévue au bail commercial conclu par les parties”, ordering the occupant’s eviction (Paris Court of Appeal, Division 1 Chamber 2, 27 June 2024, case no. RG 23/19044). The statute behind that outcome protects tenants as much as landlords, and its wording is worth knowing by heart: “Toute clause insérée dans le bail prévoyant la résiliation de plein droit ne produit effet qu’un mois après un commandement demeuré infructueux. Le commandement doit, à peine de nullité, mentionner ce délai.” No termination by operation of law without a formal demand giving one month to comply, and the demand is void if it omits that time limit; good faith in invoking the clause is also required. Before declaring dormancy, reread the exploitation, assignment and insurance clauses of your lease with these texts in hand. If continuous operation is genuinely required and no activity is possible, three pragmatic routes exist: negotiate a written tolerance with the landlord, terminate the lease cleanly and move the registered office to a domiciliation address, or sublet where the lease allows it. In Paris and the inner suburbs, where commercial rents make an empty shop ruinously expensive, the domiciliation route is frequent: the company keeps a prestigious Paris registered address for a modest monthly fee while the lease liability ends.

Employees are the second knot. Employment contracts are not suspended by the company’s dormancy: salaries, or at least the applicable guarantees, remain due, and social declarations continue. Keeping even one employee with no work to give quickly becomes a cash drain and a management headache, since the employer must still provide work and pay wages. Depending on headcount and cash, the realistic options are the partial-activity scheme (activité partielle, the publicly compensated short-time work mechanism), a negotiated agreed termination (rupture conventionnelle, the mutual separation procedure with statutory severance and unemployment rights), or economic dismissal (licenciement économique) where the legal conditions are met, each with its own procedure, notice and cost. What dormancy forbids is improvisation: stop paying wages without a procedure and the labour courts (conseil de prud’hommes, the French employment tribunal) will treat the arrears, and possibly a constructive dismissal, as the employer’s fault. Handle the staffing question in the same month as the dormancy filing, not six months later when cash has run out.

The bank relationship, third, survives but changes tone. The corporate account stays open, account fees and any loan instalments continue, and the bank sees the BODACC insertion and the annotated Kbis. French banks periodically review professional accounts with abnormal dormancy markers; expect questions about the origin of any incoming funds during the sleep and about the director’s plans. Keep the bank informed proactively, maintain a positive balance covering fees, and remember that personal guarantees (cautionnements) given by the founder for company loans or leases survive dormancy entirely: the bank can still call on them. Suppliers and clients should receive a short factual notice that the company has temporarily ceased activity, with the BODACC reference, so that no one contracts in ignorance; silence breeds disputes about apparent authority when a former manager keeps signing in the company’s name.

For Paris-based companies, two local notes complete the picture. First, the competent registry is the clerk’s office of the Paris Commercial Court, reached only through the national single portal, with Paris processing times that lengthen in summer and December: file early in those periods. Second, Paris commercial landlords are experienced litigators of the continuous-exploitation clause, and Paris rents make vacancy costly, so the lease decision, keep, renegotiate or surrender, should be taken with particular care in the capital, ideally before the dormancy filing rather than after a bailiff’s demand arrives.

Conclusion

Mise en sommeil suits the foreign founder whose French company is solvent but purposeless for a while: one decision, one online filing within a month, a published BODACC notice, then up to two years of cheap legal existence during which accounts are still prepared, nil tax returns are still filed, the director stays affiliated and the contracts are actively managed. The two-year guillotine structures everything: diary the expiry date on the day of filing, choose in advance between restart, dissolution with an orderly liquidation, or sale, and never let the clerk’s registered letter be the first reminder. Used this way, dormancy preserves what took months to build, the SIREN number, the bank history, the lease rights, the brand, for a fraction of the cost of an active company. Used as a hiding place for debts or as an excuse to abandon filings, it produces strike-off, personal claims and litigation. Solvent, published and monitored, the sleeping company wakes up clean; neglected, it does not wake up at all.