You own a house in the Dordogne, a flat in Paris or a cottage in Brittany, you live in Britain, and since Brexit you let the property to holidaymakers for part of the year to cover its costs. Two sets of French rules now decide whether that arrangement survives: the rules that say how long you personally may stay in France, and the rules that say what your house must look like on paper before a single paying guest walks through the door. Get either set wrong and the consequences are concrete. Overstay the visa-free limit and you may be banned from the Schengen area for up to three years. Let without the registration or the change-of-use authorisation and the civil fine can reach 100,000 euros per property, with a daily penalty of up to 1,000 euros per day and per square metre until the flat is restored to residential use. This guide works through both sets in order. It explains the 90 days in any 180 days limit as the British government states it today, with the new Entry/Exit System that now counts your days electronically. It then explains the national declaration every holiday-let host must file, the registration number every advert must display, and the income-tax treatment of the rents under French law and the France–UK double tax treaty. It closes with the challenges that work: how the highest French courts have struck down the two most common defences used by town halls and hosts alike, and where you go to contest a tourist-tax demand, a fine or a tax assessment. Every French term is translated on first use, every threshold is given with its statute, and every decisive statement is tied to the official text.
I. Can you still let your French second home to holidaymakers after Brexit, and how long can you stay to run it?
A. How the 90 days in any 180 days limit and the new entry/exit count control your stays
Since the end of free movement, British citizens are third-country nationals in the Schengen area. The British government’s travel advice states the position in one sentence: short trips to the Schengen area, including France, are allowed without a visa up to the 90-day ceiling in any 180-day window. The 180-day window rolls: every day you spend in any Schengen country counts, including days spent in France, Spain or Italy in the six months before your current trip, and days spent managing your own house count exactly like days spent on a beach. The same page warns that overstaying the visa-free limit can lead to a ban from Schengen countries of up to three years. For an owner who pops over for changeovers, repairs and the annual general meeting of the co-ownership, the arithmetic is unforgiving: four stays of 25 days in half a year already breach the ceiling.
The counting itself has changed. The European Union’s Entry/Exit System, known as EES, is now being rolled out across the Schengen area, replacing the manual stamping of passports. The travel advice explains that on short stays you may need to register biometric details such as fingerprints and a photograph, that there is no fee, and that your digital EES record is valid for three years. In practice this means border officers no longer rely on blurry ink stamps to reconstruct your history; the system holds your entries and exits centrally. If you believe your record is wrong, the advice is to raise it with border officials when you next cross and to carry supporting evidence. Keep your own log as well: ferry and Eurotunnel bookings, boarding passes and the dates on your taxe de séjour (tourist tax) receipts if you ever stay in paid accommodation. If an overstay allegation ever reaches a lawyer’s desk, that file is your first exhibit.
Staying longer than 90 days requires meeting the French government’s entry requirements, which in practice means a long-stay visa (visa de long séjour, the national visa for stays over three months) or a residence permit (titre de séjour, the card that authorises residence). Time spent in France under a residence permit or long-stay visa does not count towards the 90-day visa-free limit. Owners who want to spend a whole season running their let, or who plan to retire to the house later, should therefore treat the visa question as part of the letting project, not as an afterthought. A companion guide on this site walks through what happens when a long-stay application is refused and how to challenge the refusal; the present article assumes you travel visa-free and organises everything else around the 90-day frame. One practical consequence follows at once: because your own presence is rationed, most British owners need a local caretaker, agent or conciergerie (a short-let management firm) for arrivals, cleaning and emergencies, and the contract with that firm is worth drafting as carefully as the tax return.
Before leaving the border question, note what the 90-day rule does not do. It does not stop you owning the house, it does not stop you letting it while you are back in Britain, and it does not convert your rental income into something the French tax authority cannot reach. Ownership and presence are separate issues in French law, and the rest of this guide deals with ownership: what the house must declare, display and pay, whether you are in it or not.
B. How to register the let: the national declaration, the 13-character number and what the platforms must show
A meublé de tourisme, the legal term for a furnished property let to short-stay visitors, is defined by the Tourism Code as “des villas, appartements ou studios meublés, à l’usage exclusif du locataire, offerts à la location à une clientèle de passage qui n’y élit pas domicile et qui y effectue un séjour caractérisé par une location à la journée, à la semaine ou au mois” — furnished villas, flats or studios for the exclusive use of the guest, offered to passing visitors who do not live there, by the day, week or month. If that describes your Dordogne house when it is on Airbnb, it is a meublé de tourisme whatever you call it in the advert, and the obligations below apply to you as the host (loueur, the person offering the let), even though you live in Britain.
The first obligation is a prior declaration recorded on a national online service (téléservice national, the single state-run registration portal). The statute provides that “Toute personne qui offre à la location un meublé de tourisme procède préalablement en personne à une déclaration soumise à enregistrement auprès d’un téléservice national opéré par l’organisme public unique” — anyone offering a holiday let must first file, personally, a declaration for registration on the national portal. The declaration states whether the property is your main home (résidence principale, the dwelling where you habitually live), which for a British second-home owner it is not, and supporting documents can be required, including a French income-tax notice showing the let address as a place of taxation. Once the complete file is received, “le téléservice délivre sans délai un avis de réception électronique comprenant un numéro de déclaration” — the portal immediately issues an electronic receipt carrying a declaration number. That number, a 13-character code in three groups, must then appear in every advert for the property, and the declaration must be updated whenever the information changes and renewed when it expires.
The second obligation sits on the platforms. Anyone who helps market the let for payment or free, by brokerage or through a digital platform, must tell the host about the declaration and authorisation duties and must obtain from the host, before the advert goes online, a sworn statement (déclaration sur l’honneur, a signed statement made on one’s honour) confirming those duties are met, stating whether the home is the host’s main residence, and giving the declaration number. The Tourism Code states that the intermediary “informe le loueur des obligations de déclaration ou d’autorisation préalables prévues par ces articles et obtient de lui, préalablement à la publication ou à la mise en ligne de l’annonce de location, une déclaration sur l’honneur attestant du respect de ces obligations” and “publie, dans toute annonce relative à ce meublé, ce numéro de déclaration” — publishes that declaration number in every advert for the let. In plain terms: Airbnb, Booking.com and your local agency’s website must all show your number, and if a platform publishes your listing without it, both you and the platform are exposed. Check your adverts today, character by character.
The penalties for skipping the declaration are set to hurt. The government’s own English-language guidance states that missing the declaration exposes the host to a civil fine of up to 5,000 euros Where only a simple declaration to the town hall (mairie, the municipal authority) is required, the fine for failing to file is up to 450 euros. These fines sit underneath the far heavier sanction for letting without the change-of-use authorisation where one is required, which the next sections explain. The declaration alone never replaces that authorisation: registering the let tells the commune you exist, but it does not give you the right to convert a home into a tourist business. Many British owners discover this distinction only when the commune’s letter arrives, so read the two obligations as a pair — declaration everywhere, authorisation in the cities that require it.
II. What tax and local charges do the rents bear, and how do you challenge a tax bill, a tourist-tax demand or a change-of-use fine?
A. Where the rents are taxed: French income tax, the France–UK treaty and the return you must file
French domestic law starts from a blunt principle: rents from a building in France are French-source income whoever owns it. The General Tax Code provides that “Sont considérés comme revenus de source française : a. Les revenus d’immeubles sis en France ou de droits relatifs à ces immeubles” — income from buildings situated in France counts as French-source income. Living in Manchester or Edinburgh therefore does not move the taxing right to Britain; it only changes which French form you file and, through the treaty, how Britain treats the same rents.
Furnished letting is taxed as commercial profit, not as rental income in the narrow sense. The tax authority’s guidance for non-residents states that income from letting furnished premises owned in France, and from subletting furnished premises rented in France, falls under income tax in the commercial-profits category known as BIC (bénéfices industriels et commerciaux). That classification matters because it decides the declaration: non-professional furnished hosts report gross receipts on the supplementary return 2042-C-PRO, boxes 5ND to 5PD, while professional hosts use different boxes, and anyone under the actual-profits method (régime réel, taxation on real profit after deductible costs) carries the result from return 2031 onto the 2042-C-PRO. File under the wrong category or in the wrong boxes and the assessment that follows is wrong from the first line — which is precisely what makes it challengeable later.
The micro-enterprise method (régime micro, the simplified flat-allowance method) has just been rewritten for holiday lets, and British owners working from old thresholds are the most exposed. The statute now provides a dedicated ceiling: “15 000 € s’il s’agit d’entreprises dont l’activité principale est de louer directement ou indirectement des meublés de tourisme” — 15,000 euros of turnover for businesses whose main activity is letting holiday accommodation — with “un abattement de 30 % pour le chiffre d’affaires provenant d’activités de la catégorie mentionnée au 1° bis” — a 30 per cent flat allowance on that turnover. The tax authority confirms the scale of the change: the turnover ceiling for the micro method drops from 77,700 euros to 15,000 euros for 2025 income declared in 2026. A British owner who grossed 40,000 euros in 2024 under the old micro ceiling and repeats the performance in 2025 will find the simplified method closed and the actual-profits method compulsory, with accounts to keep and return 2031 to file. Owners below 15,000 euros keep the 30 per cent allowance, which replaces the far more generous allowances of the old system. Check which year’s rules your accountant applied before signing the return: a surprising number of 2026 assessments will be computed under the method the statute no longer allows.
The France–UK double tax treaty of 2008 then allocates the taxing right between the two states without removing either return. Its Article 6 on income from immovable property provides that income from immovable property situated in one of the two states may be taxed in that state and that that rule expressly covers income from letting the property. France may therefore tax the holiday rents, and Britain must eliminate the resulting double taxation, normally by crediting the French tax against the UK liability on the same rents. The practical paperwork follows: declare the gross rents in France under the BIC rules above, declare the same rents to HM Revenue and Customs as foreign property income, and claim foreign tax credit relief for the French tax attributable to them. Keep both assessments — the French avis d’imposition (the official tax notice) and the UK self-assessment calculation — because each administration may ask for proof of what the other charged. Where French social charges (prélèvements sociaux, the social levies added to French tax on capital and rental income) have been taken from a British owner affiliated to a social-security system elsewhere, a separate reclaim route exists under the Dreyer case law, and a guide on this site explains how to recover them; do not confuse that reclaim with the income-tax credit, which runs through the treaty, not through the courts.
Two final tax points before turning to the town hall. First, the detailed mechanics — micro versus actual profits against each ceiling, the professional versus non-professional boundary, and the minimum-rate rules for non-residents — are worked through with boxes and lines in this site’s companion guide to declaring furnished rental income, which remains the reference for the return itself. Second, none of the treaty relief is automatic: the credit must be claimed, on time, in each country, with the notices to prove it. An owner who declares in France but forgets the UK pages, or who claims the credit without the French notice, pays twice for want of paperwork. Diarise both deadlines — the French online filing date in spring and the UK self-assessment date in January — and treat the two files as one.
B. Tourist tax, the Paris change-of-use authorisation and the courts that cancel unfair fines and bills
Alongside income tax, every paying guest generates tourist tax. The taxe de séjour (the nightly tax paid by visitors staying in tourist accommodation) may be created by the municipal council: the statute states that “une taxe de séjour ou une taxe de séjour forfaitaire peut être instituée par délibération prise par le conseil municipal avant le 1er juillet de l’année pour être applicable à compter de l’année suivante” — a tourist tax or flat-rate tourist tax may be introduced by a council decision taken before 1 July for the following year. The scale runs from 20 cents to several euros per person per night according to the class of accommodation, and unclassified holiday lets fall into the percentage-based band of the tariff table. As host you normally collect the tax from the guest on top of the rent and pass it to the commune; where a platform collects it for you, keep the platform statements proving it did. If the commune sends you a demand you consider wrong — wrong period, wrong rate, nights the platform already taxed — do not ignore it: the commercial chamber of the Court of Cassation has held that “une collectivité territoriale peut réclamer, sans titre exécutoire, par voie reconventionnelle directement au juge judiciaire, le paiement d’une taxe de séjour contre un assujetti qui ne l’a pas réglée spontanément” — a local authority may claim payment of the tourist tax directly from the civil courts by counterclaim, without an enforcement order, against a debtor who has not paid voluntarily (Court of Cassation, commercial chamber, 12 March 2025, appeal no. 23-14.453). The commune therefore has a second route to your wallet even if its first bill is annulled, which is why faulty bills should be challenged on the merits — by administrative complaint (réclamation, the written claim to the authority) within the time limit, then before the courts — rather than left to fester.
The heavier risk, particularly in Paris and the inner suburbs, is the change-of-use authorisation (autorisation de changement d’usage, the prior permission to convert a home into short-let tourist use). In the communes the statute lists, converting a dwelling into anything else needs the council’s prior permission: the Construction and Housing Code provides that “le changement d’usage des locaux à usage d’habitation peut être soumis, sur décision de l’organe délibérant, à autorisation préalable” — the change of use of residential premises may be subjected, by decision of the deliberative body, to prior authorisation. Paris requires it, and applies compensation rules (compensation, the obligation to create an equivalent dwelling elsewhere) that make authorisation for a second home very difficult in practice; many applications for homes that are not the owner’s main residence are refused outright, and the refusal must state its reasons. The Court of Cassation has repeated the test for what counts as a conversion in terms every host should memorise: “Le fait de louer un local meublé destiné à l’habitation de manière répétée pour de courtes durées à une clientèle de passage qui n’y élit pas domicile constitue un changement d’usage.” — repeatedly letting a furnished dwelling for short periods to passing visitors who do not live there is a change of use (Court of Cassation, third civil chamber, 3 September 2026, appeal no. 25-16.157). No planning permission, no star rating and no co-ownership vote changes that analysis.
Two recent rulings destroy the two excuses most often heard when the commune sues. First, the star-rating excuse: in Bordeaux, a tenant and her management company argued that the official classification of the flat as a holiday let authorised the tourist use without further permission. The Court of Cassation answered that “une décision de classement en meublé de tourisme ne peut se substituer à l’autorisation de changement d’usage prévue à l’article L. 631-7 du code de la construction et de l’habitation” — a holiday-let classification decision cannot stand in for the change-of-use authorisation (Court of Cassation, third civil chamber, 27 June 2024, appeal no. 23-13.131, published in the Bulletin). A classified let in Paris without the municipal authorisation is therefore still an unlawful conversion. Second, the civil-activity excuse: in the September 2026 case the appeal court had accepted that seasonal letting without hotel services was a civil activity compatible with residential use. The Court of Cassation quashed that reasoning as inoperative, noting the flat was residential, had been let repeatedly for short stays to passing visitors without prior authorisation, and that “En statuant ainsi, par des motifs inopérants, alors qu’elle avait constaté que l’appartement était à usage d’habitation et qu’il avait été donné en location de manière répétée pour de courtes durées à une clientèle de passage qui n’y élit pas domicile sans autorisation préalable de changement d’usage, la cour d’appel a violé les textes susvisés.” Neither the nature of the activity nor the co-ownership rules save an unauthorised conversion.
The sanction for losing that argument is severe. The Code provides that “Toute personne qui enfreint les dispositions des articles L. 631-7 ou L. 631-7-1 A ou qui ne se conforme pas aux conditions ou obligations imposées en application des mêmes articles L. 631-7 et L. 631-7-1 A est condamnée à une amende civile dont le montant ne peut excéder 100 000 € par local irrégulièrement transformé.” — anyone infringing the change-of-use rules faces a civil fine of up to 100,000 euros per unlawfully converted property. The fine is ordered by the president of the judicial court (tribunal judiciaire, the ordinary civil court) ruling under the fast-track procedure, on application by the commune, and its proceeds go to the commune. The same court orders the property restored to residential use and, after the deadline it sets, “il prononce une astreinte d’un montant maximal de 1 000 € par jour et par mètre carré utile du local irrégulièrement transformé” — imposes a daily penalty of up to 1,000 euros per day and per square metre of usable floor area. For a 40-square-metre Paris studio the arithmetic of resistance is ruinous within weeks, and the administration may then evict the occupants and do the works at the owner’s expense.
For British owners in Paris and across Île-de-France, the practical checklist follows from the above. First, verify on the City of Paris website whether your address needs the authorisation and whether compensation would be demanded; for a second home the honest answer is usually that authorisation will be refused, in which case short letting of the whole flat is not a lawful option and only the main-home 120-day letting or medium-term letting under the mobility lease (bail mobilité, the one-to-ten-month furnished lease for mobile tenants such as students and posted workers) may be available. Second, if you are outside the authorisation zones — most villages and small towns — file the national declaration, display the number, collect the tourist tax and file the tax return; the commune cannot invent an authorisation the statute does not require there. Third, if a fine or a restoration order lands on your doormat, instruct counsel at once: the procedure is fast, the evidence turns on letting history the commune has often bought from data scrapers, and the defences that work attack the proof of repeated short letting, the residential-use starting point, or the regularity of the summons — not the classification certificate and not the civil nature of the activity, both of which the Court of Cassation has now buried. Tax assessments follow the parallel track of administrative complaint then judicial appeal, with the BIC boxes, the micro ceiling and the treaty credit as the three points to plead.
Conclusion
A British-owned French holiday let after Brexit stands on four legs: stays inside the 90 days in any 180 days, a national declaration with its number on every advert, the change-of-use authorisation wherever the commune requires one, and rents declared as commercial profits with the treaty credit claimed in Britain. The 2026 picture hardens each leg — electronic counting at the border, a single national portal whose number the platforms must publish, a 15,000-euro micro ceiling with a 30 per cent allowance, and courts that fine unauthorised conversions up to 100,000 euros while rejecting the classification and civil-activity defences. Owners who work through the four in order, keep the receipts, the notices and the platform statements, and challenge faulty bills and fines on their true legal ground, let lawfully and pay exactly what the law demands — no more, and no less.
Need a quick opinion on your case
A telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer of the firm helps you check your letting, your return or your authorisation before the next deadline. Call Maître Reda Kohen on +33 6 46 60 58 22, or use the contact page. The firm advises British owners in Paris and across Île-de-France as well as throughout France.