Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or financial advice. Always consult qualified professionals before making decisions about your French property investments.
Every year, the avis de taxe foncière lands in your espace particulier on impots.gouv.fr from late August onwards — the 2025 run began on 25 August. Most British owners of French property zero in on the big number — the taxe foncière itself — and ignore the smaller line items. One of those little line items is almost always there, quietly adding a few hundred euros to the bill: the tax on household waste. It’s one of the most mundane costs of owning a French property, and also one of the most widely misunderstood. Some owners get charged on the avis de taxe foncière; others receive a separate bill from their commune. And when the property sits empty for months on end, many don’t realise they can claim a chunk of the tax back.
It matters more than it used to. In Île-de-France alone, the cost of household-waste management borne by collectivités has risen by 13% over five years, according to the Observatoire régional des déchets — and that pressure feeds directly into the rates communes vote each autumn. And in August 2025, a confidential Agence de l’environnement et de la maîtrise de l’énergie (Ademe) dataset obtained by Le Monde revealed that more than half of France’s intercommunalités are collecting more TEOM revenue than the waste service actually costs — a legally fragile situation that we unpack in detail below.
Here’s the complete guide for British investors: what the taxe d’enlèvement des ordures ménagères (TEOM) and the redevance d’enlèvement des ordures ménagères (REOM) actually are, who pays what, how they’re calculated, whether you can recharge them to your tenant, and how to claw money back when the property is unoccupied.
What Are the TEOM and the REOM?
French communes (or the intercommunal body to which they have delegated waste management — a syndicat, a syndicat mixte, or an EPCI) have to fund the collection, sorting, and treatment of household rubbish. The law lets them choose one of two regimes:
- The TEOM (taxe d’enlèvement des ordures ménagères) — a tax, collected alongside the taxe foncière on the same avis d’imposition, calculated on the cadastral value of the property. You pay it whether you use the collection service or not.
- The REOM (redevance d’enlèvement des ordures ménagères) — a fee for service, billed directly by the commune (or the intercommunal body), calculated on actual use. You pay only if you use the collection service.
A single commune can only operate one of the two at a time — the TEOM and the REOM are not cumulable, save for some narrow transitional cases. There is also a third tool, the redevance spéciale, but it targets non-household waste from businesses and institutions rather than ordinary domestic waste.
TEOM vs REOM: One Commune’s Choice
Whether you pay the TEOM or the REOM depends entirely on which regime your commune has instituted. The decision is taken by the conseil municipal — or by the intercommunal body with waste-management competence — and it is the biggest single determinant of what ends up on your bill.
The practical difference matters. The TEOM is mechanical and unavoidable: your cadastral value times a rate, landed on the foncière bill. The REOM is a user fee: if you aren’t actually using the commune’s waste-collection service, in principle the REOM is not due. To know which regime applies to a specific French property, check the guide de la collecte on the commune’s website or ask the mairie directly.
Who Pays — Owner, Usufructuary, or Occupier?
This is the most common point of confusion for British landlords. The short answer depends on which regime applies.
TEOM: The Owner (or Usufructuary) Pays
The TEOM is established in the name of the owner or the usufructuary, and it applies to every property subject to the taxe foncière sur les propriétés bâties (TFPB) — including properties that happen to benefit from a temporary taxe foncière exoneration, such as a recent new-build. Crucially for non-resident British owners, the TEOM is also due on secondary residences used only for short stays each year: occupying the property intermittently does not get you out of it.
One subtlety worth flagging: the taxe foncière exonerations available to certain elderly or low-income occupiers — and to recipients of the Aspa, Asi, or AAH benefits — do not apply to the TEOM. An owner exempt from the foncière on income grounds may still receive a TEOM bill.
REOM: The Occupier Pays
Under the REOM, the bill goes to whoever lives in the dwelling and uses the service — owner-occupier, tenant, or usufructuary-in-residence. If the property is let and the tenant lives there, it is the tenant who receives and pays the REOM directly. Because the REOM is triggered by actual use of the collection service, a dwelling that is genuinely unoccupied and doesn’t use the service is, in principle, outside the REOM’s scope.
Can I Recharge the TEOM to My Tenant?
Yes — and for buy-to-let British investors, this is the important bit. The TEOM is one of the charges récupérables: costs that a landlord can legally pass through to the tenant. You, as owner, pay the TEOM to the fisc as part of your taxe foncière bill in the final quarter of the year; you then recover it from your tenant through the end-of-year régularisation des charges or via monthly provisions.
One nuance to take to heart: you can recover the TEOM itself, but not the frais de gestion de la fiscalité locale that the State tacks onto it. The management fee stays with the landlord. In economic terms, as Les Echos puts it, “la taxe est acquittée par la personne qui occupe les lieux” in a long-term lease — but only the net TEOM travels across, not the 8% bureaucratic wrapper. If you are letting through the loueur en meublé non professionnel (LMNP) regime, you can still recharge the recoverable portion — see our LMNP guide for British investors for the full picture on furnished-letting mechanics and charges.
The REOM, where it applies, is invoiced directly to the occupier by the commune and never touches the landlord’s books — no recharge mechanism is needed.
How the TEOM Is Calculated
The Formula: Half the Cadastral Value × the Commune’s Rate
The TEOM is calculated on the same base as the taxe foncière‘s bâti component — that is, the valeur locative cadastrale (VLC), reduced by the statutory 50% abatement. In plain terms: half the cadastral rental value of your property, multiplied by a rate set by the commune or its intercommunal grouping.
The rate is voted annually. Communes must deliberate on the TEOM rate before 15 October of the year preceding the year of imposition — or, by exception, before 15 January of the imposition year. Communes may also define zones within their territory on which different rates apply. The VLC itself is revalorised every year, principally to track inflation.
Frais de Gestion and the Incitative Component
Two additions on top of the basic TEOM matter:
- Frais de gestion de la fiscalité locale — a State management fee added to the TEOM amount to cover the cost of the fisc collecting the tax on the commune’s behalf. It is automatic and appears on your bill alongside the tax itself. As noted above, the frais de gestion are not recoverable from your tenant.
- Part incitative — an optional variable component linked to the volume, weight, or number of bin-lifts of waste each dwelling produces, or to the nature of the waste (glass, cardboard, plastic, organic…). Where it exists, it is added to a fixed part to make up the global TEOM.
How the Part Incitative Is Capped
The part incitative (sometimes called the TEOMI) is tightly regulated. The tariffs are voted each year by the commune or EPCI — by 15 April in an ordinary year, or by 30 April in a year when municipal councils are renewed — and are expressed in euros per litre, kilogram, or levée (bin-lift). The law then imposes a bracket: the produit attendu of the part incitative must represent between 10% and 45% of the total TEOM revenue (fixed part plus incitative part combined) for the year. Communes that fall outside this bracket have their prior-year rates automatically reconduits.
There is also a one-off safeguard: in the first year a commune adopts the part incitative, the total TEOM revenue (fixed + incitative) may not exceed the prior year’s total by more than 10%. After that first year the ceiling falls away. And since the 2024 finance law (loi n°2023-1322 du 29 décembre 2023, article 150), communes with more than 20% collective housing may opt not to extend the part incitative to their entire territory — a deliberate loosening of the regime for urban arrondissements and copropriétés where individualised waste measurement is hard to implement.
In short: in a typical French commune, you will see a TEOM line on your foncière notice driven by a flat rate on half your cadastral value, plus the State’s management overlay. Where the commune has gone for TEOMI, you will see a variable component on top, sized by actual bin use, and legally boxed between 10% and 45% of the total waste-tax take.
Is Your Commune Overcharging? The 115% Coverage-Rate Rule
Here’s a detail most British owners never hear about, and one that has been increasingly in the French press in 2025. The TEOM is legally a taxe affectée — a dedicated tax whose revenue can only be used to fund the waste-collection service itself. It cannot, as a matter of law, be inflated to cover unrelated commune spending like a tramway, a cycle network, or a municipal swimming pool.
The legal anchoring for this goes back more than a decade. In 2014, the Conseil d’État reminded local authorities that they must not set the TEOM at a level “manifestement disproportionné par rapport au montant [des] dépenses” needed to finance the waste service. In 2015, the finance ministry clarified that the commune’s taux de couverture — the ratio of TEOM revenue to actual waste-service spending — should be “sensiblement inférieur” to 115% of the real cost in order to remain legal.
The Ademe data Le Monde obtained in August 2025 suggests many intercommunalités are pushing those limits hard. Of 715 intercommunalités in the 2023 dataset:
- 291 collected between 0% and 100% of waste-service costs (self-funding or below);
- 333 collected between 100% and 115% — within the tolerated range;
- 78 collected between 115% and 130% — legally fragile;
- 13 collected more than 130% of their actual waste-service spending.
Between 10% and 15% of intercommunalités exceeded the 115% threshold in at least one of the years 2021, 2022 or 2023. The list spans large agglomérations (Dijon at 159% in 2022, Mulhouse Alsace Agglomération at 128% in 2022) and smaller rural bodies (Pays de Sommières in the Gard at 144% in 2023, Mirecourt Dompaire in the Vosges at 137% in 2023).
When the over-collection is egregious, the refunds can be large. In 2022, residents of Grand Nancy won a refund of €30 million after a court found the commune’s 2018 taux de couverture of 159% to be manifestement disproportionné. That said, winning is not automatic: as one lawyer familiar with this contentieux told Le Monde, “le dépassement du taux accepté n’implique pas une condamnation automatique de la collectivité à rembourser”, and cases have in fact become rarer since a 2015 legislative reform that tightened the procedural framework in communes’ favour.
For a British investor, the practical takeaway is this: if your TEOM looks disproportionate to the actual bin-collection service your property receives — especially if the commune’s accounts suggest a taux de couverture well above 115% — the legal route exists, even though the bar is high and the road is slow. Before spending a euro on a contentieux, the Ademe data and the commune’s own compte administratif are the first stops: both are public documents.
How the REOM Is Calculated
The REOM is not a tax — it is a fee for service, and the calculation is set locally. The legal requirement is that it be calculated “in proportion to the service rendered, notably the volume of waste removed”. Communes are free to choose the unit of measure. Common approaches are:
- a combination of a fixed part and a proportional part;
- a flat forfait per household;
- a per-person amount multiplied by the number of people in the household.
The REOM is invoiced directly by the commune (or its delegated intercommunal body) at dates the commune chooses — typically once a year, sometimes quarterly. There are no frais de gestion: the commune keeps 100% of what it collects.
The Redevance Spéciale: The Non-Household Regime
There is a third tool in the commune’s waste-funding toolkit, but it does not generally touch residential owners. The redevance spéciale is a fee that can exist alongside the TEOM, targeting producers of non-household waste — factories, shops, administrations — whose rubbish the public service collects despite not being strictly household in origin.
For a British individual owning a flat in Paris or a villa in Provence, the redevance spéciale is essentially never a concern. If you hold French commercial property, a meublé de tourisme run as a business, or an SCI holding commercial premises, it may be — in which case the bill will come directly from the commune or EPCI handling your collection.
If Your French Property Sits Empty: Claiming a TEOM Reduction
One of the least-known TEOM rules, and one of the most valuable for a non-resident owner who lets only part of the year: a reduction of the TEOM is available for vacant rental property. Where a property destined for rental sits empty, the owner can apply for a TEOM reduction provided three conditions are met:
- the vacancy is independent of the owner’s will (no tenant has taken the property at a market rent, rather than the owner choosing to leave it empty);
- the vacancy lasts more than three months;
- the vacancy concerns the entire building, or a part capable of being let separately.
You claim the reduction by sending a réclamation to your local centre des finances publiques, accompanied by supporting evidence — estate-agent listings, rent demand correspondence, works invoices, whatever is relevant. The deadline is 31 December of the year following the year in which the property was vacant.
Important distinction: the TEOM vacancy reduction is entirely separate from the taxe sur les logements vacants (TLV) and the taxe d’habitation sur les logements vacants (THLV) — those are penalties on long-term vacant property in tension-zone communes, designed to push empty homes back onto the market. We covered that ground in our piece on Paris’s vacant-property-tax doubling. The TEOM reduction is a refund on a genuine tax you have already paid.
How to Find Out Which Regime Your Commune Uses
Before you can forecast anything, you need to know which regime applies. Three practical ways to find out:
- Your avis de taxe foncière. If the TEOM applies, you’ll see a line labelled “Taxe d’enlèvement des ordures ménagères” on the foncière notice, with the rate and base shown. If that line is missing, your commune is on the REOM (or, rarely, has neither).
- The commune’s website or the guide de la collecte. Most communes publish the applicable regime, the rates, the bin-colour system, and the collection calendar.
- The mairie itself. Calling or emailing the mairie is a fast way to settle the question, particularly in small communes that don’t publish detailed information online.
If you own in multiple communes — a Paris flat and a Provence farmhouse, say — you may well be on different regimes for each property. Our regional property guide covers the variation in local tax regimes across France’s main markets.
The Practical Checklist for British Owners
- Identify which regime applies to each French property you own — TEOM or REOM. Check the foncière notice first; then the commune website; then the mairie.
- Read the rate and base. For the TEOM, both are on your foncière notice. For the REOM, request the tariff grid from your commune or its waste-service provider.
- If the property is let, recharge the TEOM via your charges locatives mechanism under Décret n°87-713 du 26 août 1987 — but remember that the frais de gestion component stays with you as landlord.
- If the property is vacant for more than three months for reasons outside your control, send a réclamation to your centre des finances publiques by 31 December of the following year to claim the TEOM reduction.
- Reconcile with Gérer mes biens immobiliers on impots.gouv.fr annually — confirm the fisc has the correct property details before the autumn foncière run.
- Watch the rate trend. With collectivity waste-management costs rising sharply in many regions (the Observatoire régional des déchets in Île-de-France has measured a 13% rise over five years), build headroom into your long-term cash-flow model.
- Sense-check the taux de couverture. If your commune’s TEOM seems out of kilter with the service delivered, consult its compte administratif and the Ademe data: an intercommunalité collecting materially more than 115% of its actual waste-service costs is in legally fragile territory.
Takeaway
The taxe d’enlèvement des ordures ménagères is one of those small French costs that is entirely predictable once you know the mechanics — and entirely opaque until you do. For most British owners, it’s an annual line on the foncière bill, largely recoverable from your tenant if the property is let (net of the State’s management fee), and partly refundable if the property sits empty through no fault of yours. It is not a reason to love or hate French property; it is simply a line item to budget, invoice, and — where legitimate — claw back. Keep the foncière notice, keep your tenancy régularisation des charges tidy, and keep your espace particulier on impots.gouv.fr up to date. The rest is routine.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the TEOM or the REOM better for me as an owner?
Neither is a choice for you — each commune decides which regime to run. From a pure cash-flow perspective, the TEOM is usually easier for landlords because it sits on the foncière notice and is recoverable from tenants via charges locatives (net of frais de gestion). The REOM is invoiced directly to the occupier, so the landlord never touches the cash flow at all.
Can I refuse to pay the TEOM if I don’t produce any waste?
No. The TEOM is a tax, not a fee for service, and it is due whether you use the collection service or not. The only relief is the vacancy reduction available to rental properties that are unoccupied for more than three months, for reasons independent of the owner’s will.
Does the TEOM apply to new-builds that are exempt from taxe foncière?
Yes. Service-Public is explicit that the TEOM is due on every property subject to taxe foncière sur les propriétés bâties, even where the taxe foncière itself is temporarily exonerated — new-build being the standard example.
How do I recover the TEOM from my tenant?
The TEOM is listed as a charge récupérable in the annex to Décret n°87-713 du 26 août 1987. You pay it to the fisc as part of your taxe foncière bill, then recharge it to your tenant through the end-of-year régularisation des charges, supported by a copy of the relevant page of your avis de taxe foncière. You may not recover the accompanying frais de gestion de la fiscalité locale.
Do I pay TEOM on a property held through an SCI?
Yes — the TEOM follows the taxe foncière, which is due on the legal owner. If the legal owner is an SCI, the SCI is billed for both the taxe foncière and the TEOM. The SCI then passes the recoverable portion through to the tenant if the property is let, or absorbs it if vacant. See our complete guide to owning shares in a French SCI for the full tax treatment.
When is the TEOM paid?
The TEOM is collected alongside the taxe foncière in the final quarter of the year. The due date and accepted payment methods are the same as for the taxe foncière itself, and are shown on your avis d’imposition. See our French tax deadlines guide for the full calendar.
What’s the difference between the TEOM and the TLV / vacant-property taxes?
The TEOM is a tax on every built property to fund waste collection. The TLV (taxe sur les logements vacants) and THLV are penalties on long-term vacant property in tension-zone communes — they are designed to push empty homes back onto the market. The two can apply to the same property, but they have entirely different policy purposes.
Can I challenge my TEOM if my commune is over-collecting?
In principle, yes. The TEOM is a taxe affectée, meaning its revenue can only fund the waste-collection service. Under guidance from the 2014 Conseil d’État ruling and the 2015 finance-ministry clarification, a commune’s taux de couverture — the ratio of TEOM revenue to actual waste-service spending — should be sensiblement inférieur to 115%. Courts have ordered refunds where coverage rates were found to be manifestement disproportionnés — Grand Nancy residents recovered €30 million in 2022 after a 159% coverage rate in 2018 was struck down. That said, challenges are slow, expensive, and not automatic even where the numbers are poor.
