This article is general information for foreign and domestic investors in French property and is not tax, legal, or financial advice. The Jeanbrun / Relance logement regime is brand new – it was created by the loi de finances pour 2026 and its implementing decree and tax-authority commentary are still being finalised, so some figures and conditions below may be refined. Always take advice from a qualified French notaire, an avocat fiscaliste, and your own adviser at home before committing capital.
Last Updated: June 2026
For the first time in nearly four decades, France spent a full year – all of 2025 – with no flagship tax incentive aimed at getting investors to buy a new-build home and rent it out. The Pinel reduction, the workhorse of buy-to-let defiscalisation (tax-sheltered investment) for a decade, expired on 31 December 2024 and was quietly left to lapse, judged too expensive for what it actually delivered. Landlords looking at the neuf (new-build) market spent twelve months in the wilderness. And then, in February 2026, the government reached for a mechanism it had not put at the centre of housing policy in a generation: not a tax reduction bolted onto your bill, but amortissement – the right to write down the value of your property against your rental income, year after year, the way a business depreciates a machine. That mechanism now has a name. Officially it is the statut du bailleur prive (the “private-landlord status”); to the press, to your notaire, and to everyone trying to sell you an apartment off-plan, it is the dispositif Jeanbrun, named after Vincent Jeanbrun, the ministre de la Ville et du Logement (Minister for the City and Housing) who carried it. If that sounds like a big shift, well… it is. Let’s break it down in plain English, including the part nobody selling you the apartment will dwell on: where the catch is hiding.
What Exactly Is “Relance Logement” (a.k.a. Jeanbrun)?
“Relance logement” – literally “housing restart” – is the government’s umbrella plan to push more rental housing onto the market quickly, everywhere in France including the outre-mer (overseas territories). Sitting inside that plan is the tax tool itself, written into law by the loi de finances pour 2026 (article 47), which Parliament passed in February 2026. Bercy’s own consumer guidance on the economie.gouv.fr explainer sets out the headline rules; the full policy backdrop lives on the info.gouv.fr Relance logement dossier.
Why does it matter so much? Because the amortissement idea it imports is genuinely new for this kind of investment. Until now, depreciating a property against rent was the preserve of furnished letting – the LMNP regime that we cover in detail in the mechanics of furnished-let amortisation for non-resident landlords. Jeanbrun drags that same logic into unfurnished letting for the first time. That is the whole story in one sentence: the depreciation power of LMNP, now available to a landlord who rents out an empty flat on a normal long-term lease.
The window is deliberately short. The regime is open for roughly three years, and the eligible acquisition period runs from 21 February 2026 to 31 December 2028. Buy outside that window and you are out.
Who Can Actually Use It?
Here is the refreshingly simple part. Jeanbrun is open to all individuals who want to invest in rental property, with no income ceiling (sans condition de ressources). There is no “your household earns too much” cut-off of the sort that haunts other French housing aids.
And – this is the question every reader of this site really wants answered – nothing in the text restricts it to French tax residents. The law speaks of “all individuals” who acquire a qualifying home to let; it sets no residency test. In practice the benefit works through the French rental-income return: the amortissement is a deduction inside the regime reel (the actual-expenses regime) of revenus fonciers (rental income), which a non-resident landlord files just as a resident does. So an American, British, Irish, Canadian, or Australian investor with a French buy-to-let can, on the face of the law, claim it. We flag one honest caveat below, but the direction of travel is clear, and it is good news for foreign buyers. (If you are still at the “how do I even buy the thing” stage, the step-by-step purchase route for foreign buyers covers the conveyancing groundwork first.)
Which Properties Qualify? (Spoiler: Not Your Country House)
This is where Jeanbrun gets picky. The regime applies only to homes in an immeuble collectif – a collective/multi-unit building, i.e. an apartment block. A detached maison individuelle (individual house) does not qualify, full stop. If your plan was a stone longere in the Dordogne, this is not your scheme.
- a brand-new home (logement neuf); or
- an older home (logement ancien), on condition that you spend at least 30% of the purchase price on renovation works.
That 30%-works route is the interesting one for value-add investors, and it rhymes with the Denormandie logic of rewarding renovation rather than just new concrete. As above, the eligible acquisition window is 21 February 2026 to 31 December 2028.
The Strings Attached: Nine Years, Empty, and Rent-Capped
No French tax carrot comes without a commitment, and Jeanbrun’s are substantial. To keep the benefit you must respect, on top of the property conditions:
- Let it unfurnished, as the tenant’s main home, for nine years. The property must be rented non meuble (unfurnished) as a residence principale (principal residence) for a minimum of nine years. This is a long lock-up – longer than the old Pinel’s six-year entry point.
- Respect a rent cap. You must let at a controlled rent in one of three brackets: intermediaire (intermediate), social, or tres social (very social). The lower the rent you accept, the more generously you are allowed to depreciate – more on that trade-off in a moment. These brackets track the rent and tenant-income ceilings of the Loc’Avantages scheme, so they are tighter than open-market rents. If the idea of state-set rents is new to you, the same philosophy drives the capital’s rent-control experiment, whose contested record on actually lowering rents is worth reading before you bank on the maths.
- No letting to close family. You cannot rent the home to a member of your own foyer fiscal (tax household) or to your direct ascendants and descendants (parents, grandparents, children). The flat has to house an arm’s-length tenant.
Why so strict? Because the whole point of the plan is to add occupied, affordable, long-term housing to the market, fast. The state is effectively buying nine years of capped-rent supply from you, and paying for it through the tax deduction we’ll turn to next.
The Big Idea: Amortissement, and How Far It Goes
Here is the heart of it. Under Jeanbrun you stop treating the purchase price as a sunk cost and start treating it as a depreciating asset. Each year you deduct a slice of the price from your taxable rent, on top of the usual deductible charges – works, loan interest, taxe fonciere (property tax) – that the regime reel already allows.
Two numbers define how much you can write off.
First, the base: you depreciate 80% of the acquisition or construction price (potentially increased by works, net of acquisition fees), as UFC-Que Choisir’s breakdown of the new status sets out. The remaining 20% – notionally the land – is not depreciable, which mirrors how depreciation works in the furnished world too.
Second, the rate, which climbs as the rent you accept falls. Accept a merely intermediaire rent and you depreciate slowly; accept a tres social rent and the state lets you depreciate fastest. New-build is rewarded slightly more than renovated old stock. Here is the full grid:
| Property | Intermediaire | Social | Tres social |
|---|---|---|---|
| New-build (neuf) | 3.5% | 4.5% | 5.5% |
| Older + 30% works (ancien) | 3.0% | 3.5% | 4.0% |
| Annual deduction ceiling | €8,000 | €10,000 | €12,000 |
A worked example makes it concrete. Buy a new flat and opt for an intermediaire rent, and you depreciate at 3.5% a year on 80% of the price. Over the nine-year commitment that is 31.5% of your purchase price turned into deductions; choose the tres social route at 5.5% and you reach 49.5% over the same nine years. Keep renewing the letting commitment after year nine and you can eventually write down the full 80%. As Que Choisir notes, that is a remarkable amount of a property’s price quietly disappearing from your taxable rent.
But – and this is the cap nobody puts on the brochure – the annual deduction is ceilinged by bracket, regardless of how big your flat is:
- 8,000 euros a year in the intermediaire sector;
- 10,000 euros a year in the social sector;
- 12,000 euros a year in the tres social sector.
Anything above the ceiling is simply lost – you do not carry it forward. So the 12,000 euros figure Bercy headlines is real, but it is the top of the ladder, available only to the landlord accepting the lowest, tres social rents. This ceiling also quietly caps the property size that makes sense: at 3.5% on 80% of the price, an intermediaire new-build only uses its full 8,000-euro allowance up to a purchase price of about 285,700 euros (the arithmetic: 8,000 / 3.5% / 80%). Buy bigger and you leave allowance on the table.
Where the “10,700 Euros” Comes In: Deficit Foncier
Bercy’s guidance also promises that you can deduct “up to 10,700 euros from your other income (salary, pension, and so on).” That figure is not a second Jeanbrun perk – it is the long-standing deficit foncier (rental loss) rule doing its normal job, and it pairs beautifully with the new amortisation.
Here is the chain. Your generous new depreciation can push your rental result into a loss for tax. Under the standard regime described in the tax authority’s rental-loss guidance, a rental loss – excluding the portion from loan interest – can be set against your general income up to 10,700 euros per year, with the excess carried forward against future rental income. So a Jeanbrun investor does not just shelter the rent; in a heavy-deduction year, up to 10,700 euros of salary or pension can be sheltered too.
One adjacent point worth knowing, because the internet conflates it with Jeanbrun: there is a separate, doubled ceiling of 21,400 euros that applies only to energy-renovation works on a passoire thermique (an energy-sieve property rated E, F, or G being lifted to at least class D). That “super” deficit foncier has been extended into 2027, and it can stack with a Jeanbrun investment, but it is its own regime with its own conditions – do not assume Jeanbrun itself doubles your ceiling.
What This Actually Means for a Foreign Investor
For a non-resident landlord, the appeal is specific and worth spelling out. Your French rental income is taxed at a minimum rate of 20% (rising to 30% on the slice of French-source income above the threshold), plus prelevements sociaux (social charges). Because amortissement shrinks the taxable base rather than handing back a fixed credit, it bites from the very first euro of rent – there is no “but you don’t pay enough French tax to use it” problem of the kind that blunts a tax-reduction scheme for non-residents.
There is also the social-charge angle. Affiliated UK and EU residents who hold the right paperwork pay social charges at the reduced 7.5% solidarity rate rather than the full 17.2%, a carve-out we walk through in the furnished-let guide linked above. Pair that with a base shrunk by depreciation and the effective tax on a Jeanbrun let can be very low indeed for the right cross-border profile.
Set against LMNP, the comparison is instructive rather than one-sided. Furnished letting still offers its own depreciation and the lighter micro-BIC option, but it now sits under tighter short-let rules in many cities and a less favourable capital-gains treatment after the 2025 reform. Jeanbrun answers a different brief: a long, stable, unfurnished tenancy, with depreciation finally on the table. For an investor who wanted the tax efficiency of furnished but the simplicity and security of a normal bail (lease), that gap has just narrowed.
The Honest Catch List
No scheme this generous is free of friction. Before you get excited, weigh these:
- Illiquidity. Nine years is a long commitment, and selling early or breaching the rent caps triggers a clawback of the depreciation you have already deducted. This is a buy-and-hold play, not a flip.
- Capped rents. The deeper the depreciation, the lower the rent you must accept. The tres social route that unlocks 12,000 euros a year also hands you the smallest cheque from your tenant. Run the net maths, not the headline rate.
- Apartments only. No houses, and in practice this points you at new-build blocks or heavy renovations of older ones – the very stock the plan wants to move.
- The detail is still settling. The headline architecture is law, but the fine print – exact rate grid by sub-case, the precise Loc’Avantages ceilings for each bracket, and the non-resident mechanics – will be nailed down by the implementing decret and the BOFiP tax commentary. Confirm the specifics with a fiscaliste before you sign anything binding.
It is no accident that the political class is competing over exactly this terrain. The opposition’s rival blueprint, set out in the Republicains’ 2026 housing platform, reaches for many of the same levers, which tells you supply-side landlord incentives are back at the centre of French housing policy after a decade of being squeezed.
The Bottom Line
Jeanbrun is the most interesting thing to happen to French buy-to-let taxation since the Pinel era began – and arguably more substantial, because it imports a mechanism (depreciation of unfurnished property) that French investors have wanted for years. For a foreign investor with a medium-to-long horizon, an apartment in a collective building, and the patience to accept a capped rent for nine years, it can turn a chunk of the purchase price into a steady stream of deductions against both rent and other income. The trade-offs – the lock-up, the rent caps, the apartments-only rule – are real, and the fine print is still drying. But the headline is simple enough: France wants you to be a landlord again, and for the next three years it is willing to pay you in depreciation to do it.
FAQ
What is the Jeanbrun dispositif (Relance logement)?
It is a new French tax regime, created by article 47 of the loi de finances pour 2026, that lets an individual who buys an apartment to let unfurnished depreciate up to 80% of its price against rental income over time. It is officially the statut du bailleur prive and is part of the government’s “Relance logement” plan. Eligible acquisitions run from 21 February 2026 to 31 December 2028.
Can a non-resident or foreign investor use Jeanbrun?
The law opens the regime to all individuals with no income condition and sets no residency test, and the benefit operates inside the French rental-income return that non-residents already file. So a non-resident landlord can, on the face of the law, claim it. Because non-residents pay a minimum 20% rate plus social charges, a deduction that shrinks the taxable base is especially valuable. Confirm the mechanics with a French tax adviser, as the implementing decree is still being finalised.
What kind of property qualifies?
Only homes in a collective (multi-unit) building. Detached houses are excluded. You can buy new-build, or buy an older flat and spend at least 30% of the purchase price on renovation works. The home must be let unfurnished, as the tenant’s main residence, for nine years, at a capped intermediate, social, or very-social rent, and not to your close family.
How much can I deduct each year?
You depreciate 80% of the price at a rate of 3% to 5.5% a year depending on whether the property is new or renovated and which rent bracket you choose. The annual depreciation is capped at 8,000 euros (intermediate), 10,000 euros (social), or 12,000 euros (very social), and any excess is lost. Separately, up to 10,700 euros of resulting rental loss can be set against your general income under the standard deficit foncier rule.
Can Jeanbrun be combined with the deficit foncier?
Yes. The depreciation can create a rental loss, and the standard deficit foncier rule lets up to 10,700 euros of that loss offset your general income each year, with the rest carried forward. A separate, doubled ceiling of 21,400 euros exists for qualifying energy-renovation works, but that is its own regime with its own conditions.
What happens if I sell before nine years?
Selling early, or breaching the rent caps or other conditions, triggers a clawback of the depreciation you have already deducted. Jeanbrun is a buy-and-hold commitment, not a short-term play.
