Who pays, and on exactly what base

Farid sells for 240 000 € the flat he bought for 180 000 € twelve years ago. His apparent gain is 60 000 €. His taxable gain is only 19 500 €: two standard allowances lawfully inflate his acquisition base. Tax and social levies come to 5 116 €, against 21 720 € had he been taxed on the raw difference.

A main residence is exempt, everything else is not

Selling the property that is your main residence on the day of sale escapes gains tax entirely. It is the broadest exemption available, and the reason many owners assume property taxation in France is painless.

Every other property is taxable: a second home, a let flat, land, shares in a property company. Sellers then meet a tax computed under rules that share nothing with those governing ordinary income.

• Main residence on the day of sale: full exemption, with no holding requirement.
• First sale of another dwelling, conditional on reinvesting in a main residence.
• Property held for more than thirty years: exemption acquired through duration alone.
• Modest sale price or modest retired seller: specific, tightly framed exemptions.
• Compulsory purchase or sale to a social housing body: separate regimes.

Check your position before signing the preliminary contract. An exemption has to be evidenced, and some require reinvestment or a non-ownership condition that is too late to arrange once the deed is signed.

The main-residence exemption also assumes a sale within a reasonable period after moving out, where the property was left before completion. A dwelling standing empty for several years loses the benefit, even if it was never let.

Where an exemption is claimed, the notary records the ground for it in the deed. That entry is what protects the seller if the position is questioned years later, so the wording deserves reading before signature rather than after.

The acquisition base can be lawfully increased

A gain does not compare the sale price with the price paid, but with an increased acquisition base. Two standard allowances raise it without producing a single invoice, cutting the taxable base by the same amount.

The standard allowances are optional: documented actual costs and works may be used instead. The arbitrage is arithmetic, and the standard route wins as soon as real spending stays modest.

The choice is not piecemeal: either the standard allowance or actual costs, for all works together. Mixing the two is refused, and adding a standard allowance to a few selected invoices amounts to an abusive increase of the base.

One caution: works already deducted from property income cannot be reused here. A landlord who deducted invoices during the letting does not find them again at sale, leaving the standard allowance as the only option.

Gather these documents before listing rather than at signature. Tracing an eight-year-old contractor invoice takes weeks, while the tax computation itself happens in the few days between the preliminary contract and the deed.

What else reduces the base

Selling costs borne by the seller — notably the mandatory surveys and the agency commission where it falls on them — are deducted from the sale price used in the calculation.

That deduction needs invoices. It is regularly forgotten although it runs into thousands of euros on an ordinary sale: surveys alone routinely exceed 500 €, and commission several points of the price.

Taken together, the two allowances and the selling costs frequently halve a taxable gain. None of them requires negotiation or advice: they only require knowing they exist before the notary draws up the computation.