Marine Le Pen’s Housing Programme: What the RN Would Change for Foreign Owners of French Property (2027)

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Seven months before the first round of the presidential election, the Rassemblement national has put its housing programme on the table. It reads like a list of everything that has irritated a foreign owner of French property since 2017. The wealth tax on real estate would go. The 60 percent surcharge on second homes would go. Rent control would go, the letting ban on badly insulated homes would go, and the energy rating that decides it would shrink back to an information sheet. The party set the measures out at the end of August, most fully in an interview its housing spokesman, Frédéric Falcon, member of parliament for the Aude, gave to Le Figaro (paywalled). This article does three things. It explains what each proposal would change against the rules you live with today. It checks the numbers the party is using. And it asks the question that matters more than any of them: how much of this could actually happen, and when.

First, the question the programme depends on

A manifesto is only as interesting as the odds of its author taking office, and for eighteen months the odds on Marine Le Pen were a matter for the courts rather than the pollsters. In March 2025 the Paris criminal court convicted her in the European Parliament assistants case and barred her from office for five years with immediate effect. On 7 July 2026 the Paris court of appeal upheld the conviction but cut the ineligibility to fifteen months, counted from 31 March 2025, which means it expired at the end of June 2026. She can stand. Both she and the prosecution have taken the case to the Cour de cassation, France’s highest court, so a final word is still to come. On the current position, though, her name will be on the ballot on 18 April 2027, with the second round on 2 May. Whoever wins then faces legislative elections in June. A president without a majority in the Assemblée nationale passes very little of a programme like this one. We covered what a hung parliament did to British households last time in our political-turmoil explainer, and the lesson stands: read the measures below as a direction of travel, not a timetable.

The nine measures against the rules you live with today

The tax chapter: wealth, furnished lets and the 15-year exit

The impôt sur la fortune immobilière is the tax most likely to have brought a non-resident reader here. It replaced the old wealth tax in 2018 and bites on net property wealth above €1.3 million, with the main residence counted at 70 percent of its value. Our IFI guide walks through the arithmetic. The RN would abolish it and create an impôt sur la fortune financière in its place, keeping the €1.3 million entry point but shifting the base from bricks to shares, bonds and cash. One property of the owner’s choosing, main home or second home, would be left out of the base whatever its value, with the exception of buildings held purely for rent. For a British owner whose only French asset is a house in the Luberon, that is the difference between a tax return and no tax return. Employers’ organisations dislike it for the same reason savers do. A tax on financial wealth is a wealth tax with a different name, and the party’s own presentation does not pretend otherwise.

The furnished-letting point is narrower and more immediate. Since 15 February 2025 the depreciation a landlord has deducted under the régime réel is added back when the property is sold. That raises the taxable gain for anyone who has run an LMNP for more than a few years. The party would repeal that change, and Frédéric Falcon frames the wider position as opposition to any increase in property taxation, including attempts to abolish the LMNP status itself. Then comes the proposal with the widest reach: full exemption from both income tax and social charges on a sale after 15 years of ownership. The law today asks 22 years for the income-tax part and 30 for the social charges. Our non-resident capital gains guide shows how those two clocks work. A single 15-year clock would bring the tax-free date forward by seven years for most sellers, and by fifteen for the social-charge element.

Second homes: the surcharge would go, and the numbers behind it

Since the taxe d’habitation disappeared for main residences, second homes have carried it alone, and in the 3,690 communes on the tense-zone list the council may add a surcharge of 5 to 60 percent. The tax administration’s July 2025 note puts the count at 1,628 communes applying it in 2025, up from 1,461 the year before. Some 657 of them charge the 60 percent maximum, and Brittany, Nouvelle-Aquitaine and the Pays de la Loire are the keenest users. You will see 1,136 communes and 650 at the top rate quoted in the coverage of the programme, figures that appear to conflate the old pre-2024 list of eligible communes with the number actually charging. Our second-home tax guide has the bill worked through for a typical coastal property.

The RN would remove the surcharge outright and abolish the separate tax on vacant homes, which Paris is doubling from 2027. Its argument is efficiency as much as fairness, and it rests on Biarritz. The council there voted the 60 percent maximum, then found that more than a thousand owners had simply re-declared their second home as their main one. The town has put the cost at roughly a million euros in lost revenue and penalties, and has started chasing the false declarations. Falcon is careful to add that the party would not bring back the old taxe d’habitation on tenants. What it does not say is how the communes that have built the surcharge into their budgets would be compensated, and that silence is where the measure will be tested if it ever reaches the Senate.

Rent control out, squatters out in a day

Rent control in France is still, legally, an experiment. The caps in Paris, Lyon, Lille, Bordeaux, Montpellier and a handful of other cities expire on 24 November 2026 unless parliament extends them. The Senate debates a two-year extension on 21 October. We set out the three possible outcomes in the barometer article, and the Institut des politiques publiques’ verdict on six years of the scheme is here. The RN would end it altogether, on the ground that a capped yield is why small landlords have been selling up. Whether that is the cause is disputed, and the party’s own expert witness, quoted below, thinks the measure would land badly in a country where most households rent.

On squatting the proposal is a 24-hour eviction, whatever the building: main residence, second home, business premises or holiday let. The law today already moves faster than most owners realise. The 2023 loi Kasbarian, explained in our squatter-law guide, gives the préfet 48 hours to decide and the occupant 24 hours to leave, and the loi Ripost extended that route to overstaying holiday-let guests on 20 August. Compressing the whole sequence into a day would need a rewrite of that statute, and a police response time the current one does not promise. Unpaid rent costs landlords far more than squatters do. On that, Falcon concedes, the party has no measure yet.

The DPE shrunk back to a piece of paper

Here is the chapter with the most money in it. The diagnostic de performance énergétique became legally binding in July 2021, and since then it has grown teeth. Homes rated G have been barred from new leases since January 2025, F follows in 2028 and E in 2034. Rents on F and G homes have been frozen since August 2022. Selling a house or a single-owner building rated E, F or G requires a full energy audit. Our DPE explainer has the calendar and the exceptions. The RN would remove all of it. The letting bans, the freeze and the compulsory audits would be repealed. The rating itself would revert to the informative document it was before 2021, so a seller or landlord could no longer be sued over a wrong one. The party is even said to be weighing a new name for it, though the rating cannot be abolished because European law requires an energy certificate on every sale and letting.

Two things are worth knowing before you file this under wishful thinking. The first is that the present government is already moving in the same direction. Its Relance Logement bill, passed by the Senate at first reading in July, would let F and G homes back onto the market for owners who commit to renovate. The second is that from 1 January 2027 the DPE’s electricity coefficient falls from 1.9 to 1.7, and around 300,000 electrically heated homes lose their passoire label without a single workman crossing the threshold. If you own an F or G flat with electric heating, the arithmetic may rescue you before any election does.

Copropriétés, builders and the 20 billion euro loan

Three measures aim at the supply side. Every copropriété must now commission a projet de plan pluriannuel de travaux, a ten-year works forecast, and put it to the annual meeting, where owners have been voting it down for fear of what comes next. The RN would abolish the obligation, while keeping an open mind on the diagnostic technique global that often accompanies it. For new-build, the RE2020 environmental code tightened its carbon thresholds in 2025 and does so again in 2028 and 2031. The party would freeze those two steps, citing Germany’s retreat from its own building standards. And on land, the zéro artificialisation nette target of the 2021 climate law would no longer apply to housing at all. That target halves the rate at which fields become housing estates by 2031 and ends net land take by 2050. A Senate bill loosening the same target has been waiting for the Assemblée since March 2025, so here too the RN is pushing on a door others have already leaned on.

The renovation subsidy is where the programme is most concrete. MaPrimeRénov’ would be scrapped and replaced by a scheme called 100 % Rénov’, which the party first presented in October 2025 as a budget amendment. It is a €20 billion pot of zero-interest loans, open to every French resident regardless of income, with the State carrying the interest. The loan could not exceed half the property’s pre-works value, repayment would come from half the estimated energy savings, and any balance would fall due on sale or on death. The party’s case against the grant it replaces leans on the Anah’s own figures for 2024: around 44,000 applications rejected as fraudulent and roughly one file in ten found to be for works that did not exist. The scheme’s rules would matter enormously to a non-resident, since a loan open to residents only would leave the second-home owner exactly where the current grants leave them, which is outside.

What a market veteran makes of it

The interview came with a verdict from Henry Buzy-Cazaux, asked to mark the homework. He founded and chairs the Institut du management des services immobiliers, was formerly the FNAIM’s délégué général, and talks to every parliamentary group, which makes him about as neutral a judge as the French property world offers. It is mixed in a way the party will find useful and uncomfortable in equal measure. He backs a return to an informative DPE and the end of the letting bans, but only if the State signs a bargain with landlords, renovation in exchange for lighter taxe foncière or wealth tax. He applauds the pause on the RE2020, on the ground that ever stricter building codes are the enemy of affordable homes. He is cool on abolishing rent control in a nation of tenants, calling the cap a painkiller rather than a cure. He would rather see the zero-interest loan targeted at low incomes, with a subsidised green savings plan for everyone else. On the works plan in copropriétés he parts company with the party altogether: in his view the plan is what lifts a building’s owners out of day-to-day maintenance and into thinking about the asset over decades.

Our view: the freedom is welcome, the invoice is missing

We will say plainly what most of our readers will feel. A landlord who cannot let a flat because of a label, cannot set a rent because of a decree, and pays a wealth tax on bricks that a portfolio of shares escapes, has a fair complaint. Most of the nine measures answer that complaint, and the diagnosis that too many rules have chased small landlords out of the market is shared well beyond the RN’s voters. The property market in France has been legislated into a defensive crouch, and a programme that treats the owner as a partner rather than a suspect is, on its face, good news for anyone reading this site.

The trouble is the arithmetic, and it is not small. The IFI raised €2.3 billion in 2025 from 193,600 households, and the party has not said how much an IFF that exempts one property each would raise instead. Second homes paid €3.2 billion of taxe d’habitation in 2024, up 7.1 percent in a year largely because of the wider surcharge, money that pays for the schools and sea walls in the very resorts our readers buy in, and nothing in the programme says who replaces the surcharge share of it. A 15-year capital gains exemption has no published costing at all. And €20 billion of zero-interest loans with the State carrying the interest is a subsidy by another route, on top of the grant it replaces. All of this lands on a country that ran a deficit of 5.1 percent of GDP in 2025 with debt at 115.6 percent, and whose last three governments fell over budgets. More freedom for owners is a good idea. Freedom that adds to the bill our children inherit, in a country already paying more in interest than it spends on defence, needs a funding line beside each promise, and so far there is none.

What this means if you own, or plan to buy, in France

Nothing in this programme changes a single line of the tax code today, and a good deal of it would struggle to survive contact with the Senate, the Conseil constitutionnel or Brussels even after a win in May. So the practical advice is dull and important. Do not hold a sale for a 15-year exemption that does not exist. Do not sign a lease on a G-rated flat because a party has promised to lift the ban. Pay the second-home surcharge on your notice this autumn, contest the base if it is wrong, and treat the abolition talk as background noise until a finance bill says otherwise. Three dates deserve a diary entry: 21 October for the Senate’s rent-control vote, the Cour de cassation’s ruling on the Le Pen appeal whenever it lands, and 18 April 2027. If the second round produces a president committed to this list, the first real test will be the budget for 2028. That is when the IFF, the 15-year clock and the end of the surcharge would have to be written into law. Until then the useful work is the same as ever: know what your property is rated, know what your commune charges, and know which clock your capital gain is on.

The France Brief tracks each of these dates and lands in your inbox once a month, with a one-page tax calendar and the new lease checklist in the welcome email.

FAQ: the RN housing programme and foreign owners

Can Marine Le Pen actually stand in 2027?

Yes, on the current position. The Paris court of appeal ruled on 7 July 2026 and reduced her ineligibility to 15 months from 31 March 2025, so it has expired. Both sides have appealed to the Cour de cassation, whose ruling could still change the picture.

Would a non-resident pay the proposed IFF?

Non-residents are taxed in France only on French assets. A tax on financial wealth would catch French shares, bonds and accounts, not a house, and one property of the owner’s choice would be exempt whatever its value. A non-resident whose only French asset is a home would fall outside it.

Should I delay selling to benefit from the 15-year exemption?

No. The exemption is a proposal, not law, and it would need a presidential win, a parliamentary majority and a finance bill, the earliest realistic vehicle being the budget for 2028. The 22-year and 30-year clocks apply to any sale today.

Is the second-home surcharge really counterproductive?

Biarritz is the example the party uses: after voting the 60 percent maximum, the town found over a thousand owners had re-declared their second home as a main residence and estimates a loss of about a million euros. Nationally, 1,628 communes applied a surcharge in 2025, up from 1,461 in 2024, so most councils still see it as a net gain.

Would the DPE letting ban disappear before 2028 anyway?

Possibly in part. The current government’s Relance Logement bill would let F and G homes be relet by owners who commit to renovation, and from 1 January 2027 a new electricity coefficient moves around 300,000 homes out of the F and G bands. Neither repeals the ban outright, which is what the RN proposes.