Les Républicains’ 2026 housing platform: what ‘Libérer le logement’ would mean for foreign landlords

Disclaimer: this article summarises a political party’s published platform. It is not a regulatory text, none of its proposals are in force, and nothing here should be read as legal, tax, or investment advice. We’re walking through what Les Républicains are pitching for the next presidential cycle – not what the rules are today. Always check with a qualified professional before doing anything on the strength of a campaign document.

Last updated: May 2026 – In May 2026, Les Républicains (LR) – the centre-right party currently led by Bruno Retailleau – published Libérer le logement, a 41-page housing platform built around 12 propositions organised across four priorities. The framing is deliberately combative – the document opens under the banner “Renverser la table !” – and the politics are unambiguous: rip out a decade of housing regulation, give mayors back the keys to construction, and let the rental market breathe. It is, in plain English, a manifesto rather than a regulatory text.

Why does any of this matter if you’re a foreign landlord with a flat in Paris, a maison in Lyon, or a SCI-held immeuble somewhere in between? Because if even half of what’s in this document becomes law, the landlord economics you operate under today will look different by 2028. Rent control would be gone. The DPE letting bans (the ones squeezing your 1970s flat out of the rental market in 2028) would be lifted. And – this is the big one – the long-debated statut du bailleur privé would finally arrive, bringing a flat 4% annual amortisation that LMNP landlords already enjoy across to the unfurnished side as well.

The document also sits in direct opposition to the May 2026 Institut des politiques publiques (IPP) evaluation of French rent control we covered separately – same empirical picture, completely opposite policy conclusion. So there’s a lot to unpack. Let’s do it.

What is this document, exactly?

Libérer le logement is a campaign platform – not a bill, not a draft law, not even a parliamentary white paper. It was prepared in spring 2026 (the PDF is hosted on the official Les Républicains website under the May 2026 folder, where you can download the full document) and forms part of the party’s 2027 presidential pitch. The opening section reads more like a stump speech than a policy paper, full of phrases like “la France des honnêtes gens” and direct attacks on the housing record of the last eight years of Macron-era governments. Eight different housing ministers since 2017, the document points out, and one repeatedly amended MaPrimeRénov’. Whatever you think of the politics, the frustration is real.

The diagnosis the document leads with is straightforward. Housing starts fell from 344,000 in 2017 to 270,000 in 2024 – a one-third collapse – against an annual need of more than 450,000 dwellings. France has therefore accumulated, on LR’s count, a deficit of about one million dwellings. At the same time, 2.9 million households are waiting for a social-housing allocation, 330,000 people are homeless, and over 3 million dwellings sit vacant. The system, the document argues, produces shortage and immobility at the same time – which, as diagnoses of French housing policy go, is hard to argue with.

The response is structured around four priorities, each with its own set of propositions:

• Priority I – Build more by giving mayors the freedom to build (propositions 1 to 3). Radical simplification of plans locaux d’urbanisme, an emergency construction law in the spirit of the Loi Notre-Dame, and the unlocking of vacant offices and brownfield sites.
• Priority II – Build more by restoring confidence to private investors (propositions 4 to 7). This is where most of the landlord-relevant content lives: zero tolerance on squatters and unpaid rent, abolition of rent control, end of DPE letting bans, and the new statut du bailleur privé.
• Priority III – Make France a nation of homeowners (propositions 8 and 9). PTZ reform, the bail réel solidaire, mortgage-interest deductibility for families with children, transferable mortgages, and a tripling of the family gift exemption.
• Priority IV – Refound social housing for working families (propositions 10 to 12). Repeal of article 55 of the Loi SRU, recentring of allocation on working households, and a financing restructure.

The headline ambition is 450,000 housing starts per year and “one million additional dwellings in five years”. Whether any of this is achievable is a separate question – and one we’ll come back to in the political reality-check section – but those are the numbers the document commits to.

The full 12 propositions at a glance

Before we dig into the five propositions that matter most to a foreign landlord, here’s the full landscape so you can see what is – and what isn’t – on the table. The “for foreign landlords?” column flags whether the proposition has a direct operational impact on the typical British, American, Canadian, or Australian owner of a single French rental.

You’ll notice that five of the twelve sit squarely in your operational world as a foreign landlord (propositions 4, 5, 6, 7 and partially 9), while the rest live mainly in the orbit of mayors, social-housing tenants, and primo-accédants. That’s actually a pretty high hit-rate, and it tells you something about where the document concentrates its energy: priority II is the operational core. Let’s go through those five.

Proposition 5: kill rent control – yes, the whole thing

The platform proposes to abolish the encadrement des loyers in its current form – the experiment introduced by article 140 of the Loi Elan in 2018 that the IPP has just evaluated. And then it goes a step further by repealing the underlying nationwide indexation mechanism in the loi du 6 juillet 1989, which currently caps rent increases between leases and at renewal in zones tendues. The end-state is simple: “le loyer sera librement fixé entre le bailleur et le locataire lors de la signature du bail” – freely contracted at the moment of signing, as the document points out is the rule in most other European markets.

The empirical case the document builds is interesting because it draws on much the same data the IPP works from – and reaches the opposite conclusion. LR cites a San Francisco study published in the American Economic Review showing rent control reduced that city’s rental stock by 15%. They reference the Berlin Mietendeckel rent freeze of 2020 (annulled by the German Federal Constitutional Court) producing supply contraction and accelerated unregulated rents – penalising, as the document puts it, exactly the new arrivals the measure was meant to protect. And then comes the headline statistic for Paris: the private rental stock fell from 531,000 dwellings in 1982 to 353,000 in 2021, a one-third contraction over four decades.

For Paris specifically, the document points to 30 to 40% of listings sitting above the cap since the 2019 reintroduction of encadrement – a figure which, if you’ve read our redistributive analysis of the IPP findings, will sound familiar (the IPP measured roughly the same thing using GMBI lease declarations). What’s striking is that LR reads this as evidence of a regime being circumvented or unsuited, while the IPP reads the same figure as evidence of weak enforcement architecture. Same data, opposite conclusion. It’s a perfect illustration of how empirical findings get filtered through prior political commitments.

The document also cites the document’s own back-of-envelope yield numbers: “la rentabilité locative nette tombe souvent autour de 1 à 2 %”. That’s the engine behind the proposition – LR’s argument is that rent control is a fiscally cheap signal that doesn’t actually produce more housing, and which over time pushes investors toward sale, vacancy, or tourism rentals.

Proposition 6: the DPE letting ban is the wrong tool

If you own anything built before the 1980s in central Paris – or, frankly, anywhere – the DPE timetable is probably your single biggest medium-term planning headache. The current law works like a stepwise demolition of the older rental stock:

• Class G dwellings have been banned from new tenancies since 2025.
• Class F dwellings will follow in 2028 – the next cliff.
• Class E dwellings come off the rental market in 2034.

The platform proposes to keep the DPE as a mandatory information document for tenants and buyers (which it is today, and which is genuinely useful) but to remove its function as the basis for an administrative letting ban. The DPE, as the document puts it, becomes “un outil d’information et d’incitation, et non un instrument d’exclusion du marché locatif”.

The numbers LR puts behind this are large. France has roughly 3.9 million dwellings classed F or G – about 13% of the national residential stock. The platform’s own estimate of what abolition of the letting ban would deliver:

• ~150,000 dwellings returned to the rental market immediately (the units already excluded since 2025);
• ~300,000 additional dwellings kept on the rental market when the F-grade ban would otherwise hit in 2028;
• ~450,000 dwellings preserved or returned overall.

The argument the document makes against the current architecture is two-pronged, and it’s worth pausing on because it’s actually substantive rather than ideological. First, that the rénovation économies don’t reliably materialise in practice – the DPE measures theoretical rather than real consumption (a known issue), and the cost of heavy works can exceed the energy savings over several decades. Second – and this is the lived experience of many owners – many landlords simply don’t have the capital or the technical capacity for short-window heavy renovations, particularly in copropriété where collective works decisions are notoriously slow. The realistic response to the ban, on this view, isn’t rénovation. It’s exit.

Whether you agree with that diagnosis or not, the 2028 F-grade cliff is real, it’s eighteen months away, and it’s coming for a meaningful chunk of older Parisian stock. The political odds on this proposition matter.

Proposition 7: the statut du bailleur privé – the one that changes everything

Now we come to the proposition that, if enacted, would do more to change the landlord economics than the previous two combined. The platform proposes a single unified tax regime for all rental income – unfurnished, furnished, old, new – the lot. It’s called the statut du bailleur privé, and the architecture goes like this:

• 4% annual amortisation of the value of the bâti. Available to every landlord, full stop.
• A bonification of that rate for landlords who charge moderated rents – the document wants to nudge the offer toward intermediate-rent supply rather than the top of the market.
• Harmonised rates between new and old stock, intended to push investment toward renovating the existing parc in zones tendues rather than purely toward new construction.
• An optional 30% prélèvement forfaitaire unique (PFU) for landlords whose property is already economically amortised – effectively letting older portfolios choose between amortisation and a flat-tax option.
• No zoning conditions and no administrative conditionality – the regime, in the document’s words, is “ouvert sans zonage ni conditionnalité administrative”.
• A 10-year stability commitment – an explicit reaction to what the document calls “thirty years of fiscal instability” running through Robien, Scellier, Duflot and Pinel.

Here’s why this matters operationally. Today, if you let a Paris flat nu (the long-term unfurnished lease most foreign landlords end up in by default), you can’t depreciate the building – you’re stuck with the régime foncier and limited to deducting actual expenses and interest. If you let the same flat meublé under the LMNP regime, you can amortise the bâti, the furniture, and most of the renovation works – which is why net yields on a meublé typically run, in the document’s own numbers, around 3.5%, against around 2% for the same flat let unfurnished. That distortion is what drives so much of the foreign-investor flow toward furnished tourism lettings rather than long-term unfurnished – the post-tax economics genuinely are different.

The proposed statut closes that gap. If you’re letting nu, you get amortisation. If you’re letting meublé, you get the same regime instead of having to pick between LMNP and LMP. The selective advantage of LMNP disappears. And – crucially for older portfolios already off-balance-sheet from a depreciation perspective – the optional 30% PFU brings net yields up to “autour de 3 %, contre moins de 2 % aujourd’hui”.

The document explicitly anchors itself in the rapport Daubresse-Cosson – the parliamentary report that originally proposed a 3.5% amortisation framework but was, in the document’s words, “jamais appliqué”. LR’s twist is to push the rate to 4% rather than 3.5%. Daubresse-Cosson’s own estimate, which the platform cites: around 70,000 additional rental units per year, with induced fiscal receipts from VAT, droits de mutation, and renovation works producing a net positive €1.9 billion. The implication being that the regime isn’t a giveaway – it’s a structural shift in how the rental supply gets financed.

Proposition 4: tolérance zéro on squatters and unpaid rent

If you’ve spent any time reading our eviction pillar guide – or worse, you’ve actually been through a French eviction – you know the architecture today is glacial. The standard procedure runs through commandement de payer, clause résolutoire, judicial hearing, commandement de quitter les lieux, the trêve hivernale, the réquisition de la force publique, and (eventually) the actual eviction. Average duration: 18 to 24 months, sometimes years. The 2023 anti-squat law tightened the expedited procedure for squatters to 72 hours, but that’s narrow and case-specific.

What does LR propose? In a word: speed.

For squatters, the moment unlawful occupation is established by the police or a commissaire de justice, an administrative expulsion procedure kicks in immediately, with eviction within ten days maximum. The owner can also suspend water and electricity service – something the current law actually blocks because cutting utilities can be construed as creating tenant rights – without that creating any tenant-style protections for the occupants.

For unpaid rent, a 5e classe contravention could be issued and – this is the bit that will raise eyebrows – inscribed on the tenant’s casier judiciaire B3. The landlord would also be able to obtain an enforceable eviction via référé, without substantive proceedings, where the rental debt is documented. The tenant can still contest. But they’d have to vacate first.

For State enforcement, judicial eviction orders would have to be executed within thirty days. If the State fails to enforce on time, an automatic indemnification equal to the rent kicks in until the property is recovered. This is the cleanest single change in the proposition – it directly addresses the gap between obtaining an eviction order and actually getting it executed by the prefect, which is currently where many landlord cases die.

Is this politically realistic? Honestly – the 10-day administrative expulsion would face serious constitutional objections (the right to housing, the protection of the foyer familial, et cetera), and the casier B3 inscription for civil unpaid rent is a hard sell. But the underlying signal – that the platform wants to compress eviction timelines from years to weeks – is clear, and even partial implementation would shift the calculus.

Proposition 9: the transmission shock and transferable mortgages

Proposition 9 is a basket of financing measures, most of them aimed at primo-accédant French families. Two of them, though, have a direct angle for foreign owners.

Transferable mortgages. The platform proposes that when a household sells one property to buy another, the existing mortgage’s terms transfer to the new property. The document calls this “un principe largement absent du marché immobilier français” – which is putting it mildly; French mortgages are essentially always tied to the specific property and the specific borrower at the moment of underwriting. For a foreign owner trading up or relocating across French regions, that would materially change the refinancing arithmetic, particularly in any environment where rates have moved against you since the original loan.

The transmission shock. Now this one is interesting from an inheritance-planning perspective. The platform proposes – as a three-year measure – to lift the family monetary gift exemption to:

• €150,000 exempted for a beneficiary under 30;
• €100,000 exempted for a beneficiary under 40;
• Per donor – meaning each parent can give separately.

These ceilings would represent, in the document’s own words, “un triplement par rapport au régime actuel” – which currently caps family monetary gifts at less than €32,000 with restrictive age conditions on both donor and beneficiary. The proposed regime would also extend to gifts of real property, not only cash. For any foreign owner thinking about cross-border inheritance planning around French real estate – particularly where the EU 650/2012 succession election is in play – this would meaningfully change the lifetime-versus-succession calculus.

The other measures in proposition 9 are less directly relevant to non-resident owners. The mortgage interest deductibility for families with children (50% with one, 75% with two, 100% with three or more) is restricted to résidence principale acquisitions, which means it doesn’t apply to investment property – so it won’t move the needle for a UK or US owner unless they’re relocating to France full-time. Same story for the refondu PTZ – it’s a primo-accédant tool, not an investor tool.

What the platform doesn’t address (which matters more than it sounds)

For all the territory the document covers, it’s also worth flagging what it deliberately steps around. There are four notable silences from the foreign-landlord perspective.

1. No non-resident tax provisions. The document is silent on the post-Brexit social-charges architecture – the 17.2% versus 7.5% debate covered in our CSG-hike piece – on the IFI threshold for non-residents, and on the article 244 bis A capital-gains regime on disposal. The statut du bailleur privé would apply universally (the document is explicit about “sans zonage ni conditionnalité administrative”), but cross-border tax treatment isn’t separately addressed.

2. No DMTO changes. The recent DMTO hike from 4.5% to 5% is not mentioned. That hike was a 2026 finance-act provision and remains in force regardless of what the platform proposes – something to bear in mind when modelling acquisition costs going forward.

3. No Schengen or visa provisions. Not surprising for a housing platform – the 90/180 rule that constrains non-EU owners isn’t mentioned at all.

4. The platform endorses, rather than reverses, the Loi Le Meur. This is the surprise. The November 2024 loi Le Meur – which gave mayors significant new powers over short-term tourism rentals and tightened the 120-day primary-residence cap – is explicitly endorsed by the platform. LR wants mayors to use these tools more aggressively, not less, citing the Biarritz model (where every transformation of a dwelling into meublé touristique has to be compensated by the creation of a permanent dwelling) as the template. So if you were assuming a centre-right government would loosen the Airbnb regime, this document explicitly contradicts that.

The political reality check

Let’s be clear-eyed about what this document is – and what it isn’t.

None of these propositions are in force. None of them is a bill. The document explicitly frames itself as the platform LR will run on “dès les premiers mois suivant l’élection” – meaning the legislative window doesn’t open until after the 2027 presidential election, and only then if LR wins both the presidency and a parliamentary majority. In current polling that’s neither implausible nor a given. The realistic timeline for any of this becoming law, even in the best case scenario for LR, runs from late 2027 into 2028.

The closer-in policy fight is the November 2026 vote on the encadrement des loyers experiment, which is structurally separate from this document but in the same policy zone. The IPP report we’ve covered – and which sits in direct dialogue with proposition 5 – is the technical input for that vote. LR’s proposition 5 is essentially the party’s positioning ahead of November. So even if the broader platform stays a campaign document for another two years, the rent-control direction-of-travel question gets answered much sooner.

There’s also a tension within the broader political landscape worth flagging. Several propositions cut against the current legislative direction – the DPE timetable is set by the Loi Climat & Résilience, the encadrement experiment is set by the Loi Elan, the SRU quotas have been on the books since 2000 with cross-partisan support – meaning that for LR to deliver any of this from a position in government, they’d need not just a parliamentary majority but a sustained legislative push across multiple bills. Easy to write in a manifesto. Harder to legislate in practice.

So what should you actually take from this?

Three things, if you’re a foreign landlord planning around French property.

First, the policy direction on rent control is now genuinely contested. Until this document was published, the centre-right’s position on encadrement was ambient – generally sceptical, never crystallised. It’s now crystallised. Combined with the IPP’s quantitative critique, the political pressure on the November 2026 sunset vote is unusually concrete for a French housing policy question.

Second, the DPE 2028 cliff is now politically contested too. Until this document, the F-grade ban was on track to take effect with minimal political pushback. It’s now a partisan question, which means the 2028 deadline is no longer to be treated as a fixed planning horizon – it depends on what happens in 2027. If you’ve been deferring renovation works on a class F flat in the hope the deadline slips, you’ve now got a real (though uncertain) basis for that hope. If you’ve been planning to retrofit by 2027 to stay in the market, the political risk of “they’ll repeal the ban anyway” is now non-zero. Neither response is risk-free.

Third, the 4% amortisation regime is the single biggest structural shift in landlord economics on the table. If it happens – and that’s a real if – it closes the nu/meublé yield gap and removes the LMNP regime’s selective advantage. The optionality embedded in the proposed regime (4% amortisation or 30% PFU, whichever suits the portfolio) is genuinely well-designed for the universe of older, already-paid-off rental properties that many foreign owners hold. If you’re already in LMNP, this is a non-event. If you’re in unfurnished long-term lets, this is the change you’d want to see.

FAQ

What is the LR housing platform?

Libérer le logement is a 41-page housing policy document published by Les Républicains in May 2026 as part of the party’s preparation for the 2027 presidential election. It contains 12 numbered propositions organised across four priorities: building more, restoring investor confidence, expanding ownership, and refounding social housing. You can read the full document on the LR website.

Would the platform end rent control in France?

Proposition 5 would abolish the encadrement des loyers introduced by article 140 of the Loi Elan in 2018, and would also repeal the underlying plafonnement mechanisms of the loi du 6 juillet 1989. Base rent would be set freely between landlord and tenant at lease signature, as is standard in most other European markets.

Would the DPE letting bans be removed?

Proposition 6 keeps the DPE as a mandatory information document but removes its function as a basis for administrative letting bans. The G-grade ban (already in force since 2025), the F-grade ban scheduled for 2028, and the E-grade ban scheduled for 2034 would all be lifted. The document estimates this would preserve or return approximately 450,000 dwellings to the rental market.

What is the proposed statut du bailleur privé?

Proposition 7 proposes a unified tax regime for all rental income – unfurnished and furnished, old and new – built around a 4% annual amortisation of the bâti value, a bonification for moderated rents, an optional 30% PFU for fully-amortised stock, and a ten-year commitment to stability. The regime would be available without zoning conditions, so it would apply to non-resident landlords on the same terms as domestic ones.

What changes for landlords on eviction?

Proposition 4 proposes administrative expulsion of squatters within ten days, a 5e classe contravention for unpaid rent (inscribed on the casier judiciaire B3), a référé-only eviction procedure without substantive proceedings, and a thirty-day enforcement deadline for the State – with automatic rent indemnification if it fails to enforce. The current architecture, covered in detail in our eviction pillar guide, runs to 18-24 months on average.

When could any of this become law?

None of the propositions are in force. They are a 2027 presidential platform. The realistic legislative window – assuming LR wins the presidential election and assembles a parliamentary majority – would open in late 2027 or 2028. The first nearer-term test is the November 2026 vote on the encadrement des loyers experiment, which falls within the current legislature.

Does the platform say anything about Airbnb?

Yes – and the position is probably the opposite of what you’d expect from a centre-right manifesto. The platform explicitly endorses the November 2024 loi Le Meur and proposes that mayors use its tools (registration, the 90/120-day cap, change-of-use authorisations, compensation mechanisms) more aggressively. The Biarritz model – every meublé touristique conversion has to be compensated by the creation of a permanent dwelling – is cited approvingly as a template.

A note on sources

This article draws exclusively on Libérer le logement – Nos propositions pour la France, published by Les Républicains in May 2026 and available in full on the official party website. All numerical claims, proposition text, and policy framings cited above come from that document. For broader political context around the public unveiling, a summary by Le Moniteur covers the launch event itself. No claims in the body of this article rely on those external sources – they’re there if you want context, not because the analysis depends on them.