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If you let a French property short-term, you have spent two years watching France tighten the rules, from the loi Le Meur to your own copropriété gaining the power to vote your listing out of the building. The next turn now comes from Brussels. According to reporting in the Financial Times, the European Commission is preparing legislation, known as the Affordable Housing Act, to give cities across the EU a firmer legal basis for restricting holiday rentals. For landlords, the point is not that new restrictions are coming. It is that the most reliable way of fighting the existing ones, the challenge under EU law, is closing.
What Brussels is preparing
The act’s short-term rental strand is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026. The goal is not an EU-wide ban. It is a set of criteria telling cities and regions when restrictions are lawful, covering the familiar toolkit of licensing schemes, caps on rental nights, quotas and moratoria, applied where housing is under stress. In plain terms, Brussels is preparing to spell out what a city may do, so that every new rule no longer has to be tested from scratch in court.
The numbers explain the politics. Short-term lets amount to about 1.2% of homes across the EU, which sounds like nothing, but the average hides the concentration. In hotspots like Sorrento, Dubrovnik and Fuerteventura, the Commission’s researchers put holiday lets at up to a fifth of the entire housing stock. And cities are not waiting for Brussels. Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Florence and Paris already limit tourist lets through licences or night caps, and Barcelona intends to phase out apartment rentals to tourists entirely by 2028.
Why cities keep ending up in court
Florence shows the pattern. The city created a licensing system for short-term rentals last year and froze new listings in its historic centre, and was promptly met with a dozen appeals from owners and tourism operators. “Whatever we do, an appeal comes,” says Jacopo Vicini, the city councillor responsible for tourism. Florence won the first round before Tuscany’s regional tribunal, extended the freeze to 44% of its housing stock, and expects to be sued again.
French owners have seen this before, because the landmark case was about Paris. In 2020 the EU’s top court upheld the capital’s authorisation regime for short-term lets, accepting that the fight against housing shortage can justify restrictions, provided the measures are proportionate. The court never said where proportionate ends. That one open word has produced six years of litigation, and it explains why so many town halls hold back: councils with strong legal teams push ahead and absorb the appeals, while the rest adopt weaker rules than the law allows, for fear of losing in court. The coming act is meant to remove that uncertainty by writing the criteria down.
France is already living in the future
Here is the part that matters for your property. France did not wait for Brussels. The loi Le Meur already lets your copropriété vote to ban short-term lets in the building, a power the Conseil constitutionnel upheld this spring. The 120-day cap on letting your primary residence has teeth, and the Cour de cassation spent April closing one of its last loopholes. Mayors in tense zones hold quota and authorisation powers that many have only begun to use. For the full landscape, our guides to the Le Meur regime and the 2026 primary-residence rules cover it in detail.
What the EU act changes for France is therefore not creation but reinforcement. Every French restriction gains a second legal foundation, and the argument that a municipal crackdown breaches the EU freedom to provide services loses most of its force. Expect bolder schemes from cities that were hesitating, and expect the hesitant ones to copy Paris.
House prices and rents since 2015
Annual average indices, 2015 = 100. Choose a country.
Data: Eurostat, house price index and HICP actual rentals for housing, loaded live from the Eurostat API.
The chart shows the decade behind all of this. Across the EU, house prices rose by about 62% between 2015 and 2025 while rents rose by about 21%, and prices outran household incomes in much of the bloc, according to Eurostat. Pick France from the menu and the story is gentler than the average, with prices up about 27% and rents up about 10%. The pressure driving this legislation is not primarily French, but the legal tools it creates will apply in France all the same.
Are holiday lets really to blame? The honest answer is only partly. The main cause of the affordability crisis is that housing supply has lagged demand for a decade, held back by planning constraints in exactly the dense urban areas where prices hurt most. The Commission’s researchers did find that more short-term lets correlate with higher housing costs, though the link is stronger for purchase prices than for rents. The platforms challenge the diagnosis altogether. Airbnb argues that even strict restrictions are unlikely to move house prices while the tourism income is real and local, and the holiday-home lobby points to a much larger pool of around 20% of EU homes standing empty. Both sides have a point. Politically it makes little difference, because the housing shortage needs a visible culprit, and a key box on a doorway is easier to photograph than a planning committee.
What this means if you own in France
The decision rule
Invest on the basis of the rules as they are tightening, not the permissions you hold today. If a purchase only works at short-let yields, treat those as the upside and make the long-term rent your base case. Then keep an eye on two documents: your copropriété’s AGM agenda, where a ban can now arrive by majority vote, and your mairie’s tourist-rental rules, which the coming EU framework is designed to reinforce. Nothing changes tomorrow, because the act is not yet law. The direction of travel could hardly be clearer.
Frequently asked questions
Does the EU Affordable Housing Act ban Airbnb-style rentals?
No. The initiative expected in late 2026 sets out criteria under which cities and regions can lawfully restrict short-term lets in areas under housing stress. It supports local licensing schemes, night caps and moratoria rather than imposing any EU-wide ban.
Will French short-term rental rules get stricter because of it?
France already runs one of Europe’s tightest regimes under the loi Le Meur. The EU framework mainly strengthens the legal foundation of existing French restrictions and reduces the litigation risk for cities, which makes bolder municipal schemes more likely, especially in tense zones.
Is an existing meublé de tourisme registration protected?
A registration or authorisation is only as durable as the local rules behind it, and French cities can already tighten quotas, durations and renewal conditions. Nothing in the expected EU text grandfathers existing listings, so treat current permissions as revocable rather than acquired rights.
What was the 2020 EU court case about?
It concerned Paris. The Court of Justice of the EU upheld the city’s authorisation regime for short-term lets, ruling that fighting housing shortage can justify such restrictions where the measures are proportionate. The vagueness of that word is what the coming legislation aims to resolve.
