This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal, tax or investment advice. Rules change and individual situations differ. Always confirm the current position with a qualified professional before acting.
There is a moment in every French off-plan purchase when the buyer stands at a chain-link fence in a hard hat that does not fit, looks at a muddy rectangle with a digger in it, and realises that she now owns it. Not a flat, not yet. What she owns is the ground under the digger, and a legal promise that a flat will grow out of it. That is the vente en l’état futur d’achèvement, the VEFA, and it is the contract French promoters use to sell flats that do not exist yet, for reasons that become clear below.
The civil code puts it more elegantly than the fence does: the seller transfers the rights over the land at once, and the building becomes yours “au fur et à mesure de leur exécution”, as it is built, while you pay “à mesure de l’avancement des travaux”, as the works advance. Everything else in this guide follows from those two phrases, and so does the reason the VEFA matters to a foreign buyer this autumn: the Jeanbrun tax break only works on a new-build flat in a collective building bought before the end of 2028, which means a VEFA contract for almost everyone who wants it.
What you are actually buying, and when it becomes yours
An English buyer of a new-build exchanges contracts, waits, and completes when the building is finished, owning nothing in between but a claim against the developer. The French system inverts that. Under article 1601-3 of the civil code, reproduced at article L. 261-3 of the code de la construction et de l’habitation, the promoter transfers to you immediately his rights over the land and any construction already standing on it, foundations included, even if it is about to be demolished. Those rights need not be full ownership. A promoter building on a long ground lease can sell you a VEFA just the same.
What does not yet exist becomes yours as it is executed, by the old rule of accession, which says that what is built on land belongs to the owner of the land. So the digger really is working on your property, and each course of bricks is yours the moment it is laid.
The label matters, because the protections below only attach to a real VEFA. On 14 September 2017 the Cour de cassation refused the name to a sale of disused industrial premises where the buyers were to finish the works themselves at their own cost, outside the price. No staged price, no VEFA, and no VEFA guarantees.
Owning it does not mean controlling it, and this is the part that surprises the buyer who turns up with a tape measure. The same article keeps the promoter as maître de l’ouvrage, the person in charge of the building, until the works are received from the contractors. The regulations spell out what that means. He chooses the architects and the builders, he signs their contracts, he alone accepts their work, and he keeps those powers until any snags recorded at that acceptance have been cleared.
The Cour de cassation held on 22 November 1989 that until then the buyer may not interfere in the construction, may not carry out works of her own, and cannot even get a court to authorise her to. The powers are not a licence, though. They exist so that the promoter can perform the contract, and the Conseil d’État held on 8 July 1988 that they do not let him alter the building he has sold, nor apply for a modified planning permit on his own initiative.
In exchange for that control the promoter keeps the risk. In an ordinary sale, the risk of loss follows ownership: if the thing you bought is destroyed, the loss is yours. In a VEFA the Cour de cassation held on 11 October 2000 that the risk passes only at delivery, when the finished flat is handed over, because until then only the promoter can prevent the building being lost. If the half-built block burns down in year two, that is his problem and his insurer’s, not yours.
There is a cousin, the vente à terme, in which ownership and payment both wait until completion and then apply retroactively to the day of sale. It exists in the code, it is cleaner for the buyer, and it is hardly ever used, because it does not let the promoter finance the site with the buyers’ money. It has one small tax charm: the Cour de cassation held on 21 May 2003 that the buyer under a vente à terme owes taxe foncière only from the actual transfer, not retroactively. If a French developer offers you one, ask why.
The reservation contract: a deposit with an escape hatch
Most VEFAs begin with a contrat de réservation, sometimes called the contrat préliminaire. It is not compulsory, but it is how the promoter fills the building before the notaire is involved, and the law regulates it closely because it is signed on a show-flat sofa. It must be in writing, and articles R. 261-25 to R. 261-31 of the code de la construction list what it must contain:
- the flat’s approximate habitable area, its number of main rooms, its service rooms and its position in the building
- a short technical note on the materials, the equipment and the shared facilities that serve the flat, annexed to the contract
- the provisional price and, if the price may be revised, how
- the date by which the deed can be signed
- any loans the promoter says he will obtain for you, with their amount, conditions and lender
- the deposit, and the cases in which it comes back to you, reproduced word for word from the code
- since 2019, any finishing works you choose to do yourself after delivery, such as kitchen and bathroom fittings, tiling, floor coverings, radiators or decoration, each priced, on the understanding that you then carry the cost and the liability for them.
Leave a compulsory mention out and the buyer can have the contract annulled. A copy must reach you before you pay a penny.
The deposit is capped by law according to how long you will wait. If the deed is to be signed within a year, the promoter may ask for 5 per cent of the price. Between one and two years, 2 per cent. Beyond two years, nothing at all, which tells you how the legislator feels about a promoter who wants your money three years before he can sell you a flat. The deposit goes into a blocked account in your name at a bank or with a notaire, never into the promoter’s own account, and the code makes it untouchable until the deed is signed.
You get it back in full, within three months of asking by registered letter, if the promoter fails to sign the deed within the period the contract states, if the final price comes out more than 5 per cent above the revised provisional price, if your loan is refused or arrives 10 per cent short of what the contract forecast, if a promised piece of equipment is dropped, or if a change in the flat’s specification or build quality knocks more than 10 per cent off its value. And before any of that, you have ten calendar days from the day after the contract is delivered to you by registered post or by hand to walk away for no reason, with no penalty, by registered letter. A promoter who does not tell you about that right risks a €15,000 fine.
The money: a grid the promoter cannot get ahead of
Staged payment exists to protect the buyer if the promoter’s finances collapse halfway up the building, and in the residential sector it is mandatory, with a grid written into article R. 261-14 of the code de la construction. The promoter may call for funds as the site advances, but each call is a ceiling, not an entitlement. By the time the foundations are finished, he may have received at most 35 per cent of the price. Once the building is hors d’eau, which means the roof is on and the shell keeps the rain out, he may have received at most 70 per cent. At completion, at most 95 per cent.
The last 5 per cent is payable when the flat is made available to you, and it is the buyer’s one bargaining chip, so the code lets you refuse to hand it over and deposit it with a third party instead if you record defects at delivery. The promoter cannot withhold the keys because the balance is consigned rather than paid, and if the two of you cannot agree where to consign it, it goes to the Caisse des Dépôts. Hold that thought for the section on delivery.
| Stage | Legal ceiling on what you have paid | What to check before paying |
|---|---|---|
| Reservation | 5% (deed within a year), 2% (one to two years), 0% (beyond) | Deposit is in a blocked account in your name, not the promoter’s |
| Deed signed at the notaire | The deposit counts towards the total, which must stay within the ceiling for the stage reached | The financial completion guarantee, GFA, is annexed and names a bank or insurer |
| Foundations complete | 35% | The architect’s or surveyor’s certificate that the stage is reached |
| Watertight (hors d’eau) | 70% | Roof on and building closed to rain, certified |
| Completion (achèvement) | 95% | Flat usable for its purpose, no substantial non-conformity or disqualifying defect |
| Delivery (livraison), keys handed over | 100%, or 95% with the balance consigned | Snagging record signed, reserves listed, 5% held back if anything is wrong |
Two refinements matter for the calculation. The price is not fixed unless the contract says it is. Most promoters reserve the right to revise it, and article L. 261-11-1 confines that revision to one index, the BT01 national building cost index, and to a fraction of that index’s movement, which the regulations fix at 70 per cent. The base is the last index published when the contract is signed, compared with the last one published before each payment. A 10 per cent rise in the index during construction can therefore add at most 7 per cent to what you pay. Ask for the base index in the contract and do the sum before you sign.
And the grid is a ceiling, not a script. On 14 May 2020 the Cour de cassation accepted that the parties may write their own procedures for certifying each stage and paying each call. Where they then disagree about whether a building is “complete”, it is the judge, not the promoter’s architect, who decides, by reference to the code’s definition: a building that can be used for its purpose and has no substantial non-conformities or disqualifying defects. That was a guarantor’s problem on 26 November 2020, when it sued a buyer for the 95 per cent instalment and the court sent the question of whether the building was actually finished back to the judges of fact.
The guarantee that makes all of this safe to do
Pay as you go only protects you if someone finishes the building when the promoter cannot. Until 2015 French law let promoters offer a so-called intrinsic guarantee, which amounted to a promise that their own funds would suffice, and the commentators spent years pointing out that this protected nobody. An ordinance of 3 October 2013 abolished it for every scheme whose planning application was filed from 1 January 2015. Since then article L. 261-10-1 has forbidden a promoter to sign a VEFA without first taking out one of two guarantees from a bank or insurer.
Under a garantie financière d’achèvement, the guarantor funds completion of the building if the promoter runs out of money, and can have the court appoint an administrator with the promoter’s powers to finish the works and accept them from the contractors. Under a garantie financière de remboursement, the guarantor refunds every instalment you have paid if the sale is unwound for non-completion. The reservation contract must say which one, and the deed must annex the proof. Check the name on it. A guarantee from an insurer you can find is worth the whole transaction. A promoter who cannot produce one cannot lawfully sell you the flat.
The deed, and the month you get to read it
The sale itself is signed before a notaire, and the promoter must send you the draft deed at least a month before the signing date. That is the month in which a foreign buyer should have it translated and read by someone who does this for a living. The deed must describe the lot and its share of the common parts, state the price, the payment schedule and any revision clause, and give the delivery deadline. It must annex the financial guarantee, list any works you have reserved for yourself, and set out your cooling-off rights and any late-delivery penalty. Behind it come the plans, the notice descriptive of materials and equipment, and the règlement de copropriété of the building you are joining.
If the sale is done by deed alone with no reservation contract before it, you get a ten-day reflection period after the draft is notified, during which the deed cannot be signed. Omit a compulsory mention and the buyer, and only the buyer, may have the sale annulled, provided she acts before completion.
Three things follow for a buyer abroad. You do not need to fly in: a French notaire will act on a power of attorney, and the reflection period runs from the notification, not from a meeting. Your mortgage will be drawn down call by call, which means interest on the drawn portion, the intérêts intercalaires, for the year or two before you have a flat to live in or let, and your lender will want each call certified before it pays. And if your money is in sterling or dollars, every call is a separate currency transaction on a date the promoter chooses, which is a reason to fix the rate for the whole schedule at the outset rather than to take six separate bets on the euro. Our non-resident mortgage guide covers the drawdown mechanics.
Delivery day: the only day the 5 per cent is yours to withhold
Livraison is the handover of the keys and the signing, with the promoter, of a record of the flat’s condition that may carry réserves, the French word for snags. It is not the same as réception, which happened earlier between the promoter and his contractors and did not involve you. The flat must be complete, in the code’s sense, before delivery can happen: water, gas, electricity and heating connected, the stairs usable, the lift working, the common parts lit, the aerial up. Dirty paintwork and a door that does not close properly do not stop delivery, but they go on the list.
Bring someone. The regulations let you attend with a building professional or a commissaire de justice, and a buyer who spends €400 on a surveyor for two hours on delivery day is buying the only independent record she will ever have of what the flat looked like before she moved in.
Then the clocks start. For defects you could see, or should have seen, articles 1642-1 and 1648 of the civil code give you until the later of one year from the promoter’s own réception of the works and thirteen months from the day you took possession, and after that the promoter is no longer answerable for them. He can head off a claim for cancellation or a price reduction by undertaking to repair, which is what usually happens.
For everything else the ordinary construction guarantees run from réception. The garantie de parfait achèvement obliges the builder, for one year, to fix anything recorded at acceptance or appearing in that year. The garantie de bon fonctionnement covers for two years the equipment that can be removed without damaging the building, such as boilers, shutters and taps. The garantie décennale covers for ten years anything that threatens the structure or makes the flat unfit to live in. The décennale is only as good as the insurance behind it, which is why the promoter, as the person who commissioned the works, was obliged to take out dommages-ouvrage cover before the site opened, and why the deed should name the insurer. Dommages-ouvrage pays for the repair first and argues about fault afterwards, which for an owner in another country is the difference between a fixed roof and a decade of correspondence.
Late delivery is the complaint we hear most, and the law is less generous than buyers expect. The delivery deadline in the deed is contractual, and so is the penalty for missing it: there is no statutory penalty, only the clause pénale the promoter agreed to, if he agreed to one. Every promoter’s deed also carries a list of causes légitimes de retard, bad weather, strikes, a subcontractor’s insolvency, force majeure, that extend the deadline without penalty, and the list is where the fight usually is.
What you can do about a serious delay comes in four sizes. Refuse the balance until he delivers. Claim the penalties, if there are any and no legitimate cause is proven. Sue for damages, meaning hotel bills, lost rent on a flat you had let, interest on a loan you were paying for nothing. In a bad case, ask the court to unwind the sale. Each of those needs a lawyer, and the first one needs care, because a deed with a clause résolutoire lets the promoter serve a formal payment demand, after which article L. 261-13 gives you a month to pay or to ask a judge for time.
The tax layer, which is why people do this at all
New-build is dearer per square metre than old stock in the same street, and three fiscal features close the gap. The price includes 20 per cent VAT, which the promoter collects, so what you see is what you pay. The acquisition costs, the frais de notaire, are 2 to 3 per cent of the price rather than the 7 to 8 per cent on an older flat, because the State’s transfer duty is replaced by a much smaller land registration tax on a property already carrying VAT. Our notary-fee piece has the arithmetic.
And under article 1383 of the tax code a new home is exempt from taxe foncière for the two years following the year of completion, provided the completion declaration reaches the tax office within ninety days. There is one modern catch. A commune may now cut that exemption to as little as 40 per cent of its own share of the tax, and many have. Ask the mairie before you count on it.
Then Jeanbrun. The 2026 finance law’s depreciation for unfurnished lets applies only to homes in a collective building bought between 21 February 2026 and 31 December 2028, let for nine years within rent caps. Almost every flat that qualifies is a VEFA, and the promoters know it, which is why the word Jeanbrun now appears on hoardings in Lyon and Bordeaux where Pinel used to. The tax break is real. So is everything above it, and a buyer who works backwards from the depreciation to the flat has the order wrong.
The decision rule
Sign a reservation only with the deposit in a blocked account and the ten-day letter in your hand. Sign the deed only with a named bank or insurer on the completion guarantee, a BT01 base index you have checked, a delivery date with a penalty attached, and the dommages-ouvrage insurer identified. Pay each call against a certificate, never ahead of the 35, 70 and 95 per cent grid. On delivery day bring a surveyor, list every snag, and consign the last 5 per cent if the list is long. Then diarise thirteen months.
Our view: the best consumer protection in French property, if you use it
The VEFA is one of the few areas of French property law that was designed, rather than accumulated. Every rule above exists because somebody once lost money at that exact point. Buyers who paid up front for buildings that were never finished gave France the payment grid. Promoters who guaranteed themselves gave it the 2013 ordinance. Buyers who signed on the sofa gave it the ten days. The result is a regime in which the promoter carries the building risk, the financial risk and the construction risk for a decade, and the buyer’s exposure is a deposit she can recover, instalments she can see the value of, and 5 per cent she can refuse to hand over. We would rather buy off-plan under French law than under most others.
The protection has one weakness, and it is not in the code. It is that almost none of it operates automatically. The grid is a ceiling you have to hold the promoter to. The consignation is a right you have to exercise on the day, with a list you have to have written. The thirteen months run whether or not you remembered. The guarantee is only worth reading if you read it. A French buyer half-knows these things from a cousin or a colleague. A foreign buyer signing on a power of attorney from another country knows none of them unless someone tells her, and the promoter’s sales office is not paid to. That is what this guide is for, and it is why the surveyor on delivery day and the lawyer for the month before the deed are the two cheapest purchases in the whole transaction.
FAQ: buying off-plan in France
When do I become the owner of a flat bought in VEFA?
Immediately for the land rights and anything already built, and progressively for the rest as it is constructed. The promoter keeps control of the site and carries the risk of loss until delivery.
How much can the promoter ask for before the flat is finished?
At most 35 per cent of the price when the foundations are complete, 70 per cent when the building is watertight and 95 per cent at completion. The last 5 per cent is due at delivery and may be consigned with a third party if you record defects.
What happens if the promoter goes bust?
Since 2015 every VEFA must carry a financial guarantee from a bank or insurer, either to complete the building or to refund what you have paid. Check the guarantor’s name in the reservation contract and the deed.
Can I pull out after signing the reservation contract?
Yes, within ten calendar days of receiving it, by registered letter, with no penalty. After that the deposit is returned only in the cases the law lists, such as a loan refusal or a price more than 5 per cent above the revised provisional price.
Is late delivery compensated?
Only if the deed contains a penalty clause, and only where the delay is not covered by one of the legitimate causes the deed lists. Beyond that, damages can be claimed in court for proven loss, and in serious cases the sale can be unwound.
