You delivered the goods to Lyon, or you finished the consulting mission for the Paris client, and the invoice has been sitting unpaid for two months. Your French customer answers your reminders with polite delays, then stops answering at all. From London, New York or Berlin you wonder whether French law gives you real leverage, which court can hear a foreign seller, and whether chasing a 12,000-euro invoice from abroad will cost more than it recovers. This guide answers in plain English, with the exact texts and court decisions behind every step.

Every French acronym in this article is decoded on first use. The TVA is the taxe sur la valeur ajoutée, the French value added tax. The BCE is the Banque centrale européenne, the European Central Bank, usually called the ECB in English. The greffe is the registry office of a French court, the counter where companies file documents and where creditors lodge court applications. A commissaire de justice is the enforcement officer who serves court papers and seizes assets, the profession formed by the merger of the former huissiers de justice and commissaires-priseurs judiciaires. The Kbis is the official registration certificate of a French company, its identity card issued by the Registre du commerce et des sociétés, the trade and companies register. CGV means conditions générales de vente, general terms and conditions of sale.

Short version of the whole procedure. French commercial law fixes maximum payment deadlines, and once the deadline shown on your invoice passes, late penalties run automatically with no reminder needed, plus a flat 40-euro recovery fee. A formal demand letter called a mise en demeure starts legal interest and proves the debtor was warned. If the debt is contractual and its amount is fixed, you can ask the court for a fast payment order called an injonction de payer without a hearing, serve it within three months, and enforce it if the debtor stays silent for one month. If the debtor objects, the case becomes an ordinary trial and the judge decides everything from scratch. Each stage below gives the deadline, the cost trigger and the proof to keep, so a foreign creditor can run the file from abroad through a French lawyer and a commissaire de justice.

I. Your French invoice is overdue: which payment deadline applies and how much does the delay pay you

A. How late is your French customer: the 30-day rule, the 60-day cap and the 45-day end-of-month deal

Everything starts with the date the money was legally due, because penalties and interest run from that date and not from your first reminder. The reference text is article L. 441-10 of the Commercial Code. Unless your contract says otherwise, the payment period cannot exceed thirty days after the date the goods were received or the service was performed: “le délai de règlement des sommes dues ne peut dépasser trente jours après la date de réception des marchandises ou d’exécution de la prestation demandée.” That default surprises many foreign sellers whose home markets tolerate ninety-day habits. In France the thirty-day rule is the starting point, and any longer period must be agreed.

Parties can agree a longer period, but the statute caps it. The agreed period cannot exceed sixty days after the invoice date. As an alternative, the parties can agree a maximum of forty-five days end of month after the invoice date, provided that period is expressly written into the contract and is not a manifest abuse against the creditor. For periodic invoices within the meaning of the VAT rules, the agreed period cannot exceed forty-five days after the invoice date. Check your contract and your invoice before anything else: the due date printed on the invoice is the trigger for everything that follows, and a missing or vague due date weakens the whole file. Your CGV should state payment terms clearly, because article L. 441-1 of the Commercial Code makes settlement conditions part of the general terms that the seller communicates to professional buyers, and those terms form the single foundation of the commercial negotiation.

One drafting warning for foreign sellers. The forty-five-day end-of-month option must be expressly stipulated and must not constitute a manifest abuse toward the creditor, and acceptance or verification procedures for checking conformity of goods or services are themselves capped in principle at thirty days from delivery. A French buyer who imposes a sixty-day goods inspection followed by sixty-day payment terms is building exactly the kind of combined delay the statute polices. If your French distributor sends you its own purchasing conditions with ninety-day terms, do not sign them without negotiation: once accepted, the agreed term binds you, and only a manifest abuse finding can undo it. Keep the signed contract, the delivery slips or acceptance reports, and the invoice showing the due date, because the fast court procedure described below only works for a debt whose amount is fixed and documented.

Note on the current version of the text. On the date of this article article L. 441-10 of the Commercial Code is in force, but Légifrance flags a deferred repeal connected with a recodification taking effect on 1 January 2027. Recheck the current wording on Légifrance before you act, and ask your counsel to confirm which article number carries the rule on the day you send your demand. The substance described here, maximum deadlines, automatic penalties and the flat fee, is the settled core of French payment discipline, but citations must always match the version in force.

Practical checkpoint before moving on. Pull three documents: the contract or accepted quote showing the agreed term, the proof of delivery or performance showing the starting date, and the invoice showing its issue date and due date. If those three dates line up and the due date has passed, the customer is late as a matter of law and the meter is already running. The next section computes what the meter shows.

B. How to calculate French late penalties: ECB rate plus 10 points, automatic penalties and the 40-euro recovery fee

French late penalties are contractual-looking but statutory in their minimum. Your settlement conditions must state the penalty rate and the flat recovery fee, and article L. 441-10 of the Commercial Code provides the default: unless otherwise agreed, and no agreement may set a rate below three times the legal interest rate, the penalty rate equals the interest rate applied by the European Central Bank to its most recent refinancing operation plus 10 percentage points: “ce taux est égal au taux d’intérêt appliqué par la Banque centrale européenne à son opération de refinancement la plus récente majoré de 10 points de pourcentage.” The applicable rate is the one in force on 1 January for the first half of the year and the one in force on 1 July for the second half. With an ECB refinancing rate of, say, 2 percent, the French penalty rate would be 12 percent per year, which explains why French penalties are a genuine weapon rather than symbolic interest.

The decisive sentence of article L. 441-10 of the Commercial Code for creditors is this one, quoted word for word: “Les pénalités de retard sont exigibles sans qu’un rappel soit nécessaire.” Penalties are due with no reminder needed. You do not have to send a warning before they start running; they run by operation of law from the day after the due date shown on the invoice. The Cour de cassation, the French supreme court for civil and commercial matters, applies this rule strictly. In a judgment of 3 October 2018 on a dispute between two commercial companies over unpaid goods, Commercial Chamber, appeal no. 16-28.075, the Court rejected the debtor’s challenge and left intact a court of appeal ruling that the price of 29,487.85 euros carried interest at the ECB refinancing rate plus 10 points from the sixty-first day after each invoice, holding that penalties under the commercial payment provisions run even where the debtor received no reminder. The debtor could not escape by arguing it had received no warning. For a foreign seller, the lesson is operational: invoice correctly, show the due date, and the penalties accrue even while you are still being polite.

On top of the percentage penalties, every professional in late payment owes the creditor a flat recovery fee fixed by decree, plus any proven additional recovery costs. Article D. 441-5 of the Commercial Code states, word for word: “Le montant de l’indemnité forfaitaire pour frais de recouvrement prévue au II de l’article L. 441-10 est fixé à 40 euros.” Forty euros per unpaid invoice is automatic, and if your actual recovery costs exceed that amount, the statute lets you claim a supplementary indemnity with proof, such as lawyer and enforcement-officer fees. The only statutory exception concerns debtors under safeguard, reorganisation or liquidation proceedings, where the freeze on payments blocks these extras. Outside insolvency, add the 40 euros to every overdue invoice in your demand letter; French debtors and their counsel recognise the line immediately.

A worked example keeps the negotiation honest. Take a 20,000-euro invoice due on 15 March, still unpaid on 15 September, with settlement conditions pointing to the statutory rate. Penalties run from 16 March at the ECB rate plus 10 points applicable to that half-year, without any reminder, plus the 40-euro flat fee, plus documented extra costs. Six months at around 12 percent on 20,000 euros is roughly 1,200 euros of penalties alone, before costs. That arithmetic is why a French debtor who ignores reminders often moves quickly once a lawyer’s letter shows the computation. Always look up the current ECB refinancing rate rather than copying a rate from an old article; the rate changes and your computation must use the rate in force on 1 January or 1 July of the year concerned.

Two related civil-law rules complete the picture. If your contract contains a penalty clause, a fixed sum for breach, article 1231-5 of the Civil Code lets the judge reduce or increase it where it is manifestly excessive or derisory, and no contract term can strip the judge of that power. Do not confuse the commercial late penalties above with ordinary legal interest: article 1231-7 of the Civil Code governs interest on court-awarded compensation, while your commercial penalties run from the invoice due date. State both bases in your demand: statutory commercial penalties plus flat fee from the due date, without prejudice to court interest later.

II. How to force a French customer to pay from abroad: demand letter, fast court order and seizure

A. Will a formal demand letter unlock payment: mise en demeure, proof file and the right French court

Penalties may run automatically, but a formal demand letter remains the single most cost-effective step in the file. The mise en demeure is the formal notice demanding payment, served by a letter or act that clearly calls on the debtor to pay. Article 1344 of the Civil Code states, word for word: “Le débiteur est mis en demeure de payer soit par une sommation ou un acte portant interpellation suffisante, soit, si le contrat le prévoit, par la seule exigibilité de l’obligation.” In practice, send the demand by registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt or through a commissaire de justice, set a short final deadline of eight to fifteen days, state the principal, the penalty computation with the rate used, the 40-euro fee per invoice, and the court action that follows. A demand served by a commissaire de justice, called a sommation de payer, carries extra weight because it is also an official record of the debt and the refusal.

The demand letter also fixes the starting point of legal interest on sums of money. The Cour de cassation recalled on 18 September 2025, Second Civil Chamber, appeal no. 23-23.418, applying the former article 1153 of the Civil Code: “dans les obligations qui se bornent au paiement d’une certaine somme, les dommages-intérêts résultant du retard dans l’exécution ne consistent jamais que dans la condamnation aux intérêts au taux légal, à compter du jour de la sommation de payer ou d’un autre acte équivalent.” Interest runs from the formal demand or an equivalent act, and the Court added that a money claim fixed in amount before judgment bears interest from the demand or, failing a demand, from the court action itself. Send the demand early even if you plan to negotiate: every week without a demand is a week of interest lost, and the commercial penalties above do not replace the need to prove the debtor was formally called to pay when you later claim interest before a judge.

Build the proof file at the same time, because French judges decide on papers. Assemble the contract or accepted quote with the agreed payment term, the delivery notes, service reports or acceptance records, the invoices with due dates, the full email thread showing reminders and any acknowledgment of the debt or request for more time, your penalty computation, and an up-to-date Kbis or company-register extract of the debtor. Any partial acknowledgment in writing, a promise to pay, a dispute about only part of the invoice, shapes the strategy: the undisputed part can go through the fast procedure below while the disputed part may need an ordinary summons. If the debtor claims the goods were defective, preserve your delivery and quality records immediately; a bare allegation of defects raised only after the demand letter rarely stops a payment order where the file is complete.

Choose the right court before filing. Disputes between traders, disputes about commercial companies and disputes about commercial acts between any persons belong to the commercial courts: article L. 721-3 of the Commercial Code gives the tribunaux de commerce, the specialised business courts now grouped in many cities under the name tribunal des activités économiques, jurisdiction over these cases. A foreign seller suing a French company for an unpaid commercial invoice files in principle before the commercial court of the debtor’s domicile. Contract clauses sending the dispute to arbitration are possible where the parties agreed them when contracting. For a foreign creditor with no French establishment, a French lawyer files and follows the case while you sign a power of attorney and send the papers; physical presence in France is not required at the order stage. Where the debtor is a consumer or a non-trader, different courts apply, so confirm the debtor’s status from its Kbis and the contract before choosing.

Mind the clock. Commercial payment obligations are time-barred after five years: article L. 110-4 of the Commercial Code states that “Les obligations nées à l’occasion de leur commerce entre commerçants ou entre commerçants et non-commerçants se prescrivent par cinq ans si elles ne sont pas soumises à des prescriptions spéciales plus courtes.” Five years looks comfortable until a foreign head office lets reminders drift across staff changes. Diary the limitation date from the invoice due date, and treat any invoice approaching its fourth year as urgent. A formal demand does not by itself stop limitation; only court action or a clear acknowledgment by the debtor resets the position, so do not let negotiation run past the deadline.

B. What happens if the debtor fights the payment order: fast order, opposition, trial and seizure

The injonction de payer is the reason small and mid-size French commercial debts are worth chasing. It is a fast, paper-only procedure in which the president of the competent court issues a payment order without hearing the debtor, on the strength of your application and documents. Article 1405 of the Code of Civil Procedure opens the procedure where the claim has a contractual cause or results from a statutory obligation and is for a fixed amount, with the amount determined under the contract including any penalty clause, and also covers commercial paper such as accepted bills of exchange and promissory notes. Your application goes, depending on the nature and amount of the claim, to the president of the commercial court or the judicial court within their respective jurisdiction, and the official service-public business portal describes the same procedure step by step in its business fact sheet on judicial recovery by payment order in France and in Europe, which also exists in an English version. Attach everything: contract, delivery proof, invoices, demand letter, penalty computation and debtor identification.

Territorial jurisdiction is strict and protects the debtor. Article 1406 of the Code of Civil Procedure sends the application to the judge of the place where the debtor pursued, or one of the debtors pursued, resides, and declares these rules a matter of public policy: any contrary clause is deemed unwritten and the judge must raise lack of jurisdiction on his own motion. File where the French debtor lives, not where you are based abroad and not where your lawyer sits, unless several debtors open another competent forum. A French debtor company with its registered office in Marseille answers in Marseille even if your contract was negotiated in Paris and your company sits in London. Getting this wrong costs months, so verify the debtor’s current registered address from an official company extract on the day you file.

Once the judge signs the order, speed matters twice. The order must be served on each debtor by a commissaire de justice, and article 1411 of the Code of Civil Procedure states, word for word: “L’ordonnance portant injonction de payer est non avenue si elle n’a pas été signifiée dans les trois mois de sa date.” An order not served within three months of its date is void. Instruct the commissaire de justice immediately after receiving the signed order, confirm the debtor’s address, and diary the three-month date. Service is also the moment the debtor’s own clock starts: article 1416 of the Code of Civil Procedure provides that “L’opposition est formée dans le mois qui suit la signification de l’ordonnance.” The debtor has one month from service to file opposition, with an extended regime where service was not made personally. If nobody objects within the month, you ask the court to add the enforcement formula and the order becomes an enforceable title: bank seizure, seizure of receivables and other enforcement measures follow through the commissaire de justice.

If the debtor does object, understand exactly what opposition changes. Opposition wipes the order away as a decision and forces a full trial. Article 1420 of the Code of Civil Procedure states, word for word: “Le jugement du tribunal se substitue à l’ordonnance portant injonction de payer.” The Cour de cassation enforces this strictly. On 11 September 2025, Second Civil Chamber, appeal no. 24-14.766, the Court recalled that “Aux termes de ce texte, le jugement du tribunal se substitue à l’ordonnance portant injonction de payer.” and quashed a judgment that had declared the opposition admissible yet kept the order alive, holding that “l’ordonnance portant injonction de payer, qui n’est une décision qu’en l’absence d’opposition, ne pouvait reprendre ses effets, le tribunal a violé le texte susvisé.” Five years earlier the same chamber had decided identically on 2 July 2020, Second Civil Chamber, appeal no. 19-16.100, quashing a judgment that, after rejecting the debtor’s case on the merits, had said the earlier order would simply produce its effects. Do not fear opposition and do not over-read it: it means you must now prove the whole claim at a hearing, with your lawyer, your documents and, where useful, your witnesses, but it also means the debtor must show up and argue, which many chronic late payers will not do.

Prepare the opposition scenario from day one by keeping two tracks. Track one is the order application with the complete file described above. Track two is the trial-ready file: a chronological bundle, a penalty computation down to the day, the delivery and quality evidence answering the defects the debtor may allege, and instructions to your lawyer on settlement authority. Many oppositions settle at the first hearing once the debtor sees a complete bundle and a creditor ready to go to judgment. If the case runs to judgment, the court decides principal, penalties, flat fee, additional costs and interest, and the judgment carries its own enforcement. Where the debtor is insolvent rather than merely unwilling, shift strategy: file a proof of claim in the insolvency proceedings within the deadline instead of spending on individual enforcement that the stay of proceedings would freeze.

Enforcement from abroad is administrative once you hold the title. The commissaire de justice serves the enforceable order or judgment with the payment command, then uses the debtor’s bank details, employer and asset information to seize. French bank seizure, called saisie-attribution, freezes the debtor’s account balances up to the amount owed and is brutally effective against operating companies. Seizure of receivables intercepts money the debtor’s own customers owe it. Each step needs the enforceable title plus up-to-date debtor information, which is why keeping the debtor’s bank details from the business relationship and its current Kbis matters long before litigation. Budget realistically: court fees for the order itself are modest, while translation, service and seizure fees scale with the amounts at stake, and the 40-euro fee plus proven extra costs feed back into the claim.

Cross-border variants deserve one paragraph. Where creditor and debtor sit in two different European Union countries and the claim is uncontested, the European payment order and the European small-claims procedure offer alternatives to the French domestic order, and the service-public business portal covers both on the same fact sheet. Where the debtor sits outside the European Union, the French domestic injonction de payer before the competent French court remains the standard route, with service abroad under the applicable international rules adding time. In every variant the same discipline applies: fixed amount, contract papers, delivery proof, formal demand, competent court, fast service, and a lawyer who answers the judge in French while reporting to you in English.

Conclusion

An unpaid French invoice is not a cultural fatality but a documented claim carrying automatic penalties. The payment deadline is capped by statute, the ECB-plus-10 penalties run with no reminder needed, the 40-euro fee attaches to each late invoice, and the Cour de cassation backs each proposition with published judgments. The mise en demeure starts interest and proves warning, the commercial court of the debtor’s domicile hears the case, the injonction de payer delivers a fast order where the amount is fixed, opposition converts the file into an ordinary trial where the judgment replaces the order, and the commissaire de justice turns the final title into money through seizure. Run from abroad, the sequence is demand letter with computation, complete proof file, application to the right president of the court, service within three months, enforcement after one silent month or trial after opposition, all inside the five-year limitation. Foreign sellers who follow that chain recover; those who chase by email alone fund their debtor’s cash flow. Put the dates in your diary, compute the penalties to the day, and move the file the week the final deadline expires.

Need a quick opinion on your case

Send us your unpaid invoice, contract and demand letter today: a telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm to check the applicable deadline, compute the penalties and the 40-euro fee, and choose between a payment order and a full summons. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 or write via the contact page.