Your parents’ stone house in the Dordogne now belongs to you, your brother in Leeds and your sister in Bristol. Nobody lives there full time, your sister spends every August in it, and each autumn the French tax assessments arrive in a single name while the three of you argue over who should pay what. This is the everyday reality of indivision (joint undivided ownership) for British families after Brexit: the house is shared, but the French tax system taxes the building as one unit, the bills follow the property rather than each owner’s residence, and the sibling who enjoys the house privatively owes the others compensation on top. This guide explains every French term the first time it appears, links each decisive statement to its official text, and answers the questions in the order British co-owners actually ask them. Part I maps the yearly stack of French property taxes and shows how co-owners divide them, with a published ruling of the Cour de cassation (France’s supreme court for civil matters) on the housing tax as the centrepiece. Part II prices private use through the indemnité d’occupation (the occupation indemnity owed for exclusive enjoyment), illustrated by a 2025 Paris judgment that fixed it to the euro, then shows the exits when sharing no longer works. Where this guide divides the bills, our companion guide to British co-heirs forcing the sale or keeping the French house takes over for the partition itself.

I. The French Tax Bills on a Shared House: What Is Due and How Co-Owners Divide It

A. The Yearly Stack on the House: Owner’s Tax, Second-Home Tax and Wealth Tax

The taxe foncière sur les propriétés bâties (the property tax on built land, universally shortened to taxe foncière) is the unavoidable yearly charge on ownership. Article 1380 of the General Tax Code (Code général des impôts) states the rule in one sentence: “La taxe foncière est établie annuellement sur les propriétés bâties sises en France à l’exception de celles qui en sont expressément exonérées par les dispositions du présent code.” The tax is established each year on built properties situated in France, apart from those expressly exempted. British nationality, British residence and the fact that none of the co-owners lives in the house permanently are all irrelevant. The reference date is 1 January and it governs the whole year: the tax is established in the name of the 1 January owner, the assessment is issued in September even where the property changed hands months earlier, and the administration takes no account of transfers during the year, leaving the parties to apportion the charge under the deed. Where the indivision itself still owns on 1 January, one assessment issues and the co-owners sort out the shares privately, which is where most family disputes begin.

The amount starts from the valeur locative cadastrale (the cadastral rental value), an administrative estimate of the yearly rent the property could theoretically produce. Article 1388 of the General Tax Code provides: “La taxe foncière sur les propriétés bâties est établie d’après la valeur locative cadastrale de ces propriétés déterminée conformément aux principes définis par les articles 1494 à 1508 et 1516 à 1518 B et sous déduction de 50 % de son montant en considération des frais de gestion, d’assurances, d’amortissement, d’entretien et de réparation.” The tax is set by reference to the cadastral rental value, reduced by 50 per cent for management, insurance, depreciation, maintenance and repair costs, with locally voted rates then applied to that halved base. An error in the property description, such as a room count that includes a demolished outbuilding, is an error in the base itself and one of the strongest grounds of challenge, as explained below.

The second layer, the taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires (the housing tax on second homes), survives in full on holiday houses. Article 1407 of the General Tax Code provides: “La taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires est due pour tous les locaux meublés conformément à leur destination d’habitation autre qu’à titre principal, y compris lorsqu’ils sont imposables à la cotisation foncière des entreprises.” The tax is due on all furnished residential premises used otherwise than as a main home, and a furnished family house used a few weeks a year is caught even if it stands empty for the other eleven months. Liability follows use: Article 1408 of the General Tax Code states that “La taxe est établie au nom des personnes qui ont, à quelque titre que ce soit, la disposition ou la jouissance des locaux imposables.” The assessment may therefore name whichever sibling actually has disposal or enjoyment, which is rarely the whole indivision. On top of the base tax, communes in tight housing markets may vote a surcharge: Article 1407 ter of the General Tax Code provides that “Dans les communes mentionnées au B du I de l’article 1406 bis, le conseil municipal peut, par une délibération prise dans les conditions prévues à l’article 1639 A bis, majorer d’un pourcentage compris entre 5 % et 60 % la part lui revenant de la cotisation de taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires due au titre des logements meublés.” Check the assessment for a majoration line and ask the mairie (the town hall) for the deliberation behind it: a surcharge applied without a proper vote is challengeable on that ground alone.

The third layer concerns larger estates. Article 964 of the General Tax Code establishes that “Il est institué un impôt annuel sur les actifs immobiliers désigné sous le nom d’impôt sur la fortune immobilière. Sont soumises à cet impôt, lorsque la valeur de leurs actifs mentionnés à l’article 965 est supérieure à 1 300 000 €”, an annual tax on real-estate wealth catching assets above 1,300,000 euros, and it taxes “Les personnes physiques n’ayant pas leur domicile fiscal en France, à raison des biens et droits immobiliers mentionnés au 1° de l’article 965 situés en France”, so United Kingdom residents are caught on their French holdings. Article 965 takes net value on 1 January, including company shares up to the underlying French bricks, Article 973 reserves its 30 per cent reduction (“un abattement de 30 % est effectué sur la valeur vénale réelle de l’immeuble lorsque celui-ci est occupé à titre de résidence principale par son propriétaire”) to main homes, which a shared holiday house is not, and Article 977 scales the rates from zero to 1.50 per cent across the bands. Each co-owner declares their own undivided share, so the threshold test is personal even though the house is shared.

B. One Assessment, Several Debtors: Splitting the Bills and Challenging the Wrong One

Only one taxe foncière assessment is issued per property, usually in one co-owner’s name, and only one housing-tax assessment follows the occupier. As between the siblings, the courts treat these payments as conservation expenses of the shared property, which gives the payer a quantified claim when the accounts are drawn up. In Court of Cassation, First Civil Chamber, 5 December 2018, appeal no. 17-31.189, published in the Bulletin (ECLI:FR:CCASS:2018:C101169), a co-owner who had paid the taxe d’habitation on an undivided property from her own funds asked for a credit against the joint ownership. The court gave its visa in these terms: “Vu l’article 815-13, alinéa 1, du code civil”, then censured the appeal court for leaving the tax on the occupier alone, “alors que le règlement de cette taxe avait permis la conservation de l’immeuble indivis”, whereas paying the tax had preserved the undivided building, and it “CASSE ET ANNULE, mais seulement en ce qu’il rejette la demande de créance de Mme X… à l’égard de l’indivision postcommunautaire du chef de la taxe d’habitation”, quashing the judgment only in so far as it rejected the claim against the joint ownership for the housing tax. The statute behind the ruling, Article 815-13 of the Civil Code, provides that “Il doit lui être pareillement tenu compte des dépenses nécessaires qu’il a faites de ses deniers personnels pour la conservation desdits biens, encore qu’elles ne les aient point améliorés”: account must likewise be taken of necessary expenditure a co-owner has made from personal funds to preserve the property, even where it did not improve it. The practical lesson for British families is to keep every receipt from the first bill onwards: the brother who pays the French taxes alone for five years while the others enjoy the house each August is building a quantified claim for the final partition, and our guide to British wills and French houses explains how that partition interacts with the choice of English law and the children’s reserved shares.

Two administrative reflexes protect the indivision before any dispute. First, keep the occupancy description current: the owner must file a déclaration d’occupation (a declaration of occupancy) through the “Gérer mes biens immobiliers” section of the personal account on impots.gouv.fr before 1 July whenever a property has never been declared or its situation has changed, specifying main home, second home or vacant accommodation. A house that became a shared second home when the last surviving parent died, but is still recorded as someone’s main home, generates the wrong tax on the wrong person. Second, where an assessment names the wrong person outright, for example a deceased parent or a sibling who sold their share, Article 1413 of the General Tax Code organises the correction: “Lorsque, au titre d’une année, une cotisation de taxe d’habitation sur les résidences secondaires a été établie au nom d’une personne autre que le redevable légal de l’impôt, l’imposition de ce dernier, au titre de la même année, est établie au profit de l’Etat dans la limite du dégrèvement accordé au contribuable imposé à tort.” The wrongly taxed person is discharged and the true debtor is assessed instead for the same year.

Where the bill itself is wrong, by an excessive cadastral description, an unfounded surcharge or a refused relief, French law channels the dispute through a compulsory prior claim, the réclamation. Article L190 of the Tax Procedures Book (Livre des procédures fiscales) defines the field: “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 […]”. File through the secure messaging of the online account or by recorded-delivery letter to the office shown on the assessment, as soon as the error is spotted and within the time limit printed on the assessment, identifying the tax, the year, the property and the assessment number, quantifying the correction and attaching the proof. The administration must normally answer within six months of receiving the claim, and the reply, or the expiry of that period, opens the route to the court it designates. Keep the payment deadline separate in the diary: the claim and the collection run on parallel tracks.

II. Private Use Has a Price and Sharing Has an End: the Occupation Indemnity and the Exits

A. The Sibling Who Uses the House Alone Owes an Indemnity: How Courts Price Exclusive Enjoyment

Sharing ownership does not mean free use. Article 815-9 of the Civil Code, in the version verified for this guide, lays down the two limbs: “Chaque indivisaire peut user et jouir des biens indivis conformément à leur destination, dans la mesure compatible avec le droit des autres indivisaires et avec l’effet des actes régulièrement passés au cours de l’indivision. […] L’indivisaire qui use ou jouit privativement de la chose indivise est, sauf convention contraire, redevable d’une indemnité.” Each co-owner may use and enjoy the undivided property consistently with the rights of the others, and the co-owner who enjoys it privatively owes an indemnity unless otherwise agreed. The sister who spends every August in the Dordogne house while her Leeds-based brother never sets foot in it is the textbook case: her enjoyment excludes his, so she owes the indivision month by month until partition or until she hands back the keys. No written agreement is needed to create the debt; on the contrary, only a written agreement can remove it, which is why families who accept an informal rota should still record who occupies, when, and on what financial terms.

Courts price the indemnity by reference to the rental value of the property, usually with a reduction for the precariousness of occupation within a family arrangement. A recent Paris judgment shows the method applied to the euro. In Paris Judicial Court, Second Chamber, Second Section, 28 March 2025, case no. 24/09805, the court recorded that the claimant valued the indemnity “sur la base de la valeur locative mensuelle de l’appartement”, on the basis of the monthly rental value of the flat, “sur laquelle il applique un abattement de 20%”, with a 20 per cent reduction applied, and it ordered in its operative part: “Dit que Mme [B] [R] est redevable envers l’indivision qu’elle forme avec M. [N] [X] portant sur le lot n°74 de l’immeuble situé [Adresse 2] d’une indemnité d’occupation mensuelle de 2 672 euros, à compter du 29 avril 2024 et jusqu’au partage ou jusqu’à libération complète et définitive du bien”, holding the occupant liable to the joint ownership for a monthly occupation indemnity of 2,672 euros from 29 April 2024 until partition or until complete and final release of the property. Three lessons follow for British co-owners. First, the debt runs until the partition or the definitive handover, so every additional summer of exclusive use increases the final account. Second, the reduction, here one fifth, reflects that an occupant in indivision is not an ordinary tenant, but the starting point remains the market rent, so an expert valuation of the letting value is the single most useful exhibit. Third, the indemnity is owed to the indivision, meaning each other co-owner recovers their fractional share of it, and it sits in the same final account as the tax bills analysed in Part I: the sibling who paid the taxe foncière alone offsets her credit against the indemnity she owes for her Augusts, and the balance decides who pays whom on the day of reckoning.

One interaction needs care. Because Article 1408 taxes whoever has disposal or enjoyment, the assessment for the housing tax may name the occupying sibling personally, while the Cassation ruling above treats that same tax as a conservation expense shared through the indivision account. There is no contradiction: facing the Treasury, the occupant pays the assessment in their name; facing the family, the payment enters the partition account as a credit for whoever advanced it. Conflating the two levels is the classic family error, in both directions: the occupant who believes paying the housing tax discharges the indemnity is wrong, and the non-occupants who believe the occupant’s tax payments relieve them of the taxe foncière are equally wrong. Record each payment with its nature, austral summer by austral summer, tax by tax, occupant by occupant.

B. Ending the Sharing: Amicable Partition, the Right to Leave, and What the Court Can Order

No co-owner is locked in. Article 815 of the Civil Code states the founding rule: “Nul ne peut être contraint à demeurer dans l’indivision et le partage peut toujours être provoqué, à moins qu’il n’y ait été sursis par jugement ou convention.” No one may be forced to remain in joint ownership, and partition may always be demanded, unless stayed by judgment or agreement. The orderly route is the amicable partition before the notaire, who draws up the final account, values the house, allocates the tax credits and indemnities analysed above, and records any balancing payment, the soulte, owed by the sibling who keeps more than their share. Where the house itself is allocated to one sibling, the others receive their value in money, and the tax bills paid along the way adjust who owes what to whom.

Where agreement fails, the partition is demanded in court. The official service-public.fr guidance on succession indivision describes the mechanism: a co-owner requests the sharing of all or part of the property, and where some wish to leave while others wish to remain, those who remain may ask the court to let them stay in joint ownership while the leaver is assigned their share. The court therefore has a full range of outcomes, from allocating the house to one sibling against compensation, to ordering the sale where sharing in kind is impossible, to maintaining a reduced indivision among those who agree to continue. The detailed tactics of forcing that outcome, including the auction sale (licitation) and the preferential allocation (attribution préférentielle), belong to our companion guide to British co-heirs forcing the sale or keeping the French house, which should be read alongside this one: divide the bills here, divide the house there. One warning shared by both guides: letting the house furnished to holidaymakers while the dispute lasts adds a second tax layer on the rents, with registration and declaration duties of its own, worked through in our guide to British landlords declaring furnished rental income in France.

Start the file before the argument starts. A partition-ready folder holds the yearly assessments with their numbers, every receipt for tax paid from personal funds, the occupancy declaration receipts, a calendar of who stayed when, an independent estimate of the market rent, and the town-hall deliberation wherever a surcharge appears. With that folder, the amicable partition before the notaire is usually a single meeting of arithmetic; without it, the same family pays twice, once in tax and once in procedure.

Conclusion

A French house shared between British siblings carries three certainties: the taxe foncière, the second-home housing tax with its possible surcharge, and for larger estates the IFI arrive every autumn in a single name; the co-owner who advances them builds a conservation claim for the final account; and the sibling who enjoys the house alone accrues a monthly indemnity until partition or handover. Pay the assessments in the name shown, record every payment with its nature, correct the occupancy description before disputing the amount, challenge genuine base errors through a precise quantified réclamation within the printed time limit, and value exclusive summers at the market rent less the usual reduction. Applied together, with the receipts in the file and the valuations in hand, these rules turn the annual family argument about the French bills into an account that a notaire, and if needed a court, can close to the euro.