You own a flat in Lyon, a cottage in the Dordogne or a studio in Paris, and every month rent lands in your account. Then two tax offices take an interest: France, where the property stands, and Britain, where you live or where you still file. After Brexit, British owners keep asking the same worried questions. Must I declare French rents in France even though I already pay tax in Britain? Is an unfurnished letting taxed the same way as a furnished one? Why does the French bill add social charges on top of income tax, and can I really be taxed at 20 or 30 per cent as a non-resident? And when the avis d’imposition — the French tax assessment notice — looks wrong, how do I challenge it before the deadline runs out?
This guide answers those questions in one place, in plain English with UK spelling. Every French term is explained the first time it appears. Part I explains how France classifies your rental income — revenus fonciers, meaning property income from an unfurnished letting, or bénéfices industriels et commerciaux, known as BIC, meaning trading profits from a furnished letting — and which of the two tax regimes, the flat-rate micro regime or the régime réel, the real regime with actual expenses, applies to you. Part II explains what changes when you live in Britain: the minimum rates for non-residents, the social charges and the solidarity levy, the France-Britain double tax treaty that prevents the same rent being taxed twice, and the exact procedure for declaring and for challenging a wrong assessment, the réclamation. The legal backbone is the French General Tax Code — the code général des impôts, universally shortened to CGI — verified article by article on the day of writing, read with the official guidance of the French tax administration and with the 2008 France-United Kingdom double tax convention as published by the British government.
I. How France classifies and taxes your French rental income
France taxes the building, not the landlord. Wherever you live, rents from a property standing in France are taxable in France. That single rule shapes everything that follows: the category of income, the regime, the return and the remedies are all French, even if you live in London, Manchester or Edinburgh and even if you also declare the same rents to HM Revenue and Customs. What varies is not whether France taxes, but how.
A. Your unfurnished letting: property income under the micro-foncier or the real regime
When you let a property unfurnished — a location nue, literally a bare letting — the rent falls into the category of revenus fonciers, property income. Article 14 of the General Tax Code provides that there “sont compris dans la catégorie des revenus fonciers, lorsqu’ils ne sont pas inclus dans les bénéfices d’une entreprise industrielle, commerciale ou artisanale, d’une exploitation agricole ou d’une profession non commerciale”, which means that rents from houses and flats belong to property income whenever they are not already part of a commercial or professional business. The French tax administration confirms the point in its guidance for non-residents, which confirms that income from letting an unfurnished dwelling is taxed at the progressive income-tax scale as property income, adding that such income also bears social charges at 17.2 per cent, a point developed in Part II below.
Once inside that category, two regimes compete. The starting point is simple arithmetic. Article 28 of the General Tax Code states that “Le revenu net foncier est égal à la différence entre le montant du revenu brut et le total des charges de la propriété”, meaning net property income equals gross receipts minus total property charges. The régime réel, the real regime, applies that formula forensically: you deduct what you actually spent. Article 31 of the General Tax Code lists the deductible property charges, which include repair and maintenance expenditure actually borne by the owner, insurance premiums, irrecoverable sums spent on behalf of the tenant, co-ownership provisions, management fees, loan interest and the taxe foncière itself, the French local property tax. Keep every invoice, because under the real regime each euro of deduction must be proved.
Beside that stands the micro-foncier, the simplified flat-rate regime. Article 32 of the General Tax Code provides that “lorsque le montant du revenu brut annuel défini aux articles 29 et 30 n’excède pas 15 000 €, le revenu imposable correspondant est fixé à une somme égale au montant de ce revenu brut diminué d’un abattement de 30 %”, meaning that where annual gross receipts do not exceed 15,000 euros, taxable income is set at gross receipts minus a 30 per cent flat allowance. No receipts to sort, no invoices to keep for the return itself: you enter the gross figure and the allowance applies automatically. The regime covers all the unfurnished property income of the household together, and it is shut out in defined cases, notably where the taxpayer holds certain investment-fund or company interests letting bare buildings, or where a member of the household has opted for the real regime elsewhere. The practical test for a British owner is therefore a comparison, not a reflex. Below 15,000 euros of gross annual rent, the micro-foncier wins whenever your real charges are worth less than 30 per cent of the rent — the usual case for a property owned outright with modest co-ownership charges. It loses as soon as works, interest, insurance and management genuinely exceed that 30 per cent, and it loses structurally above 15,000 euros, where the real regime becomes compulsory. Run both calculations every year rather than assuming last year’s answer still holds, because one year of major repairs can flip the result.
Two traps catch British owners here. The first is believing that a British agent’s statement or a British tax return proves anything in France: only the French categories and the French return count, and the return for property income is the French form 2042 with its annexes, not the Self Assessment pages. The second is mixing the letting categories within one property across the year — for example a flat let unfurnished for nine months then furnished for three. Each period follows its own category and its own return boxes, and the micro thresholds are assessed accordingly. Get the category wrong and the whole computation collapses: allowances claimed under the wrong regime are disallowed, and the correction arrives with late-payment interest.
B. Your furnished letting: trading profits under the micro-BIC or the real regime
Furnish the same flat — beds, cooker, crockery, everything a tenant needs for normal occupation — and the legal nature of the rent changes completely. Income from letting furnished rooms or dwellings is not property income at all: it is taxed as bénéfices industriels et commerciaux, trading and commercial profits, universally shortened to BIC. The French tax administration states it without ambiguity: income from letting furnished premises you own, or from subletting furnished premises you rent, falls into the BIC category. It adds that such income bears social charges at 18.6 per cent for income received from 2025. Note the gap: 17.2 per cent for an unfurnished letting, 18.6 per cent for a furnished one. That single decimal point decides hundreds of euros on a typical rent, so the furnished or unfurnished characterisation must be settled first, by reference to the furniture actually present, and the administration measures it against the statutory list of items indispensable for normal occupation set by decree 2015-981 of 31 July 2015.
Here too a simplified regime faces the real regime. Article 50-0 of the General Tax Code sets the entry thresholds: businesses qualify where turnover excluding tax, adjusted where relevant pro rata for the operating period in the reference year, “n’excède pas, l’année civile précédente ou la pénultième année”, meaning does not exceed, in the previous calendar year or the year before that, “1° 203 100 € s’il s’agit d’entreprises dont le commerce principal est de vendre des marchandises, objets, fournitures et denrées à emporter ou à consommer sur place ou de fournir le logement, à l’exclusion de la location directe ou indirecte de locaux d’habitation meublés ou destinés à être loués meublés”, then “1° bis 15 000 € s’il s’agit d’entreprises dont l’activité principale est de louer directement ou indirectement des meublés de tourisme”, and “2° 83 600 € s’il s’agit d’autres entreprises”. In ordinary language: the standard long-term furnished letting of a residential dwelling belongs to the residual category capped at 83,600 euros, while the furnished tourist letting — the meublé de tourisme, meaning a dwelling let short-term to passing visitors — has its own 15,000 euro ceiling. Below the threshold, taxable profit equals turnover minus a statutory flat allowance: 71 per cent for the first category, 50 per cent for standard furnished lettings in the second category, and 30 per cent for furnished tourist lettings, with a minimum allowance of 305 euros. The text states that the taxable result “est égal au montant du chiffre d’affaires hors taxes diminué d’un abattement de 71 % pour le chiffre d’affaires provenant d’activités de la catégorie mentionnée au 1°, d’un abattement de 50 % pour le chiffre d’affaires provenant d’activités de la catégorie mentionnée au 2° et d’un abattement de 30 % pour le chiffre d’affaires provenant d’activités de la catégorie mentionnée au 1° bis”, and that “Ces abattements ne peuvent être inférieurs à 305 €”. A British owner letting a furnished flat in Paris year-round to a professional tenant therefore deducts 50 per cent automatically under the micro-BIC, the simplified BIC regime; the same flat turned into a holiday let for tourists deducts only 30 per cent within a far lower 15,000 euro ceiling.
The choice between the micro-BIC and the real regime follows the same logic as for unfurnished property, with higher stakes. Under the real regime you deduct genuine costs — agency commission, co-ownership charges, insurance, repairs, interest, depreciation of the furniture and, within statutory limits, of the building itself — and depreciation is where furnished lettings often win: spreading the cost of the flat and its contents over their useful lives regularly beats the 50 per cent allowance for recently bought or heavily renovated property. Businesses that have not opted for a real regime which means businesses that have not opted for a real regime must keep a day-by-day journal of their takings with invoices and supporting documents and produce it whenever the administration asks. The option for a real regime lasts one year and renews silently each calendar year, and giving it up follows the same return timetable. Three British pitfalls deserve emphasis. First, the Airbnb-style short letting is almost always a furnished letting in the tourist sub-category, with the lowest allowance and the lowest ceiling — never declare it as ordinary unfurnished income. Second, the VAT-looking turnover thresholds are assessed on the two preceding years, so a single exceptional season can eject you from the micro regime two years later. Third, registration and declaration duties for furnished activity run through specific business returns and boxes, not the property-income annexes: using the wrong form is the fastest route to an assessment built on a wrong base, which Part II explains how to undo.
II. Paying the right amount from Britain and putting a wrong bill right
Owning in France while living in Britain does not move the taxing right: France taxes the rents because the building stands in France, and Britain then gives relief so the same pound of rent is not taxed twice. The difficulty is entirely practical — minimum French rates for non-residents, social charges layered on income tax, a British credit that must be claimed correctly, and French declaration duties that ignore Brexit completely. This part works through each layer in order, then gives the procedure for challenging an assessment that gets any of them wrong.
A. Non-resident rates, social charges and the British credit against double taxation
The first question is whether you are resident in France for tax purposes at all. Article 4 A of the General Tax Code draws the line: “Celles dont le domicile fiscal est situé hors de France sont passibles de cet impôt en raison de leurs seuls revenus de source française”, meaning persons whose tax domicile lies outside France are liable to French income tax only on their French-source income. Your domicile fiscal, your tax domicile, is defined by article 4 B of the General Tax Code: the home or principal place of stay in France, professional activity carried on in France otherwise than incidentally, and the centre of economic interests. A British national who lives year-round in Kent, works in London and merely owns a holiday flat in Nice is plainly non-resident; a British national who lives all year in Bordeaux with family and schools there is plainly resident, and declares worldwide income in France. Between those poles lies the genuine second-home owner who splits the year: count days, weigh family presence, locate the professional activity, and identify where the economic centre sits, because residence decides the whole architecture — worldwide taxation with allowances and family quotient on one side, French-source-only taxation with minimum rates on the other.
For the non-resident, the statute names French rents as taxable in terms. Article 164 B of the General Tax Code opens with “Sont considérés comme revenus de source française : a. Les revenus d’immeubles sis en France ou de droits relatifs à ces immeubles”, meaning treated as French-source income are rents from buildings situated in France and rights relating to them, including undivided rights, bare ownership, usufruct and shares in property companies. The computation of the tax then follows the ordinary progressive scale, but with a floor. Article 197 A of the General Tax Code applies the scale rules to persons without a French tax domicile receiving French-source income, and provides that “l’impôt ne peut, en ce cas, être inférieur à un montant calculé en appliquant un taux de 20 % à la fraction du revenu net imposable inférieure ou égale à la limite supérieure de la deuxième tranche du barème de l’impôt sur le revenu et un taux de 30 % à la fraction supérieure à cette limite”, meaning the tax cannot be lower than an amount computed by applying 20 per cent to the part of net taxable income at or below the top of the second band of the scale, and 30 per cent above it. In practice, modest French rental profits that would attract little or no tax for a French resident are lifted to at least 20 per cent for the British non-resident. But the same article contains the escape route many owners miss: “lorsque le contribuable justifie que le taux de l’impôt français sur l’ensemble de ses revenus de source française ou étrangère serait inférieur à ces minima, ce taux est applicable à ses revenus de source française”, meaning where the taxpayer shows that the French tax rate on all worldwide income would be lower than those minimum rates, that lower average rate applies to the French-source income instead. A British pensioner whose only substantial income is a UK pension plus a small French rent can therefore ask for the taux moyen, the average-rate mechanism, by disclosing worldwide income with supporting documents — or, while gathering them, by attaching a sworn statement of accuracy to the return, a facility the statute expressly extends to persons domiciled in a European Union state or in a state bound to France by administrative assistance arrangements, which the United Kingdom remains. Claiming the average rate is often worth several points of tax, yet it requires full disclosure: you cannot ask France to measure your worldwide ability to pay while hiding the worldwide income.
On top of income tax come the prélèvements sociaux, the social charges levied on capital and property income. Residents pay them through article L136-6 of the Social Security Code, which makes persons tax-domiciled in France liable to a contribution on net property income. Non-residents affiliated to a social security scheme in another EU state, in the European Economic Area or in Switzerland — including British nationals covered by the NHS and holding an S1 form — are exempt from the CSG and CRDS components, but the administration recalls that while the administration recalls that a 7.5 per cent solidarity levy still applies to that income. Add the pieces for an unfurnished letting: income tax at a minimum of 20 per cent plus the 7.5 per cent solidarity levy, before any British tax is even considered. For a furnished letting the administration applies social charges at 18.6 per cent from 2025 income, with the same exemption logic for the CSG and CRDS portion. Errors here are frequent — full social charges applied to an S1 holder, solidarity levy forgotten or doubled, wrong rate applied to the wrong letting category — and each of them is challengeable under the procedure in section B.
The treaty then prevents double taxation. Article 6 of the 2008 France-United Kingdom double tax convention, as published by the British government, provides that income from immovable property situated in one of the two states may be taxed in that state, so France as the state of situation taxes the rents first. Article 24 on elimination of double taxation then grants relief on the British side as a credit: French tax paid in accordance with the convention on French-source profits, income or gains is credited against the British tax computed on the same income, meaning Britain allows the French tax as a credit against the British tax on that income. Two consequences follow. First, keep the French assessment and proof of payment: without them HMRC cannot grant the credit. Second, the treaty allocates the taxing right but never reduces the French bill itself — an argument that “I already paid in Britain” has no legal force against the French assessment and, raised alone in a réclamation, it fails.
B. Declaring correctly and challenging a wrong assessment before the deadline
Declaration comes first, because most wrong bills start as wrong returns. Non-residents declare French property income on the French return, form 2042 with the property annexes for an unfurnished letting and the business annexes for a furnished one, entering gross rents in the boxes for the regime chosen and, under the real regime, each deductible charge in its own line. Where no property income was received in the year, the administration asks that box 4BN of form 2042 be ticked so that instalments computed on the previous year stop being demanded. Separately, every owner must report the occupation of each dwelling through the Gérer Mes Biens Immobiliers service — the Manage My Properties online service in the personal account — since the administration requires every owner to report the occupancy of each property before 1 July each year — main home or second home and, where the owner does not live there, who the occupants are, on what basis and for which period. A British owner who lets year-round but forgets that July declaration invites the wrong occupancy tax on top of the income tax, and the two disputes then run on different tracks. Instalments follow the return: once declared, advance payments are computed from September on the declared base, with the solidarity levy collected on the final balance, so a first correct return also calibrates the following year’s cash flow.
When the assessment arrives and it is wrong — wrong category, micro allowance denied, real charges rejected, minimum rate applied despite a justified average-rate claim, full social charges despite S1 cover, tourist sub-category imposed on a year-round furnished tenancy — the remedy is the réclamation, the formal claim to the administration. Article L190 of the Tax Procedures Book — the livre des procédures fiscales, the code governing tax disputes — gives claims their jurisdictional home: “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”, meaning claims seeking repair of errors in the base or computation, or the benefit of a statutory right, belong to the contentious jurisdiction, which is what allows an appeal to the administrative court if the administration refuses. The time limit is strict. Article R*196-1 of the Tax Procedures Book requires that to be admissible, claims concerning taxes other than local direct taxes “doivent être présentées à l’administration au plus tard le 31 décembre de la deuxième année suivant celle”, according to the case, of recovery of the roll or notification of the collection notice, of payment of the disputed tax where no roll or notice was issued, or of the event founding the claim. For income tax assessed by notice, that is 31 December of the second year after the year of the notice: a 2025 assessment notified in 2026 must be challenged by 31 December 2028, and a day late is fatal however strong the merits. File online from the personal account or by recorded letter to the competent tax office, identify the assessment, state each head of error with its article — category, allowance, charges, average rate with worldwide income evidence, S1 and social-charge exemption — quantify the reduction sought, and attach the lease, the invoices, the S1, the British assessment and the proof of payment. Ask expressly for a stay of payment where sums remain disputed, keep every acknowledgment, and diary the administration’s six-month reply period: silence for six months is an implied refusal that opens the door to the administrative court, and that door has its own two-month clock.
Conclusion
Your French rental income as a British owner stands on four certainties. Unfurnished rents are property income under article 14, computed as gross minus charges under article 28, with a 30 per cent allowance below 15,000 euros under article 32 and deduction of genuine charges under article 31. Furnished rents are trading profits with thresholds of 83,600 euros for the standard letting and 15,000 euros for the tourist letting, allowances of 50 and 30 per cent, under article 50-0. Non-residents are taxed only on French-source income under articles 4 A, 4 B and 164 B, at a minimum of 20 and 30 per cent under article 197 A unless the average rate on worldwide income is lower, plus the 7.5 per cent solidarity levy, with the treaty credit in Britain doing the rest. And any error is repaired by réclamation under article L190 no later than 31 December of the second following year under article R*196-1. Read each avis against those four points the day it arrives: check the category, check the regime, check the rate and the social charges, and file before the deadline rather than after it. Where the figures resist straightforward reading — mixed unfurnished and furnished periods, a residence position between two countries, an average-rate claim with British evidence to assemble, a tourist reclassification that halves your allowance — take advice before the 31 December clock runs out, because a late claim, however well founded, cannot be saved.
Need a quick opinion on your case
Our British desk reviews your French rental position, checks the category and regime of your letting, verifies the non-resident rate, the social charges and the treaty credit, and prepares your réclamation before the deadline. Telephone consultation: 80 EUR incl. VAT, with an avocat of the firm within 48 hours. Call +33 6 46 60 58 22 or write via our contact page.