This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. The template it describes is a starting point to adapt to your own bill, and a professional should review it.
Every autumn the same question comes round from somewhere outside France. The avis de taxe foncière has arrived, the figure is higher than last year or plainly wrong, and the owner wants to know what to do about it. We answered the first half of that question in is it worth contesting your taxe foncière and showed you how to read the avis line by line. The second half is the letter itself, and the search data tells us you have been looking for one. So we wrote it.
What is in the template
It is a seven-page Word document, free, in two parts. The first part is a guide in English to the réclamation contentieuse, the formal complaint the livre des procédures fiscales makes you send before any court will look at your bill. It covers when to use it and when not to. It gives the deadline, the longer one for people billed in error, and the fallback if you have missed both. Then where to send the letter, the four conditions on pain of inadmissibility, how to defer payment while the office thinks, what happens next, and a checklist of what to attach. The second part is the letter in French, with an English note under every paragraph. Four variants, and you keep the one you need:
- Variant A: the valeur locative cadastrale rests on wrong facts, a surface, a category, a pool you do not have.
- Variant B: an exemption you are entitled to was not applied, the two-year new-build exemption being the usual one.
- Variant C: the property stood empty for three months or more through no fault of yours, which earns a pro-rata relief.
- Variant D: you are billed for a property you sold, or never owned, which happens more often than you would think when a deed takes its time at the publicité foncière.
Every rule in it is tied to an article. The deadline and its extensions sit in R.* 196-2 of the livre des procédures fiscales, the four admissibility conditions in R.* 197-3, the French address every non-resident must give in R.* 197-5, the sursis de paiement in L. 277. The transfer of a bill to the real owner comes from articles 1402 to 1405 of the code général des impôts. We read the texts on Légifrance and then checked our reading against the published commentary, which is where the useful warnings came from. One of them: contesting your surface invites the office to look at the whole property, and an undeclared extension can be reassessed four years back. The template tells you that before you post the letter, not after.
Why it is not a download button
We could have put the file at the bottom of this page. Within a week it would be sitting on scraper sites under other people’s names, and if our visitor statistics are any guide, most of those people take their breakfast a good six time zones east of Paris. That is not what the work was for. So the template goes to readers, not to crawlers. Subscribe to The France Brief, our free email on what changed for foreign owners of French property, and the letter arrives in the welcome email, next to the one-page tax calendar and the lease checklist. One or two emails a month, no spam, and you can leave whenever you like.
The taxe foncière réclamation letter (Word, French with English notes, four variants)
Free with The France Brief. Enter your email below, confirm it from your inbox, and the letter arrives in the welcome email with the tax calendar and the 1 October lease checklist.
Already on the list? The link will be in the next Brief.
What the letter cannot do
Two things, and the guide says so on page one. If you sold in March and still received the full bill, that is the law working as written. The taxe foncière is due for the whole year by whoever owned the property on 1 January, and the pro-rata in your sale deed is a private arrangement with the buyer. And if the bill is right but you cannot pay it, you need a demande gracieuse, a different letter asking for time or remission, not a réclamation. For everything in between, including the TEOM that rides on the same bill and the rules on who qualifies for which exemption, the template has a paragraph.
The 2026 bills can be contested until 31 December 2027. Nobody needs to rush. But the fiche d’évaluation takes a few weeks to arrive from the centre des impôts fonciers, and the letter is better with it than without, so the time to ask is now.
