General information, not advice. The rules below are quoted from the tax code and the tax administration’s published doctrine as they stand on 17 October 2026, with a link to each source. Your own position depends on your figures, so have a French accountant run them before you sign.
A question that reaches this site in several wordings every month: when a furnished landlord sells, is professional status (LMP) judged on the year of the sale or on the year before? The answer is the year of the sale, with one tolerance for the tax return and two traps in the arithmetic. Here is each piece, with the text it comes from.
The test is annual, and it is the year of the sale that counts
Under article 155, IV, 2 of the code général des impôts, furnished letting is professional when two conditions are both met in the year: the household’s annual receipts from furnished letting exceed €23,000, and those receipts exceed the household’s other earned income (salaries and pensions, other business profits, farming and professional profits, and managers’ remuneration under article 62). The administration’s commentary says the receipts are assessed per calendar year (BOI-BIC-CHAMP-40-10, § 120), that the comparison with other income is also made year by year, using only that year’s income before any carried-forward losses (§ 160, citing the Conseil d’État of 24 October 2014, n° 375358), and that the status applies to the whole household and all of its furnished lets at once (§ 50).
For the gain on a sale, the doctrine is explicit. Where a landlord has been professional in some years and non-professional in others, the gain is taxed under the regime that applies at the time of the sale (BOI-BIC-CHAMP-40-20, § 460). The same document says, in its worked example on depreciation, that what matters is whether “at the time of the sale” the taxpayer is carrying on the activity professionally (§ 340). So the year of the sale decides, and what you were last year does not.
Why people think it is the previous year
Because the administration lets you file as if it were. You usually sell in the middle of a year, before you know whether that year’s receipts will clear the two conditions. Paragraph 470 of the same commentary says that a landlord who cannot know at the date of the sale whether the year of sale will make him professional or non-professional may be allowed to declare the gain under the rules that followed from his status in the previous year, and then regularise when the income of the year of sale is assessed, without penalties or late interest, unless the case falls under article 1729 (deliberate breach) (BOI-BIC-CHAMP-40-20, § 470). That is a filing tolerance, not the rule. The tax finally due is the one for the status you turn out to have in the year of the sale.
The first trap: the year of sale is a short year, and the code knows it
If you sell your only furnished flat on 1 March, you have two months of rent in the year of sale. Taken at face value that would push almost everyone under €23,000 and out of professional status in the year it matters most. The code does not take it at face value. Article 155 provides that in the year the letting begins and in the year the letting activity ceases altogether, the receipts are brought back to twelve months for both thresholds (article 155, IV, 2, last paragraph). The administration gives two examples side by side (BOI-BIC-CHAMP-40-10, § 200), and they are worth reading together because they point in opposite directions. Both use the same landlord: two furnished flats, one let at €1,800 a month, the other at €1,500.
Example 1, the activity continues. He sells the first flat on 1 March and keeps letting the second. In the year of sale he collects €3,600 from the sold flat (January and February) and €18,000 from the other, €21,600 in all. Nothing is scaled up, because his letting activity has not stopped. He is under €23,000 for the year, so he is non-professional in the year of sale, and the gain on the flat he sold is a private capital gain, whatever he was the year before.
Example 2, the activity ends. He sells the first flat on 1 March and the second on 31 May, and lets nothing after that. What he actually collects is €3,600 from the first flat and €7,500 from the second (five months), €11,100 in all. Because the sales end the activity, each flat’s rent is scaled up to a full year: €3,600 earned over 60 days becomes 3,600 × 365 / 60 = €21,900, and €7,500 earned over 151 days becomes 7,500 × 365 / 151 = €18,129. The figure tested is €40,029. He is over the €23,000 line in the year of sale and, if his other earned income that year is lower than €40,029, he is professional for that year, with a professional gain on both sales.
Read together, the two examples say something counter-intuitive. Selling everything can keep you professional for the year, because the short year is annualised. Selling one flat out of two can take you out of the regime in the year that matters, because it is not. The order and timing of sales therefore change the answer, and an owner with several furnished lets who wants a particular regime on a particular sale should run the test before fixing the completion dates.
What the status changes on the gain
Non-professional in the year of sale: the gain is a private capital gain under articles 150 U to 150 VH, with the holding-period allowances counted from the original purchase whatever your status was along the way (BOI-BIC-CHAMP-40-20, § 270 and § 490). Since the 2025 finance law, the purchase price is reduced by the depreciation you deducted while letting, which raises the gain (article 150 VB, III). The rates and allowances are in our non-resident capital gains guide. The depreciation itself is about to be capped by article 7 of the 2027 finance bill, which does not change the add-back.
Professional in the year of sale: the gain is a business gain under articles 39 duodecies and following, short-term up to the depreciation you booked and long-term for the rest (§ 400 and the example at § 340). It can be exempt under article 151 septies: fully if receipts are at or under €90,000, partly between €90,000 and €126,000, provided the activity has been carried on for at least five years.
Two details of that exemption are where the “which year” question comes back in a different form. First, the five years are counted by adding up the periods during which the activity was professional, so years as a non-professional do not count towards them (§ 410). Second, the €90,000 and €126,000 are not the year of sale at all: the article defines annual receipts as the average, net of VAT, of the two calendar years preceding the year of the sale (article 151 septies, IV). The long-term part also qualifies for the holding-period relief of article 151 septies B (§ 435).
Moving from one status to the other is not treated as closing the business (§ 450), and the private-gain rule of article 151 sexies, which splits a gain between the private and professional periods, does not apply to a furnished landlord who has merely changed status, unless the property actually moved from private assets into the business balance sheet (§ 480).
The second trap, for owners who live abroad
From the 2026 tax year, the second condition is applied differently to non-residents. Your French furnished receipts must exceed your earned income of the same kinds that is taxed under an income tax equivalent to the French one in your country of residence, so a UK salary or pension now counts against you (article 155, IV, 2, as amended by article 53 of the finance law of 19 February 2026, and BOI-BIC-CHAMP-40-10, § 165). Income exempted by a special provision in the country of residence is not counted, and rental, investment and furnished-letting income is not counted either. We covered the change when it was enacted in the LMP reform piece. For the year-of-sale question it means that a non-resident who was professional in 2025 on French figures alone may be non-professional in 2026 on worldwide figures, and it is the 2026 status that will govern a 2026 sale.
In one paragraph
Status is tested year by year on that year’s receipts and that year’s other earned income, worldwide for non-residents from 2026. The gain on a sale takes the regime of the status in the year of the sale. If the sale ends your letting activity, the receipts of that short year are annualised for the test. If you keep other furnished lets, they are not. You may file on last year’s status and regularise without penalty. The five years for the professional exemption count only professional years, and its €90,000 and €126,000 ceilings look at the average of the two years before the sale, not the year of the sale.
Readers, did your accountant run the year-of-sale test before you signed, or only after? Did the annualisation rule change your status in the year you stopped letting? If you live outside France, has the 2026 worldwide-income test moved you from LMP to LMNP?
