The Relance Logement Bill, Article by Article: What the Senate Passed and What the Assemblée Still Has to Decide

This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal, tax or investment advice. It describes a bill still before parliament, not the law in force. Rules change and individual situations differ. Always confirm the current position with a qualified professional before acting.

The projet de loi visant la relance et la décentralisation du logement, the Relance Logement bill, is the one text this year that touches almost every French property a foreign owner is likely to hold. It decides whether an F or G rated flat can still be let after 2028, and what a copropriété can vote through in a heatwave. It decides how quickly a new-build scheme can get planning permission, and who hands out the keys to social housing. The Senate adopted it at first reading on 8 July 2026, and the Assemblée nationale takes it up this autumn under the accelerated procedure. We covered the announcement in April and the Senate’s rewrite of the renovation chapter in July. This is the full text, article by article, with what each one would change for you and where the deputies are likely to fight.

The bill in one table

Title I: building faster

Article 1: a third urban renewal programme

The first article is a programme law rather than a rule. It launches a third national urban renewal programme under the ANRU, running from 2026 to 2040 with an indicative €5 billion, financed mainly by Action Logement, the State and the social landlords. Two things are new. The programme reaches beyond the priority urban districts to the run-down centres of mid-sized towns, with a first 150 districts to be chosen by decree by the end of 2026. And it bundles in objectives that have nothing to do with bricks: adaptation to heat, opening up isolated estates, bringing back public services. There is also a security chapter that may mean video surveillance, which split the Senate. The housing minister, Vincent Jeanbrun, calls it an ANRU at 360 degrees. The money is the doubt. The Conseil d’État reminds everyone that the €5 billion binds nobody. The CESE wants it written as a floor, and points out that each of the two previous programmes ended up costing €12 billion, with the State’s own share around a tenth and Action Logement carrying most of the effort. Action Logement is not the lender it was. For an owner, the practical question is whether your building sits in one of the 150 districts, which will be public by the end of the year.

Article 2: zones where the local plan gives way

This is the article that matters most to anyone who buys new-build, owns building land or lives next to either. Where a commune is short of homes, the authority in charge of the plan local d’urbanisme, in practice the mayor, could draw a perimeter. Inside it, new housing projects would be granted wide derogations from the plan, after a non-binding opinion from the préfet. Inside the perimeter the architecte des Bâtiments de France, whose agreement is normally required near listed buildings, would give advice that can be ignored. The Senate added limits: only in urban or to-be-urbanised zones, for five years renewable twice, and the homes created must be used exclusively as main residences. That last condition is the one to note if you were hoping to buy an off-plan flat in such a zone as a holiday home. It joins the main-residence servitude written into the lease template that applies from 1 October, which we cover in our checklist for that date, as a second route by which a new home can be barred from tourist letting for good.

The Conseil d’État accepted the principle and disliked the trend. Its opinion of June 2026 renamed the device a périmètre de développement du logement. It demanded that the shortage be demonstrated and the zone kept proportionate to five years of need. It kept the heritage architect’s binding say near listed monuments and excluded protected heritage sites altogether. And it warned of a worrying tendency to pile exception on exception until planning law loses its coherence. It is the third such carve-out in a year, after the planning simplification law of November 2025 and the economic simplification law of May 2026. Whether mayors will use an optional tool that invites legal challenge from neighbours is an open question.

Article 3: simplification by ordinance

Article 3 lets the government rewrite by ordinance the procedures for bringing planning documents into line with projects of general interest or public utility. The Conseil d’État found the authorisation precise enough. Together with article 2 this is the machinery behind the government’s target of two million homes by 2030, a figure worth treating as a slogan until building permits say otherwise.

Article 4: the Jeanbrun amortissement, loosened

The 2026 finance law created a tax advantage the ministry calls the statut du bailleur privé and everyone else calls the Jeanbrun. A landlord who buys or renovates a home and lets it unfurnished as a main residence at a capped rent for at least nine years may depreciate part of the price against rental income. We set out in July why it is probably not for a non-resident with a furnished let, and nothing here changes that. What changes is the entry ticket in the old-build market, which the ministry admits has been slow. The government proposed cutting the works threshold from 30 percent to 20 percent of the price. The Senate went further and scrapped the works quota altogether in favour of a single energy test. The renovated home must reach at least class D, or at least E if it started at G. The requirement to remove a gas or oil boiler after the works was dropped, because a flat in a copropriété cannot always choose its heating. And, unlike the current rules, the landlord could let to a parent or child outside the tax household, provided their income sits under the scheme’s ceilings. The Conseil d’État added a dry footnote: this is a temporary tax break, not a status, and the word should go.

Article 4 bis: the second-home surcharge reaches the islands

A Senate addition that the legal press passes over and that a second-home owner should not. Article 1406 bis of the tax code defines the zone where the tax on vacant homes applies: the tense housing areas and, since 2023, communes with a high share of second homes. Being on that list is what allows a commune to vote the 5 to 60 percent surcharge on the taxe d’habitation for second homes, the THRS we explain in our second-home tax guide. Article 4 bis adds a third category: communes on metropolitan islands with no permanent link to the mainland. Belle-Île, Yeu, Ouessant, Groix and the Îles d’Hyères are the obvious names. If you own a holiday home on one of them, the surcharge becomes a council vote away once the bill passes.

Article 5: La Défense

Europe’s largest business district has a 15 percent office vacancy rate and a public body built for a world of single-use towers. Article 5 gives that body more room to act. It creates a five-year experimental certificat de projet for conversions above 20,000 m², which freezes the applicable planning rules for three years. And it extends the maximum life of a projet urbain partenarial, the contract under which a developer pre-finances public infrastructure, from fifteen to twenty years. For a reader this is a market to watch rather than a rule to obey. Office-to-housing conversion at La Défense is where some of the cheapest new flats in the Paris region will come from, if the finance law behind it appears.

Title II: renovating faster

Article 6: the passoire reprieve, in detail

Under the 2021 climate law, homes rated G have been barred from new leases since January 2025 and F follows on 1 January 2028. The government’s impact study counts 650,000 to 700,000 homes, including 453,000 rated G, that would otherwise leave the rental market by that date. Article 6 lets their owners keep letting while the works are under contract. If the owner of a house or a flat signs, before 1 January 2030, a contract for works capable of bringing the home up to the required class, the home is deemed decent for up to three years from signature. If it is the copropriété that signs the contract, for works on the building capable of bringing the flat or the whole block up to the required class, the grace runs for five years. Both routes are temporary. The Senate text switches off the owner’s route on 1 January 2033 and the copropriété’s route on 1 January 2035. A sixth route costs nothing: if the building’s collective DPE already reaches the class required of the flat, the flat is deemed decent whatever its own label says. Vincent Jeanbrun’s line on it, that banning is easy and renovating takes courage, drew sharp criticism from tenant associations, and the Communist senator Ian Brossat’s reply that tenants are being asked to pay, endure and keep quiet. Both sides will be heard again in the Assemblée.

The Senate then added a set of exemptions borrowed from Amel Gacquerre’s 2025 bill, and they matter as much as the reprieve. The energy-decency obligation would apply in full only to newly concluded leases. For a lease already running on the ban date it would bite from the next renewal or tacit rollover, and in any event within three years of that date. For most sitting tenants that means a date the landlord can predict. The obligation would be deemed satisfied where the works are impossible for technical, architectural or heritage reasons, or where their cost is manifestly disproportionate to the value of the home. It would also be satisfied where the administration has refused them, the situation we described when a heritage architect refuses external insulation. And in a copropriété the obligation would be treated as met where the general meeting has voted the works down within the last eighteen months, provided the landlord pushed for them and has done whatever works remain possible in the flat itself. A judge who cuts the rent for an energy-indecent home would also have to weigh the landlord’s diligence, and could not cut it by more than the tenant’s extra energy cost. The Conseil d’État accepted that applying the new rule to existing leases is constitutional, because it serves the environment and the right to decent housing. It asked for two inequalities in the government’s draft to be removed. One was a three-year cap on the grace for existing leases that applied only to corporate landlords, which the Senate text now applies to everyone. The other was a works-contract exemption that treated flats in a copropriété less well than flats in other blocks, which the Senate text also fixed. The Senate went one step further and deleted the government’s blanket exemption for listed buildings, which leaves their owners with the impossibility test like everyone else. Expect the deputies to reopen all of it.

One piece of arithmetic sits alongside all this. From 1 January 2027 the DPE’s electricity coefficient falls from 1.9 to 1.7, and around 300,000 main residences leave the F and G bands without any works at all, some 125,000 of them in the private rental stock. If your flat is one of them, the bill’s works contract is a question you may never have to answer. Our DPE guide has the calendar as it stands today.

Article 6 bis: summer comfort enters the law

The Senate examined the bill during the third heatwave of the summer and wrote the heat in. Summer comfort, a building’s ability to avoid overheating, joins the legal definition of a performing energy renovation in the construction code. It must also feature in the plan pluriannuel de travaux, which every copropriété over fifteen years old has had to commission since January 2025. We showed in June how an A-rated flat can still hit 36 degrees. The practical changes are in the voting rules. Installing external solar protection, shutters and awnings, or a cooling system such as air conditioning or a geothermal heat pump, would benefit from the clause passerelle. That is the second-chance vote at a lower majority which our AGM guide explains. Those works could be financed by the collective loan with automatic membership created by the 2024 law on degraded housing. And the heritage architect’s binding opinion would become advice for external shutters and solar protection, the same downgrade as in article 2. The measures come from a cross-party bill on heat adaptation tabled in July 2025 and never scheduled, now revived by amendment.

Article 7: social landlords and rent ceilings

Article 7 lets the préfet authorise a social landlord to raise the rent ceilings written into its APL agreements after an energy renovation of homes over forty years old whose loans are repaid. Sitting tenants would not see an increase, only new entrants. The Conseil d’État saw no constitutional difficulty. It does not touch private landlords, but it tells you where the sector’s renovation money is meant to come from.

Title III: decentralisation

Article 8: housing authorities with teeth

The 2022 decentralisation law created autorités organisatrices de l’habitat, and almost nobody used them: eight intercommunal bodies hold the status against 83 that already administer housing grants on the State’s behalf. Article 8 makes the status automatic for urban communities and metropolises and available to the rest, and gives it substance. The authorities would run the aides à la pierre and deliver renovation policy, including MaPrimeRénov’. They could also adjust some social rents locally. The Conseil d’État made the point that turning a delegation into an obligation is a transfer, and a transfer must be compensated, which the impact study prices at €27.5 million a year. For an owner, the visible effect is that the office deciding your renovation grant may in future be a metropolis rather than the Anah’s regional desk. We will track that change in the grants articles.

Article 9: the right to housing stays where it is

The government wanted to hand local authorities the droit au logement opposable, the enforceable right to housing. The State administers it today and, when it fails, pays for it in court penalties running above €25 million a year. The Senate refused: the councils are not asking for it, and the penalties would follow the competence. What survives is an experiment. Paris-region communes and intercommunal bodies that volunteer could take on DALO delivery for two years under delegation from the préfet. The Conseil d’État used the occasion to suggest an ordinance reforming the penalty regime so that the money reaches the households it is meant for.

Article 10: the mayor and the keys

Article 10 puts mayors back at the centre of social-housing allocation. The mayor, or an elected councillor for a multi-commune commission, would chair the allocation committee. For the first lettings of a new social-housing programme, the mayor would propose the ranking of candidates, and the State’s own reserved quota would pass to the commune, except for homes reserved for State employees. And the mayor would gain a reasoned veto over any allocation, no longer limited to public-order grounds as the government’s draft had it. The Conseil d’État had already judged the narrower version insufficiently framed and asked that it be limited to serious disturbances threatening residents’ safety, so the Senate’s wider veto is exposed. The Conseil national d’évaluation des normes, the body that vets new rules on behalf of local authorities, observed in June that the real problems are the shortage of homes, the complexity of the procedures and the opacity of the tools. The text gives them only a partial answer.

What happens next

The Senate adopted the text on 8 July against the votes of the Green, Socialist and Communist groups, and it was tabled at the Assemblée the next day as text n° 3058. The economic affairs committee has it, the finance committee gives an opinion, and 38 amendments were on file before the summer recess ended. No date has been fixed. The government is using the accelerated procedure, one reading in each chamber and then a joint committee. The minister’s office says it hopes for promulgation before the end of 2026, ahead of the presidential campaign, the point at which parliament stops legislating. The chapters most likely to be reopened are the ones the Conseil d’État flagged: the planning derogation zones, the reduced role of heritage architects, the energy-decency exemptions and the mayor’s veto.

What it means for a foreign owner, by situation

If you let an F or G home, do not sign a works contract yet, but get the quotes. The reprieve is not law, its wording will move in the Assemblée, and the January 2027 coefficient may move your label first. Keep the tenant in place. Under the Senate text the obligation reaches an existing lease at its next renewal or rollover, and at the latest three years after the ban date, so an early termination is the one way to bring the deadline forward. If you own a flat in a copropriété, the summer-comfort chapter is the one to act on early. Put shutters, awnings or cooling on the agenda for the next general meeting. Ask the syndic whether the plan pluriannuel de travaux covers overheating, because the bill would make it compulsory. If you are buying new-build, ask the notaire whether the plot sits in a périmètre de développement du logement or carries the main-residence servitude. Either one rules out holiday letting for the life of the building. If you invest to let unfurnished at a capped rent, the loosened Jeanbrun is worth a second look once the final text exists, and not before. And if you own a second home and let nobody in, this bill asks nothing of you, although its heritage-architect chapter may one day make your own shutters easier to fit.

Our view: the right diagnosis, the usual missing invoice

Two things in this bill are simply right. Banning 700,000 homes from the rental market in the middle of a housing shortage was never going to survive contact with January 2028. A works contract with a deadline is a more honest answer than a cliff edge. Writing summer comfort into the law is overdue, because the climate the building code was written for no longer exists. A copropriété that cannot vote a set of shutters through is a building nobody should have to live in. The exemptions for works that are impossible or absurdly expensive fix a real injustice that owners of listed and stone-built homes have been living with for three years.

Our reservations are the Conseil d’État’s. Planning law in France now has more exceptions than rules. A mayor’s power to switch off the local plan for fifteen years is the kind of tool that produces the next generation of ugly buildings, and the next generation of court cases. Reducing the heritage architect to an adviser will delight anyone who has fought one and will be regretted the first time a listed street is spoiled. And the money is not there. The €5 billion for urban renewal is indicative. The compensation for the housing authorities is a line in an impact study. And the whole text lands in a country that ran a 5.1 percent deficit last year and will vote a budget for 2027 in the same weeks it debates this bill. A housing policy that works is one with a finance law behind it, and this one, so far, has a press release.

FAQ: the Relance Logement bill

Is the F and G letting ban already lifted?

No. The ban on G homes has applied to new leases since January 2025 and F follows on 1 January 2028. The reprieve exists only in a bill adopted by the Senate and awaiting the Assemblée nationale. Until it is promulgated the current calendar applies.

What would the works contract have to contain?

Under the Senate text, a contract signed before 1 January 2030 for works whose full execution would bring the home up to the required class. The home is then deemed decent for up to three years from signature if the owner signed, or five years if the copropriété signed for works on the building. The owner’s route closes on 1 January 2033 and the copropriété’s on 1 January 2035. The precise proof required will be set by decree if the bill passes.

Does the bill apply to leases already running?

The Senate version applies the energy-decency obligation in full to new contracts. An existing lease is caught from its next renewal or tacit rollover, and at the latest three years after the ban date. The Conseil d’État accepted that applying it to existing leases at all is constitutional because of the environmental and housing objectives it serves.

Can a copropriété refuse the works and keep letting?

Under the Senate text, yes, with conditions. If the general meeting has voted the works down within the last eighteen months, and the landlord pushed for them and has done what remains possible in the flat, the home is deemed decent. The same applies where works are technically impossible, refused by the administration or disproportionately expensive relative to the home’s value.

Does the bill change anything for a second home I never let?

Directly, no. Indirectly, a copropriété you own a flat in would find it easier to vote shutters or cooling, and the heritage architect’s opinion on external solar protection would become advisory rather than binding.