This article is general information, not legal advice. Whether a French lease falls under the Code civil, the 1989 regime or the tourist-letting rules depends entirely on the facts of the occupation – and, as you are about to read, the penalties for getting it wrong have teeth. Have a French avocat review your draft before anyone signs.
Last Updated: July 2026
Two words are having a very strange year in France. The housing ministry’s Zéro Logement Vacant service published a guide in May 2025 encouraging communes to promote the bail Code civil as a tool for bringing empty homes back onto the market. Twelve months later the mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, was describing the explosion of the very same contract in the capital as an “escroquerie à l’échelle industrielle” – industrial-scale fraud – while the consumer-fraud authority opened a national enforcement campaign and Paris judges handed out five-figure fines. Both stories are true at once, because the bail civil is two things at once: the legally correct lease for a second home, and the contract of choice for landlords dodging rent control. If you own French property that is not anyone’s main home, you need to know exactly where the line runs, because 2026 is the year France started policing it.
One rental market, two rulebooks
French tenancy law is a layered affair: the Code civil supplies the default rules for any hiring of property, and the law of 6 July 1989 then overrides them – with public-order protections nobody can contract out of – whenever a dwelling is let as somebody’s home. The 1989 regime is mandatory only when four conditions are met at the same time:
- the parties agree that one will enjoy the other’s property in exchange for a price – a lease in the Code civil’s sense;
- the tenant is a natural person, not a company or an association;
- the premises are let for residential or mixed residential-professional use; and
- the premises are the tenant’s résidence principale.
That last condition carries the whole structure. A principal residence, for the 1989 law, is a dwelling occupied at least eight months a year – by the tenant, their spouse or a dependant – unless work, health or force majeure explains the absence, and nobody gets to have two of them. Knock out any one of the four conditions and the mandatory regime falls away, which is why the legitimate territory of the bail civil reads like a list of everything that is not an ordinary home: second homes occupied under eight months a year, staff housing rented by a company for an employee, premises let to an association, offices and storage, non-agricultural land, free-standing parking and cellars. Seasonal holiday lets are technically civil-code leases too, but they answer to their own tourist-letting rules – a distinction that, as we will see, some landlords learned about in court.
What freedom actually looks like
The differences are not cosmetic. Under a bail Code civil the rent is uncapped and its payment terms are whatever you agree, advance payments included; the deposit has no ceiling; there is no minimum duration; and the lease simply ends at its agreed term without anyone serving a congé. The parties can write their own termination clauses, including automatic termination at a fixed date, and the tenant is not automatically protected if you sell – the lease can provide that a buyer may recover the property, with any indemnity fixed in the contract itself. The landlord’s side of the bargain comes from the Code civil’s general lease rules: deliver the premises, keep them fit for their agreed use, guarantee peaceful enjoyment, and carry the repairs that are not the tenant’s. One default rule surprises owners – unless the contract says otherwise, you cannot take the property back mid-term, even to live in it yourself.
| Bail Code civil | Bail d’habitation (loi 1989, unfurnished) | |
|---|---|---|
| When it applies | Whenever the four 1989 conditions are not all met – typically a second home, a company tenant or an association | Mandatory when a natural person rents a dwelling as their principal residence |
| Duration | Free, no minimum; ends at the agreed term without notice | Minimum 3 years (6 years for corporate landlords), tacitly renewed |
| Rent | Free, including payment schedule | Capped in some twenty rent-controlled cities; annual indexation limited |
| Deposit | No ceiling | Capped at one month’s rent |
| Ending the lease | As the contract provides, automatic termination clauses allowed | Landlord needs a legal ground (sale, repossession, serious cause) and long statutory notice |
| Sale of the property | Tenant protection only if the lease grants it | Tenant protected; strict pre-emption and notice rules |
Why all of Paris is suddenly talking about a lease from 1804
The freedom above collides head-on with the encadrement des loyers, the experimental rent-cap regime running since 2019 in Paris and now in some twenty cities including Lille, Lyon, Bordeaux and Montpellier, under which a lease may not exceed a reference rent plus twenty percent. The experiment is currently due to expire on 23 November 2026, and the City of Paris’s own evaluation by the Apur urban-planning agency, published on 27 April 2026, found it has held Paris rents about five percent below where they would otherwise be – worth €85 a month to the average tenant – while nearly one listing in two (48.6 percent) still advertises a rent above the cap, a share that is rising.
Enter the workaround. Because the caps only bind leases under the 1989 law, listings offering flats on a “bail Code civil” – at rents the encadrement would forbid – have multiplied across the regulated cities, pitched at students, young professionals and mobile executives who will, in reality, live there full-time. That is not creative contracting; it is unlawful, since the 1989 regime attaches to the facts of principal-residence occupation rather than to the label on the contract. The scale of it is what turned a legal footnote into front-page politics: Paris’s mayor has announced a dedicated enforcement plan, and the DGCCRF – the consumer-protection and anti-fraud authority – launched a national control campaign in spring 2026 aimed at identifying abusive civil leases, having them treated as what they really are, and returning the overcharged rent to tenants. Under the existing rent-cap rules, a landlord reported for exceeding the ceiling already faces a prefectoral order to lower the rent and refund the excess, backed by administrative fines of up to €5,000 for an individual and €15,000 for a company.
The courts are drawing the line – in both directions
French judges spent early 2026 sketching the boundary with unusual clarity. In Lyon, a student who had received housing benefit at the flat all year and paid its electricity bills persuaded the court on 26 February 2026 to requalify her “bail civil” into a 1989 furnished tenancy, with the rent cut to the capped level and the overcharge refunded. The exercise is evidence-driven rather than automatic: in several Paris cases decided the same season, tenants who could not show utility bills, a tax address or a genuine centre of life at the property saw their requalification claims fail, because a fiscal address elsewhere, a parental attachment or a short study stay tells the judge the dwelling was never a principal residence. The door swings both ways, too – in 2024 a Paris court requalified a 1989 lease into a bail civil after the tenant moved her life abroad and kept the flat as a pied-à-terre, stripping her of the 1989 protections and letting the landlord serve notice under the Code civil’s ordinary rules.
The second front is the one that should worry owners in tourist cities. On 24 February 2026, in three decisions prosecuted by the City of Paris, the Paris judicial court held that stringing together civil leases of under a year for a passing clientele found on booking platforms amounts to short-term tourist letting – a regulated change of use of residential premises under the construction code – and fined the owners between €15,000 and €35,000, appeal pending. The tribunal anchored itself in the Cour de cassation’s 2021 formula:
« [L]e fait de louer, à plusieurs reprises au cours d’une même année, des locaux à la nuitée, à la semaine ou au mois, à une clientèle de passage qui n’y fixe pas sa résidence principale constitue un changement d’usage d’un local destiné à l’habitation, et, par conséquent, soumis à autorisation préalable. »
“Letting premises several times in the course of the same year – by the night, the week or the month – to a passing clientele that does not make them its principal residence constitutes a change of use of residential premises, and is therefore subject to prior authorisation.” – Cour de cassation, 3rd civil chamber, 18 February 2021, n° 19-13.191 (our rendering)
The practical upshot of the February rulings, as the defending counsel herself summarised, is that in change-of-use cities only civil leases of a year or more now look safe from being treated as unauthorised tourist letting. A bail civil does not exempt anyone from the tourist-rental rules we covered in our short-term letting guide – it just changes the paperwork the inspector photographs.
The regulatory horizon: the loophole is being legislated shut
Parliament has noticed. A bill to make rent control permanent (proposition de loi n° 2213, tabled 9 December 2025) was adopted at first reading by the Assemblée nationale on 11 December 2025, and its drafters name the bail civil explicitly as a circumvention device. Its article 11 would subject any dwelling occupied as the tenant’s principal residence to rent control whatever the contract says on the cover, require listing platforms to display where an advertised rent sits against the local caps, and let préfets order landlords who misuse civil leases to bring the contract into conformity and refund overcharged rent – without waiting for a judge to requalify anything. The text still needs the Senate, and French housing bills have died there before, but the direction of travel is unambiguous: the space for using a bail civil against a de facto principal residence is closing from three sides at once – courts, regulators and legislators.
What a foreign owner should actually do
None of this abolishes the legitimate bail civil, and the ministry’s vacancy guide remains a fair catalogue of second-home owners’ situations: the owner who wants the property back in a year or two without navigating the 1989 law’s narrow repossession grounds, the pied-à-terre whose contract carves out your weekends while a tenant takes the rest, or the digital nomad wintering in your village who keeps a principal residence elsewhere. The company renting housing for an employee belongs on the list too – the 1989 regime does not apply at all there, because the tenant is not a natural person – as does the association taking a dwelling for its activities. What the 2026 enforcement wave changes is the margin for error, so the paperwork now has to prove the premise. Put the lease in writing, state expressly that the premises are not and will not be the tenant’s principal residence, and keep hard evidence that the tenant has one elsewhere – a tax notice or utility bill on file beats an argument in court, and the Lyon case shows judges reading electricity records like bank statements. Do an état des lieux at entry and exit, take a guarantor where sensible, and remember your tenant may face the taxe d’habitation on secondary residences, which in surcharge communes is not a rounding error.
The list of things not to do writes itself from the case law. Do not let successive short civil leases to a passing clientele in Paris or any change-of-use city, because that is tourist letting in a trench coat and now attracts tourist-letting fines. Do not advertise a “bail Code civil” above the rent cap to someone who will plainly live there, and treat any agency or concierge service promising that trick as a liability rather than a service – the DGCCRF is auditioning test cases. If what you want is a lawful mid-length let to a mobile worker, the bail mobilité (one to ten months, for tenants in study or professional mobility) exists precisely for that; for classic furnished tenancies and their tax treatment, our LMNP guide covers the ground, and if you ever need to recover a 1989-protected property instead, the courts police every comma of the congé. Rental income under a bail civil is, needless to say, still rental income for the taxman, whichever code the lease lives in.
We read the rulings and the bills so you can read your lease. If you are weighing a flexible let of your maison secondaire – or an agent has just proposed a “bail code civil” that sounds a little too clever – the comments are open, and the contact page reaches us directly.
FAQ
What is a bail Code civil?
It is the default lease of the French Code civil, available whenever no mandatory special regime applies – most commonly when the dwelling is not the tenant’s principal residence, or the tenant is a company or association. The parties set the rent, deposit, duration and termination terms contractually.
Is it legal to use a bail civil to avoid rent control?
No. Rent control and the 1989 regime attach to the facts of principal-residence occupation, not to the contract’s label. Courts requalify abusive civil leases, tenants recover the overcharged rent, préfets can fine landlords who exceed the caps, and the DGCCRF opened a national enforcement campaign against the practice in 2026.
When is the 1989 residential lease mandatory instead?
When four conditions are met together: there is a lease for a price, the tenant is a natural person, the premises are for residential or mixed use, and they are the tenant’s principal residence – a dwelling occupied at least eight months a year, save for professional, health or force majeure reasons. All four together make the 1989 regime unavoidable.
Can I use civil leases for short stays instead of registering a tourist let?
Not safely. In February 2026 the Paris judicial court treated successive civil leases of under a year, let to a passing clientele via platforms, as an unauthorised change of use of residential premises and fined the owners, applying the Cour de cassation’s 2021 case law. In change-of-use cities, only civil leases of a year or more currently appear to escape that qualification.
Can I rent my French second home to a company for its employees?
Yes. Where a company takes the lease and provides the dwelling to an employee, the 1989 regime does not apply because the tenant is not a natural person, so the letting can be structured under the Code civil. The housing ministry’s vacancy guide highlights this employer-housing route expressly.
