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Relist a studio in the Marais this month and the arithmetic is tempting. The tenant pool is deep, the summer’s rate rise has kept would-be buyers renting, and the legal rent ceiling you are supposed to respect, the encadrement des loyers, is due to expire on 24 November 2026 unless parliament extends it. More on that deadline below. Plenty of Paris landlords have already drawn their conclusion. According to the sixth barometer of the Fondation pour le Logement, published on 3 September, 46 percent of homes advertised for rent in the capital over the past year asked more than the legal maximum. A year earlier the figure was 31 percent. It is the highest reading since Paris brought the cap back in July 2019, and it arrives seven weeks before the Senate decides whether the cap survives at all.
We covered the IPP’s verdict on six years of rent control in May, and who actually pays for it. This article is about the other side of the ledger: how far the rules are being ignored, where, by whom, and what that means for a foreign owner deciding what to write in a lease this autumn.
What the barometer measures, and what it cannot
The Fondation pour le Logement is the renamed Fondation Abbé Pierre, the housing charity, and it wants the cap kept. Its numbers deserve reading with that in mind, and they also deserve reading, because nobody else counts this. The data come from a browser extension that tenants install. Each time a user opens a rental advert, the tool compares the asking rent with the loyer de référence majoré (the reference rent plus 20 percent, which is the legal ceiling) for that size, age and district, and logs the result. Between August 2025 and August 2026 that produced 10,572 analysed adverts, 4,598 of them in Paris.
The authors flag two caveats themselves, and the first is that the sample leans towards the flats young renters look at, so small units are over-represented. And an advert above the ceiling is not automatically illegal, because a landlord may add a complément de loyer (a rent supplement) where the home has exceptional features, provided the supplement and its justification appear in the lease. The barometer counts the overshoot, not its legality. Keep both points in mind when the headline number gets quoted at you.
Paris goes one way, the provinces go the other
Across all nine regulated territories, 37 percent of adverts exceeded the ceiling, up five points on 2025 and nine on 2024. The national average hides a split, because Paris jumped fifteen points to 46 percent while the regional cities went the opposite way. The capital’s eastern suburbs got worse again: 36 percent in Est Ensemble and 61 percent in Plaine Commune, the only territory where a majority of listings are out of bounds. In the provinces, Montpellier is at 12 percent, Bordeaux fell from 37 percent in 2023 to 17 percent, Lille from 43 percent in 2022 to 25 percent, and Lyon with Villeurbanne sits at 26 percent. The two newcomers improved in their second year, the Pays Basque to 30 percent and Grenoble to 43 percent.
Source: Fondation pour le Logement, 6e baromètre de l’encadrement des loyers, September 2026, 10,572 adverts · theenglishinvestor.com
Inside Paris the pattern is the one you would guess. The west and the centre, where demand is fiercest, have the most adverts above the ceiling, and the working-class north-east respects it more. The 13th arrondissement had 28 percent of adverts out of line, and the 3rd had 64 percent. The Fondation offers three explanations for the Paris surge: a shrinking pool of year-round rentals as interest rates climbed and more flats slipped into vacancy or occasional use, a year of noisy uncertainty about whether the cap would survive, and a growing habit of using the complément de loyer to get over the line. On that last point the City of Paris had already noticed in 2024 that a third of the files it examined relied on a supplement, against 13 percent in 2019.
Who is overshooting: small, furnished, self-managed
The breaches cluster in predictable places, starting with size. Of homes of ten square metres or less, 92 percent were advertised above the ceiling, against 22 percent of homes over 75 square metres. Studios overshoot at 35 percent, three-room flats and larger at 26 percent. Furnished lets, which already enjoy a higher ceiling than unfurnished ones, overshoot nine points more often than empty ones, at 46 percent. And landlords who manage the flat themselves are the worst offenders, at 49 percent of adverts, against 29 percent when an agency handles the letting.
That last figure cuts both ways for the foreign owner who is, by definition, managing from a distance. An agency roughly halves your chance of an illegal advert. It does not remove it, and the barometer’s platform data show why: 52 percent of listings on Leboncoin were above the ceiling, against 24 percent on the FNAIM portal, with the big general sites in between. The average overshoot, meanwhile, fell sharply, from €191 a month nationally to €159, and in Paris from €237 to €171. More landlords are breaching, by smaller amounts. The Fondation reads that as landlords treating the ceiling as a base to nudge past.
One category stands out for sheer cheek, and it is the one where the law leaves no room at all. Homes rated G on the energy performance certificate were advertised above the ceiling 36 percent of the time, and F-rated homes 32 percent. The reason that matters: since 18 August 2022, article 140 of the loi ELAN forbids any complément de loyer on a home rated F or G, whatever its view, terrace or address. On those homes the ceiling is the ceiling, and the only defence left to a landlord is that the tool misread the advert. Nearly two thirds of adverts did not display a DPE rating at all, which is a separate breach.
The complément de loyer, from exception to habit
The supplement was written into the law as a safety valve for the flat with the Eiffel Tower in the window. The rules are narrow and worth restating, because the barometer’s most damaging pages are about agencies stretching them. A supplement is only possible when the base rent is already at the loyer de référence majoré, when the home has features of location or comfort that set it apart from comparable homes in the same district, and when both the amount and the features appear in the lease. Since 18 August 2022 it is barred outright where the home has any of a list of defects: F or G rating, toilets on the landing, damp on the walls, draughty windows, a facing building within ten metres, a north-facing main room and so on. The tenant has three months from signing to challenge the supplement before the commission départementale de conciliation, and the burden of proof is on the landlord.
Against that, the tenants’ association BAIL surveyed the daily adverts of several agencies in Lyon and Villeurbanne between mid-May and mid-August 2026. At ORPI, 53 percent of the 396 adverts carried a supplement, averaging €134 a month or 12 percent of the rent. At the online manager OQORO, 97 percent of 137 adverts, almost all rooms in shared flats, carried one, averaging €142 on a base of €327, so 31 percent of the rent. The report’s examples of justification include an equipped kitchen worth €326 a month on a studio, and a furnished let itemising a flat-screen television at €30, a coffee machine at €20 and a kettle at €15. BAIL says 70 percent of the abusive-supplement files it handles involve an agency. None of this is a court finding on any individual lease. It is a portrait of a market that has decided the ceiling is a floor.
What it costs when you are caught
Enforcement is the weak joint of the whole system, which is partly why breaches are rising, and it is also getting sharper in the one city that matters most to our readers. Under article 140 of the loi ELAN, a landlord found above the ceiling receives a formal notice to bring the lease into line and refund the excess, with a month to respond, and then faces an administrative fine of up to €5,000 for an individual or €15,000 for a company or SCI. The fine does not stop the tenant separately claiming the overpaid rent back.
Since the loi 3DS of 2022 a city can take that enforcement power over from the préfet, and Paris did. Its online reporting service has run since January 2023. The barometer counts close to 4,980 reports received by June 2026, with tenants recovering an average of €3,775 in overpaid rent through a procedure that costs them nothing. Lille runs a similar reporting site and forwards files to the préfecture for fines, and Lyon’s métropole spot-checks adverts and agencies. If you own in Paris, assume the tenant knows the procedure, because the City has spent three years telling them.
Two further exposures are easy to forget from abroad. A lease that omits the reference rents gives the tenant a month to demand them and a route to the judge if you refuse. And at renewal, a tenant whose base rent sits above the ceiling can bring an action en diminution de loyer to cut it, the mirror image of the under-market revaluation we described in our guide to raising a French rent.
Eleven weeks: what happens on 24 November
The cap exists only as an experiment, and experiments have end dates. Article 140 of the loi ELAN authorised it for five years from the law’s publication on 24 November 2018, and the loi 3DS stretched that to eight, so the authority to set reference rents runs out at the end of 24 November 2026. The Paris rent simulator already shows its final period as running from 1 July to 24 November. Without a new law, a lease signed in Paris on 25 November would carry no ceiling at all.
The rescue vehicle is a Socialist bill by the deputy Iñaki Echaniz, which the Assemblée nationale adopted on 11 December 2025 with the aim of making the cap permanent and extending it. The government has now scheduled it for the Senate on 21 October 2026, on the understanding that it will be amended down to a two-year extension for the territories already inside the scheme, with no new towns admitted. The housing minister, Vincent Jeanbrun, opposes the cap personally and has said the question of its future belongs to the presidential election of 2027, but his office accepts the two-year bridge to avoid what Echaniz calls a sortie sèche, an abrupt exit that would send rents jumping in some seventy communes. Parallel texts from the Paris deputy Danielle Simonnet and the senator Ian Brossat would make the scheme permanent, and neither has been scheduled. Nothing is voted yet. A Senate vote, an amended text going back to the Assemblée, and a hard deadline five weeks after the debate: the arithmetic is tight.
| Scenario | Lease signed before 24 November 2026 | Lease signed after | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two-year extension voted in time | Ceiling applies, fines and refunds as now | Ceiling applies until late 2028 in the nine current territories | Nothing changes at the signing table. The 2027 election decides the long run. |
| Vote slips past 24 November, extension passes later | Ceiling applies | A gap during which new leases are uncapped, then the cap returns for leases signed after the new law | A lease signed in the gap keeps its rent, but the political and reputational risk of pricing into a gap is real. |
| No law at all | Ceiling applies for the life of the lease, and the tenant keeps every remedy | No ceiling. The zone tendue rule still caps relocation rents at the previous tenant’s rent plus IRL | Existing leases do not reset. Only a new tenant, or a renewal on new terms, lets you reprice. |
One point in that table deserves underlining, because it is the one landlords most often get wrong. Even a full lapse does not free a Paris landlord to charge what the market bears at the next relocation. The older, national rule for every zone tendue, in force since 2012, still limits the rent for a new tenant to what the previous tenant paid, revised by the IRL, unless works or a manifest undervaluation justify more. The experiment sits on top of that rule. Removing it takes away the square-metre ceiling and leaves the relocation brake in place.
The decision rule for a foreign landlord this autumn
Price to the ceiling and stop there, until the law says otherwise. Run the flat through the City of Paris reference-rent simulator for the 1 July to 24 November period, and put the reference rent, the ceiling and the base rent in the advert and the lease, because the omission is itself actionable. If you believe a supplement is justified, write down the features that justify it before you write down the euro figure, and make them features a judge would accept: a terrace, a view, a period fireplace in a district where those are rare. Not the kettle. If the home is rated F or G, there is no supplement, full stop, and the letting bans are the larger problem anyway.
If an agency manages the flat, ask to see its ceiling calculation and the wording of any supplement, since 70 percent of the abusive files BAIL handles come through an agency, and the fine lands on the owner. And resist the temptation to hold the flat empty until 25 November in the hope of an uncapped lease. The Senate date is 21 October, the outcome is unknown, and an empty Paris flat in the meantime earns nothing while the City’s vacancy surcharge heads for 60 percent. For a fuller picture of what a Paris flat actually yields after all of this, our pied-à-terre spreadsheet does the sums. We will update this article the week of the Senate vote.
FAQ: Paris rent control in autumn 2026
Is it illegal to advertise a Paris flat above the reference rent ceiling?
Yes, unless the excess is a properly justified complément de loyer for exceptional features, stated in the advert and the lease, and the home is free of the listed defects, including an F or G energy rating. Otherwise the landlord faces a formal notice, a refund and a fine of up to €5,000, or €15,000 for a company.
When does French rent control end?
The experiment authorised by article 140 of the loi ELAN runs for eight years from 24 November 2018, so it lapses after 24 November 2026 unless parliament extends it. A bill scheduled in the Senate for 21 October 2026 is expected to add two years for the territories already covered.
If the cap lapses, can I raise the rent on my existing tenant?
No. A running lease keeps its rent, and revision during the lease is limited to the IRL. Only a new tenant, or a formal renewal on new terms, allows repricing, and even then the zone tendue rule caps a relocation rent at the previous tenant’s rent plus IRL unless works or a manifest undervaluation justify more.
How does a tenant challenge a rent above the ceiling in Paris?
Through the City of Paris online reporting service, which has handled close to 4,980 reports since January 2023, or through the commission départementale de conciliation and then the judge. A complément de loyer must be challenged within three months of signing. Tenants recovered an average of €3,775 through the Paris procedure.
Does the cap apply to furnished lets and Airbnb-style rentals?
It applies to furnished and unfurnished main-residence leases, with a higher ceiling for furnished homes, and to bail mobilité contracts. It does not apply to meublés de tourisme, which have their own rules, nor to social housing or Anah-conventioned homes.
