Every autumn, thousands of British owners of French holiday homes open their personal account on impots.gouv.fr, the online portal of the French tax administration, and discover two bills where they expected one, or one bill far heavier than the year before. The stone cottage in the Dordogne, the flat near the ski lifts, the village house bought years ago for summer holidays has generated a taxe fonci\u00e8re, the French annual property tax on built property, and a taxe d’habitation sur les r\u00e9sidences secondaires, the council tax still charged on second homes, possibly increased by a surcharge of up to 60 per cent voted by the local council. Brexit changed your residence status, your visa needs and your health cover. It changed nothing about these two taxes: as a British owner you pay exactly like a French owner, and you challenge them through exactly the same procedures.<\/p>\n
The two mistakes that cost British second-home owners money are paying a wrong bill without checking it and challenging the right bill through the wrong argument. Owners pay the surcharge even though their commune never validly voted it, or they accept a taxe d’habitation assessment on a g\u00eete they barely use, when the case law draws a precise line between the owner who keeps the use of the property and the owner who does not. Other owners do the reverse: they attack the government’s list of expensive housing zones, a challenge the Council of State has already rejected, instead of attacking the facts of their own file, where victories are genuinely available. This article explains, first, what a British second home really costs in French local tax each year, and secondly, how to pay the correct amount and challenge an excessive bill step by step.<\/p>\n
The taxe fonci\u00e8re sur les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s b\u00e2ties, the annual tax on built property, is the unavoidable base charge on any French bricks you own. Article 1380 of the General Tax Code<\/a> states that “La taxe fonci\u00e8re est \u00e9tablie annuellement sur les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s b\u00e2ties sises en France \u00e0 l’exception de celles qui en sont express\u00e9ment exon\u00e9r\u00e9es par les dispositions du pr\u00e9sent code.” In plain English, the tax is assessed every year on built property situated in France, except property expressly exempted by the Code. Nationality plays no part: a British owner of a cottage in Normandy pays on the same basis as a French neighbour, and leaving the European Union made no difference to the liability itself.<\/p>\n The decisive date for the whole year is 1 January. Article 232 of the same Code<\/a> belongs to a different tax, but the Council of State regularly recalls the general yearly rule it shares with the local taxes: in its judgment of 23 December 2024 the court cited Article 1415 of the Code<\/a>, under which “La taxe fonci\u00e8re sur les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s b\u00e2ties, la taxe fonci\u00e8re sur les propri\u00e9t\u00e9s non b\u00e2ties et la taxe d’habitation sur les r\u00e9sidences secondaires sont \u00e9tablies pour l’ann\u00e9e enti\u00e8re d’apr\u00e8s les faits existants au 1er janvier de l’ann\u00e9e de l’imposition.” The property taxes are assessed for the entire year on the basis of the facts existing on 1 January of the tax year. The practical consequence is blunt. If you owned the house on 1 January and sold it in March, you owe the full year’s taxe fonci\u00e8re, and the buyer owes nothing for that year; notaries routinely adjust this between seller and buyer in the completion accounts, but against the tax office the person who owned on New Year’s Day pays. If you bought in February, the bill for that year belongs to the seller. British buyers who complete a purchase in spring and then receive no bill sometimes assume the property is exempt; it is not, the bill simply went to the previous owner.<\/p>\n The amount itself is built from the valeur locative cadastrale, the notional annual rental value recorded for the property in the land registry, multiplied by rates voted each year by the commune, the intercommunal body and, where applicable, the department. Two identical houses in two villages can therefore produce very different bills, and a British owner comparing notes with another British owner two valleys away is comparing uncomparable figures. What you can usefully check on your assessment notice, the avis d’imposition, is the base value, the rates applied and any exemption line. The main exemptions do not help a second home. Article 1390 of the Code<\/a> exempts “Les titulaires de l’allocation de solidarit\u00e9 aux personnes \u00e2g\u00e9es mentionn\u00e9e \u00e0 l’article L. 815-1 du code de la s\u00e9curit\u00e9 sociale ou de l’allocation suppl\u00e9mentaire d’invalidit\u00e9 mentionn\u00e9e \u00e0 l’article L. 815-24 du m\u00eame code”, holders of the old-age solidarity allowance or the supplementary disability allowance, but only “\u00e0 raison de leur habitation principale”, for their main home. A British retiree drawing a United Kingdom state pension and living most of the year in Kent cannot import that exemption onto a French holiday house. Similarly, Article 1414 B of the Code<\/a> protects “Les personnes qui conservent la jouissance de l’habitation qui constituait leur r\u00e9sidence principale avant d’\u00eatre h\u00e9berg\u00e9es durablement dans un \u00e9tablissement ou un service mentionn\u00e9 au 6\u00b0 du I de l’article L. 312-1 du code de l’action sociale et des familles”, people who keep the use of the dwelling that was their main home before moving permanently into a care institution. Again, a provision for the main home, not for the second one. The lesson is symmetrical: a second home is taxed in full, with almost none of the reliefs that soften the bill on a main residence.<\/p>\n One boundary matters for owners who leave the property empty rather than using it. The taxe annuelle sur les logements vacants, the annual tax on vacant dwellings, known as the TLV, applies in areas with a severe housing imbalance to dwellings that are genuinely vacant, while a furnished second home falls under the taxe d’habitation instead. Article 232 of the Code<\/a> targets communes “o\u00f9 il existe un d\u00e9s\u00e9quilibre marqu\u00e9 entre l’offre et la demande de logements entra\u00eenant des difficult\u00e9s s\u00e9rieuses d’acc\u00e8s au logement sur l’ensemble du parc r\u00e9sidentiel existant”, communes where a marked imbalance between housing supply and demand causes serious difficulty in accessing housing across the existing residential stock. A furnished house you occupy each summer, even briefly, is not vacant in this sense; it is a r\u00e9sidence secondaire, a second home, and it is the taxe d’habitation that applies. Owners sometimes receive alarming letters suggesting vacancy penalties after failing to declare the occupation of the property, which is why the annual occupation declaration described below matters as much as the payment itself. Getting the classification right, vacant or second home, decides which tax you face and which arguments can reduce it.<\/p>\n French tax residence does not change any of this, but British owners often confuse the two questions. Article 4 B of the Code<\/a> provides that “Sont consid\u00e9r\u00e9es comme ayant leur domicile fiscal en France au sens de l’article 4 A : a. Les personnes qui ont en France leur foyer ou le lieu de leur s\u00e9jour principal”, persons are regarded as having their tax domicile in France where France holds their household or their principal place of stay. A British owner who spends most of the year in the United Kingdom and holidays in France is normally still domiciled for tax in the United Kingdom, while a British owner who has genuinely moved the centre of family and personal life to France becomes French tax resident. Either way, the taxe fonci\u00e8re and the taxe d’habitation on the French house are due in full: these are taxes on the property and its occupation, not on the owner’s residence. Residence matters instead for declaring rental income and for claiming relief under the France-United Kingdom double tax treaty, and the British government’s guidance on tax on foreign income and on residence<\/a> is the starting point on the London side before any treaty claim is made. Do not expect non-residence to reduce a local property tax bill; do use residence correctly when you declare what the property earns.<\/p>\n The second bill, the taxe d’habitation sur les r\u00e9sidences secondaires, abbreviated THRS, survived the abolition of the same tax on main homes and now falls almost exclusively on second-home owners, furnished lets and vacant furnished property. Article 1407 of the Code<\/a> provides that “La taxe d’habitation sur les r\u00e9sidences secondaires est due pour tous les locaux meubl\u00e9s conform\u00e9ment \u00e0 leur destination d’habitation autre qu’\u00e0 titre principal, y compris lorsqu’ils sont imposables \u00e0 la cotisation fonci\u00e8re des entreprises.” The tax is due on all furnished premises used for residential purposes otherwise than as a main home, including premises also liable to the business rates equivalent. A British-owned flat kept for holidays, a house lent free of charge to adult children, a dwelling held for future retirement, all are caught, because none is anyone’s habitation principale, main home. The only escape routes in the article concern premises used exclusively for professional purposes and specific accommodation for people in difficulty or for pupils and students, none of which describes a normal holiday home.<\/p>\n On top of this base, many communes add a majoration, a surcharge voted locally. Article 1407 ter of the Code<\/a> allows the municipal council, the conseil municipal, to act “par une d\u00e9lib\u00e9ration prise dans les conditions pr\u00e9vues \u00e0 l’article 1639 A bis”, by a formal decision taken under the statutory voting procedure, in order to “majorer d’un pourcentage compris entre 5 % et 60 % la part lui revenant de la cotisation de taxe d’habitation sur les r\u00e9sidences secondaires due au titre des logements meubl\u00e9s”, increase by between 5 and 60 per cent the share of the second-home council tax accruing to the commune on furnished dwellings. Two features of that sentence deserve attention. First, only the communal share is increased, so a 60 per cent surcharge does not increase the total bill by 60 per cent; it increases the commune’s slice, which is usually the largest slice but not the whole. Second, the surcharge exists only where the council has actually voted it, in the proper form and on time. A bill carrying a surcharge in a commune that never deliberated, or whose deliberation was out of time, is challengeable on that ground alone, and the first check on any inflated bill is to ask the mairie, the town hall, for the deliberation.<\/p>\n The surcharge is not available everywhere. It can be voted only in communes on the official list of tight housing zones, and that list grew dramatically with Decree No. 2023-822 of 25 August 2023, challenged in Conseil d’\u00c9tat, 21 December 2023, No. 488601<\/a>, which amended the 2013 decree on the scope of the vacant-dwellings tax instituted by Article 232 of the Code and extended the zone geography that also conditions the second-home surcharge. The government’s information service confirms that for communes showing a high proportion of dwellings used otherwise than as main homes, the surcharge has applied since 1 January 2024, and its official guide to the second-home council tax<\/a> explains who pays, who may claim relief on complaint, and how to contact the tax office. For a British owner this extension is the usual explanation for a bill that suddenly jumps between one year and the next without any change in the property: the house did not move, the zone map did, and the commune then voted the surcharge the extended list allowed.<\/p>\n Owners’ associations in mountain resorts tried to have the 2023 extension annulled, arguing the commune list was arbitrary and ignored differences within communes. The Council of State rejected the whole challenge. In Conseil d’\u00c9tat, 8th and 3rd chambers combined, 21 December 2023, No. 488601<\/a>, the court held that objections to the commune list failed against the precise statutory criteria, and added, on the refusal to differentiate neighbourhood by neighbourhood, that “c’est la loi elle-m\u00eame qui pr\u00e9voit d’appr\u00e9cier l’existence d’un d\u00e9s\u00e9quilibre marqu\u00e9 entre l’offre et la demande de logements uniquement \u00e0 l’\u00e9chelle des communes.” It is the statute itself which requires the marked imbalance between housing supply and demand to be assessed at commune level only. The message for a British owner is direct and saves wasted fees: do not pay a lawyer to argue that your street has no housing shortage, or that the commune list is unfair in principle. That battle was fought by the mountain resorts’ federation and lost definitively. Litigate your own facts, the occupation of your property, the validity of your commune’s vote, your personal right to relief, where the law still gives you real openings, as the second part of this article shows.<\/p>\n Many British owners let their French house for part of the year, through a platform or a local agent, and assume that weeks of paying guests must reduce or remove the taxe d’habitation. The Council of State’s answer, given in a case about three classified tourism lets in Brittany, disappoints that assumption but draws a clear and usable line. In Conseil d’\u00c9tat, 8th chamber, 23 December 2024, No. 492174<\/a>, owners of three g\u00eetes class\u00e9s en meubl\u00e9s de tourisme, g\u00eetes registered as furnished tourist accommodation, let for short stays largely through online platforms, had been assessed to the second-home council tax on two of the g\u00eetes on the ground that they had the properties at their disposal on 1 January 2022. The administrative court of Rennes had discharged them, reasoning that the volume of seasonal letting proved they had not kept the use of the properties. The Council of State quashed that judgment for error of law and restated the rule: “lorsqu’un logement meubl\u00e9 fait l’objet de locations saisonni\u00e8res ou de courte dur\u00e9e, le propri\u00e9taire du bien est redevable de la taxe d’habitation d\u00e8s lors qu’au 1er janvier de l’ann\u00e9e de l’imposition, il peut \u00eatre regard\u00e9 comme entendant en conserver la disposition ou la jouissance une partie de l’ann\u00e9e.” Where a furnished dwelling is subject to seasonal or short-term letting, the owner is liable to the council tax where, on 1 January of the tax year, he can be regarded as intending to keep its disposal or enjoyment for part of the year.<\/p>\n The reasoning turns on control, not on occupancy statistics. The court stressed the latitude the owners kept to accept or refuse short-stay proposals during the year in response to their own advertisements, holding that such freedom proves, rather than defeats, the intention to keep the property’s use from the start of the year. For a British owner this means the test is practical: if your agent or your platform calendar lets you block weeks for your own family, refuse bookings at will, or withdraw the property mid-season, you keep the disposition, the legal power to use the dwelling, and you owe the tax even if guests occupied it for twenty weeks. Only an arrangement that genuinely strips you of control for the whole year, such as a full-year lease to a single tenant or a year-round management contract under which you cannot recover the keys, points the other way. And where the property truly passes to a long-term tenant who occupies it as a main home, the tenant becomes the liable person and your second-home exposure ends, though the taxe fonci\u00e8re, being an owner’s tax, stays with you. Owners should therefore read their letting contracts for the control clause before arguing non-liability: the calendar of actual bookings matters less than the right to say no.<\/p>\n Whatever the letting pattern, one administrative duty now conditions everything: the annual occupation declaration. Article 1418 of the Code<\/a> provides that “A des fins de gestion des impositions pr\u00e9vues aux 1406 bis, 1407 et 1407 ter , les propri\u00e9taires de locaux affect\u00e9s \u00e0 l’habitation sont tenus de d\u00e9clarer \u00e0 l’administration fiscale, avant le 1er juillet de chaque ann\u00e9e, les informations relatives \u00e0 la nature de l’occupation de ces locaux, s’ils en r\u00e9servent la jouissance, ou s’ils sont occup\u00e9s par des tiers.” For the management of the taxes on second homes and their surcharge, owners of residential premises must declare to the tax administration, before 1 July each year, how each property is occupied, whether they keep its use or a third party occupies it, with the occupant’s identity, the type of letting and the dates of occupation. The declaration is filed online in the “G\u00e9rer mes biens immobiliers”, manage my property, section of the owner’s impots.gouv.fr account. British owners who bought years ago and never created such an account, or who declared once and forgot the yearly update, are the first to receive wrong assessments: a house declared vacant when it is a furnished second home, a g\u00eete declared empty when it is let, a property still shown under the previous owner’s name. Before contesting any bill, log in, correct the occupation status for the year concerned going forward, and keep screenshots of every declaration, because the file the tax office holds about your house increasingly starts there.<\/p>\n Two related duties often surprise British owners at this stage. First, if the letting is a genuine furnished-holiday business rather than occasional family use, the income must be declared in France under the micro-BIC or actual-profit rules for furnished letting, with the treaty then preventing double taxation through relief in the United Kingdom, and the registration and planning rules for short-term lets, which a companion guide on holiday lets, registration and the 90-day question for British second homes<\/a> covers in detail, must also be respected. Second, the taxe de s\u00e9jour, the visitor’s tax collected from paying guests, is separate from the taxe d’habitation and is paid by the guest through the host, not by the owner as owner. Mixing these three, the owner’s council tax, the income tax on rents, the guest’s visitor tax, is the most common source of confused correspondence with the tax office. Keep three folders, one per tax, and answer each letter in the folder it belongs to.<\/p>\n Start with the relief the statute writes expressly against the surcharge, because a d\u00e9gr\u00e8vement, a discharge or reduction granted by the administration, costs nothing to request and succeeds on facts rather than on legal theory. Article 1407 ter of the Code<\/a> grants relief from the surcharge, on complaint made in time and in the statutory form, to three groups. First, “Pour le logement situ\u00e9 \u00e0 proximit\u00e9 du lieu o\u00f9 elles exercent leur activit\u00e9 professionnelle, les personnes contraintes de r\u00e9sider dans un lieu distinct de celui de leur habitation principale”, for the dwelling near their workplace, persons obliged to live somewhere other than their main home. A British employee posted to France who rents in Paris during the week while the family home sits elsewhere is the textbook case. Second, persons who moved permanently into care and kept their former main home, under the Article 1414 B mechanism described above. Third, and most broadly, “Les personnes autres que celles mentionn\u00e9es aux 1\u00b0 et 2\u00b0 qui, pour une cause \u00e9trang\u00e8re \u00e0 leur volont\u00e9, ne peuvent affecter le logement \u00e0 un usage d’habitation principale”, persons who, for a cause beyond their control, cannot use the dwelling as a main home. Illness, a failed sale in a blocked market, an administrative prohibition on occupation, or storm damage making the house uninhabitable can qualify; a free preference for living in London does not. The relief covers the surcharge, not the base tax, and it is charged back to the commune, so the tax office has no budgetary reason to resist a well-evidenced file. Assemble proof of the cause, medical certificates, agent’s evidence of a marketed but unsold property, the inhabitability order, and file the complaint with the documents attached rather than promised.<\/p>\n Next, attack the assessment’s own facts, because most winning cases are won there. Check the deliberation: ask the mairie for the council decision voting the surcharge, its date and its percentage, and compare with your bill. Check the property description: wrong surface, wrong comfort elements or a base value copied from a different property all inflate the valeur locative and both taxes with it. Check the occupant box: a house your adult child occupies year-round as a main home is not your second home for that year, and a house let year-round to a sitting tenant is the tenant’s council-tax liability, not yours, subject to the control test from the December 2024 judgment. Check double liability: a property taxed both as vacant under Article 232 and as a second home under Article 1407 for the same year is being taxed twice for one occupation status, and one of the two assessments must fall. None of these points requires a lawyer to spot; each requires the assessment notice, the declaration history and the contract or family facts in front of you on the same table.<\/p>\n Then file the r\u00e9clamation, the formal complaint to the tax administration, correctly. The government’s guide confirms the channel: send the complaint from your personal online account, through the secure messaging heading, attaching the notice, the evidence and a short letter identifying the tax, the year, the property reference and the precise correction sought, whether full discharge, partial reduction or surcharge relief. Watch the deadline printed on your assessment notice and diary it on receipt, because late complaints fail whatever their merits, and keep the administration’s acknowledgement. If the office rejects the complaint expressly or stays silent past the statutory response period, the dispute moves to the administrative court, the tribunal administratif, where the judge re-examines the facts and the law afresh. At that stage, and only at that stage, professional representation earns its fee: the pleadings must cite the exact article, the exact deliberation defect or the exact passage of the December 2024 judgment that fits your letting pattern, and attach the exhibits in admissible form. What counsel should not sell you is a rerun of the mountain resorts’ lost battle against the zone list itself. Since No. 488601 of 21 December 2023<\/a>, the commune-level map is lawful, and a judge will apply it. The same judgment, read positively, tells you where judges still listen: your street’s situation is irrelevant, your property’s situation is everything.<\/p>\n British owners sometimes add a European argument, typically that Brexit Britons are discriminated against compared with French or European Union owners. Run this argument only on legal advice and only where the facts truly show different treatment, because the standard position defeats it: the taxe fonci\u00e8re, the THRS and the surcharge apply identically to French nationals, Germans, Americans and Britons holding comparable property in the same commune. Discrimination law bites where a rule treats comparable situations differently without justification, not where one bill feels heavy. The real Brexit effect on your file is indirect but practical: as a third-country household you may visit less often, leave the house empty longer, and miss the July declaration or the complaint deadline while out of the country. The remedy is organisation, not litigation theory. Give a French-based contact or your agent a standing instruction to forward every tax letter the week it arrives, keep your impots.gouv.fr login working from the United Kingdom, and set yearly reminders for the July declaration and the autumn bills.<\/p>\n A British second home in France carries two local taxes and one optional surcharge, and each follows its own logic. The taxe fonci\u00e8re is the owner’s yearly charge on French bricks, assessed on the 1 January owner for the whole year, with almost no relief for a holiday house. The taxe d’habitation on second homes catches every furnished dwelling that is nobody’s main home, and the commune may add a voted surcharge of 5 to 60 per cent of its share wherever the extended tight-zone map allows, an extension the Council of State upheld in December 2023 at commune level. Owners who let through platforms remain liable wherever they keep the power to use the property part of the year, as the Council of State confirmed for Breton g\u00eetes in December 2024, and every owner must declare each property’s occupation online before 1 July. Against a wrong bill, the order of battle is relief on complaint for the surcharge, correction of the assessment’s facts, then a timely online complaint and, if needed, the administrative court, arguing the property’s situation and never the zone map’s fairness. Run that sequence with documents in hand and the French local tax on your second home becomes what it should be: a predictable cost of a house you love, not an annual surprise.<\/p>\n Related reading: for the letting side of the same house, registration, planning and the 90-day question, see British Second Home in France: Holiday Lets, Registration and the 90-Day Question After Brexit<\/a>.<\/p>\n Telephone consultation within 48 hours with a lawyer from the firm. We can review your taxe fonci\u00e8re and taxe d’habitation bills, your surcharge, your g\u00eete liability, your occupation declaration and your complaint deadlines with you. Call Ma\u00eetre Reda Kohen at +33 6 46 60 58 22<\/a>. Contact the firm<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" British second-home owner in France? Taxe fonciere, second-home council tax, the 5 to 60 per cent surcharge and how to challenge the bill after Brexit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":251031309,"featured_media":16277,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kj_source_type":"","_kj_official_id":"","_kj_official_url":"","_kj_judilibre_id":"","_kj_jur":"","_kj_lieu":"","_kj_chambre":"","_kj_rg":"","_kj_date":"","activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":""},"categories":[80312,80314],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2122754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-british-desk","category-decryptage"],"yoast_head":"\nB. When does the 5 to 60 per cent second-home surcharge apply to British owners<\/h3>\n
II. How a British owner pays correctly and challenges an excessive bill<\/h2>\n
A. Who really owes the tax on a g\u00eete or holiday let, and the July declaration that decides it<\/h3>\n
B. How to challenge the bill: relief, complaint and the arguments that actually win<\/h3>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
Need a quick opinion on your case<\/h2>\n