This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal, tax or investment advice. Rules change and individual situations differ. Always confirm the current position with a qualified professional before acting.
A nurse at a Paris hospital can no longer afford to live within an hour of her ward. A prison officer in Marseille does not want to live in the same block as the people he locked up. A metro driver on the first shift of the day cannot commute from a town where a flat is affordable. France’s answer, promulgated on 29 June and published the next morning, is a short law with a long reach: loi n° 2026-553 on access to housing for public-service workers. It ties a social tenancy to the job that justified it, hands public employers half the flats built on land they sell cheaply, and lets town halls wave through housing on public sites that the local plan had reserved for something else. None of it touches the private lease you sign with a tenant. All of it changes what gets built next to you, and one of its tools is a device you have met before on this site: the flat that may only ever be a main residence.
Six articles, one idea
The law began as a private member’s bill from David Amiel, the deputy who wrote a 2024 report on housing public-service workers and who has since become public accounts minister. The diagnosis dates from the pandemic, when the workers the State called essential, nurses, police officers and teachers, turned out to be the ones who could no longer afford to live near the job. It went through the Assemblée in January, the Senate in March, a joint committee in June, and the Journal officiel on 30 June. Six articles, each pulling in the same direction: put the people who run hospitals, courts, trains and police stations in homes near where they work, and make those homes follow the job rather than the person.
| Article | What it does | Who feels it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lets a social tenancy allocated through a public employer carry a clause de fonction, so the right to stay ends when the job does, with at least six months’ notice | Public employees and, in tense zones, staff of public transport operators, in reserved social housing |
| 2 | Raises the share of social flats a public body may reserve for its own staff when it sells land at a discount, or leases it long-term, from 10% to 50% | Anyone living near a former barracks, hospital annex or railway yard |
| 3 | Lets justice, customs and, in tense zones, public transport reserve specific identified flats rather than a share of the annual flow | Social landlords and the staff concerned |
| 4 | Lets the planning authority override the local plan’s use rules to build housing on public land, if half the homes go to public-service workers, and lets the plan mark such sectors as main residence only | Neighbours, and anyone buying into such a scheme |
| 5 | Lets public bodies hand the management of their housing stock to an outside manager | Hospitals with unlettable flats |
| 6 | Lets public hospitals develop their own property, including through subsidiaries and mixed-economy companies, to house staff | Hospital trusts with land |
The clause de fonction: a flat for as long as the job lasts
Social housing in France comes with something private tenants do not have. The droit au maintien dans les lieux is a right to stay that survives almost everything except non-payment and misconduct. Article 1 rewrites article L. 442-7 of the housing code. Where a public employer has used its reservation rights to place an employee in a social flat, the lease may now contain a clause de fonction naming the job that justifies the tenancy. When the job ends, for retirement, resignation, a move to the private sector or a transfer elsewhere, the employer has one year to ask the landlord to end the lease. The landlord then serves notice, and the notice period written into the clause cannot be shorter than six months from the day the tenant is told of the employer’s decision.
A version of this has existed since 1983 for civil and military public employees. It is the practical successor to the logement de fonction, the tied flat that came with the post and that has largely fallen into disuse, the village schoolteacher’s lodging above the classroom being the last familiar example. What is new is the reach and the machinery. The clause now extends to employees of public bodies and companies running public passenger transport, in the tense zones listed under article 17 of the 1989 tenancy law. In practice that means the RATP, the SNCF and the urban transport operators of the big cities. Public hospitals can use it for contract staff, not only for established public servants. Mixed-economy housing companies, the sociétés d’économie mixte that own a large share of the Paris social stock, get their own article allowing the clause. And the reservation agreements between employers and social landlords must now say whether the clause is being used, so that the arrangement is visible from the start.
The Senate added the safety catches. A decree, still to come, will define the exceptional medical, family or professional situations in which a tenant or their dependants can have up to a further year to leave after the notice expires. The same decree will set out how a tenant, or a member of the household, who becomes disabled during the tenancy keeps the right to stay even after the job has ended, provided the disability was not known when the lease was signed. Nothing in the law makes the eviction automatic. The employer must choose to ask, within the year, and the landlord must then act.
One gap the Dalloz commentary points to is worth stating plainly. The clause names a job, and the whole reservation system is built around the identity of the employer. A transfer to another post, or from one administration to another, could therefore end the tenancy of someone who is still a public servant. Termination is optional, so it need not happen, but the possibility introduces into social housing precisely the insecurity it was designed to remove.
The number that explains all this comes from the regional audit office. In 2010, forty percent of the social flats reserved for the Paris hospitals group, the AP-HP, were occupied by people who no longer worked there. A flat given to a nurse in 1998 was still hers in 2010, and the nurse hired in 2010 was commuting from the far suburbs. The clause de fonction is the answer to that arithmetic, and it comes with a cost that the Dalloz commentary on the law makes plain: social housing has always sold security, and this attaches the security to the payslip.
Half the flats on public land
Article 2 is the one that changes the skyline. When the State sells land at a discount for housing, it has been able to reserve up to ten percent of the resulting social flats for its own staff. The same now applies when it leases the land under a bail emphytéotique, the long lease of up to 99 years. The law raises that to fifty percent, on top of the préfet’s usual quota, and the Senate made sure it sits alongside rather than inside the shares belonging to local authorities and Action Logement. The reservation is limited to the selling administration’s own people, so a former army site produces flats for defence staff, a former hospital annex for hospital staff. The provision was lifted by Senate committee amendment from article 19 of the Senate’s own CHOC housing bill, which the Senate adopted on 20 January 2026. The Amiel report had wanted the pool shared across the public service. Parliament kept it tribal.
For an owner the practical effect is a change in who your future neighbours are and what the building next door is for. The sites in question are the ones foreign buyers notice, the disused barracks in a provincial city centre, the railway land behind a station, the old hospital wing. Those are now much more attractive for a public body to dispose of, because it keeps half the housing for people it is trying to recruit. Expect more of them to come forward, and expect the buildings on them to be social and reserved rather than private and for sale.
The planning override, and another main-residence-only sector
Article 4 creates a new article L. 152-6-11 in the planning code, in force since 1 July. In urban and to-be-urbanised zones, the authority that grants planning permission may set aside the local plan’s rules on what a building may be used for. It needs a reasoned decision, and it may permit housing, by construction or conversion, on two conditions. The land must belong to a public body or public company, or have been sold by one for the purpose. And at least half the homes created must be reserved for the public-service workers covered by article 1. The owner has to prove every year that the half is still respected. Miss the declaration or fall below the line, and after a three-month formal notice the building is treated as breaching its permission.
Tucked into the same article is a sentence that will outlast the rest. The local plan may now designate sectors in which homes built under this derogation are for use exclusively as main residences. That is the third such device in a year. The lease template in force from 1 October carries a main-residence servitude on certain new homes. The Relance Logement bill’s development perimeters carry the same condition. We set both out in our article-by-article guide to that bill. Each one closes the door on holiday letting for the life of the building, and each one arrives in a different code so that nobody sees the pattern. If you are buying new-build on former public land, the question for the notaire is now whether the plot sits in one of these sectors, before you ask about anything else.
Security, hospitals, and the flats nobody could let
Article 3 is a technical change with a human reason. Since the ELAN law of 2018, employers’ reservation rights in social housing are meant to be managed as a flow, a percentage of each year’s lettings, rather than as a list of named flats. The change only took effect on 24 November 2023, after the 3DS law delayed it, and the social landlords themselves doubt it has delivered the flexibility promised, a doubt aired in a written parliamentary question published the same day as this law. Defence, internal security and public hospitals were already exempt, because a police officer should not be housed in the same stairwell as someone he arrested. The new law adds the justice service, customs and, in tense zones, public transport operators to the exemption, so that prison officers and railway security staff can be placed in identified buildings rather than wherever the flow lands them.
Articles 5 and 6 are for the hospitals. The Paris hospitals group owns about 3,400 flats and, according to the Assemblée’s rapporteur, had been unable to appoint an outside manager to run them. Public bodies may now hand their housing stock to a manager under a management agreement. And public hospitals, whose legal powers are normally confined to healthcare, may develop their own land to house staff, and may set up subsidiaries or mixed-economy companies to do it. Whether a hospital trust is the right developer of housing is a fair question. Whether it was right to leave the land idle while the wards emptied is an easier one.
What does not change for a private landlord
Every provision above concerns social housing, public land or public bodies. If you let a flat to a nurse or a teacher under an ordinary lease, nothing in this law reaches that contract. You cannot insert a clause de fonction into a private residential lease under the 1989 law. The grounds on which you can end that lease remain the three the statute allows, sale, recovery for your own or family occupation, and a legitimate and serious reason. Our guide to ending a French tenancy covers all three. A public employer that owns private flats outright, as the AP-HP does, can and does use the clause in those leases, but that is the employer’s position as owner, not something a third-party landlord can borrow.
Where the law does reach you is indirectly, in three ways. Supply: in the tense-zone cities where you are most likely to own, some of the sites that would have become private flats will now become reserved social ones, with the effect on local prices that follows from fewer private units. Neighbours: a building built under article 4 will be half public-service households by design, which most owners will count as a good thing and some will not. And the pattern: the main-residence-only sector is spreading from code to code, and a foreign buyer of new-build should assume it applies until the notaire confirms it does not.
April 2024
David Amiel’s report, Loger les travailleurs des services publics, sets out the diagnosis and most of the remedies.
12 January 2026
Assemblée nationale adopts the bill at first reading under the accelerated procedure.
30 March 2026
Senate adopts it with the tenant protections, the 50% reservation and the recentred planning derogation.
1 and 17 June 2026
Joint committee text adopted by the Senate, then by the Assemblée.
29 and 30 June 2026
Promulgated, published. The planning derogation applies from 1 July.
Still to come
The decree on exceptional situations and disability under the clause de fonction.
Our view: the right diagnosis, and a quiet reversal
The diagnosis is right. A hospital that cannot house its nurses does not have a housing problem, it has a hospital problem. The 40 percent figure from the AP-HP shows how a benefit meant for the people doing the work ended up as an annuity for the people who once did it. Tying the flat to the job fixes that, and the Senate’s safeguards, a year for the employer to decide, six months’ notice, a further year for hard cases, protection for disability, are more generous than most private tenants in France will ever see.
What the law does not say out loud is that it reverses the doctrine that has governed French social housing since the 1980s, in which the flat is a right attached to the household’s income rather than to its usefulness to the State. The 1983 exception for public servants was narrow. This law widens it and attaches the flat to the payslip, which is the logic of the habitations à bon marché of the 1890s, when employers housed workers to keep them. That may be the right trade for a country that cannot staff its wards. It should be argued for rather than slipped through in six articles under a title about access. And for the private owner, the more durable legacy is the smaller one. A planning code that can now declare a sector main-residence-only has one more way to decide what your building is for, and it will not be the last.
FAQ: the public-service workers housing law
Can I put a clause de fonction in the lease I sign with a tenant who works for the State?
No. The clause applies to social housing allocated through a public employer’s reservation rights, and to flats owned by the public employer itself. An ordinary private lease under the 1989 law cannot be tied to the tenant’s job.
Is the law already in force?
Yes, since publication on 30 June 2026, with the planning derogation applying from 1 July. The decree on exceptional situations and disability under the clause de fonction had not been published at the time of writing.
Does it affect the flat I own in a copropriété?
Not directly. It may change what is built on public land nearby, and who lives there. If you are buying new-build on former public land, ask whether the site was permitted under the new derogation and whether the plan marks it as main residence only.
How much notice does a tenant with a clause de fonction get?
At least six months from the day the landlord notifies them of the employer’s decision, which the employer must take within a year of the job ending. A decree will allow up to a further year in exceptional medical, family or professional circumstances.
