France Tenant Rights: A Guide to Renting Under the 1989 Law

French residential tenancy law is unusually concentrated. Instead of a housing code assembled from many sources, the core of it sits in one statute, loi n° 89-462 du 6 juillet 1989, and almost every question a tenant asks, about notice, deposits, inventories, rent revision or the landlord's grounds for ending a lease, is answered by an article of that single law. A handful of related rules live elsewhere, notably eviction procedure in the Code des procédures civiles d'exécution and the good repair presumption in the Code civil, but the 1989 law is the spine. Everything on this page is governed by it unless we say otherwise.

Two other structural facts shape every answer. The first is the furnished and unfurnished split, which is not a detail but a fork that runs through the whole statute: furnished main residences are handled by their own articles, and they carry different lease terms, different notice periods and a different deposit ceiling. The second is the venue. Residential tenancy disputes in France go to the juge des contentieux de la protection at the tribunal judiciaire, a specialist judge for protective litigation, and many of them pass first through a commission départementale de conciliation, which is free and often faster than a hearing. Knowing which of the two categories your lease falls into, and knowing where a dispute would actually be heard, resolves more confusion than any single rule does.

Information last verified on 21 July 2026. This page presents general legal information, not legal advice.

How This Section Is Organised

The guides below are grouped the way a tenant actually meets the rules, rather than by article number. Starting a tenancy is dominated by two documents, the inventory and the deposit receipt, that will still matter years later. The middle of a tenancy is mostly about money, meaning what the rent can do and what limits sit on it. The end of a tenancy is about process, meaning who has to give what notice, in what form, and what a landlord must go through before anyone can be made to leave.

That grouping matters because the rules are chained together. The deposit dispute you have on the way out is decided by the inventory you signed on the way in. The notice period you can use depends on where the property is and what has happened in your working life. Reading a rule in isolation is how most people get the wrong answer, so each guide below flags the neighbouring rule it depends on.

If you are looking more broadly at French law rather than tenancy specifically, the France legal information hub collects the other sections of the site.

Starting a Tenancy: The Inventory and the Deposit

A French tenancy legally begins with the état des lieux, the move-in inventory. It is compulsory, it has to be drawn up contradictoirement with both sides present, and each party keeps a copy. It is not a formality: the exit report is compared line by line against the entry report, and that comparison is what determines whether anything is withheld from the deposit at the end. A tenant who signs a vague or hurried entry report has already lost most of the argument they will have on the way out.

There is also a trap here that many tenants get backwards. If no état des lieux was made at all, article 1731 of the Code civil presumes the tenant received the dwelling in good repair and must return it in good repair, which is the landlord's advantage rather than the tenant's. There is a real exception where one party obstructed the report being made, but engaging it depends on doing something specific and documented. Our guide to the état des lieux and the move-in inventory explains the presumption, the exception, the ten day window to ask for the report to be amended, and the rules on who pays when an agency carries out the inspection.

The second document is the dépôt de garantie. The ceiling depends entirely on whether the letting is furnished or unfurnished, and so do the consequences of a late return. The law also fixes a statutory penalty on a landlord who returns the deposit late, calculated per monthly period of delay, with a specific rule about part months that surprises people. Our guide to the dépôt de garantie covers the ceilings, the return deadlines, when the clock actually starts, the late return penalty and the limitation period on bringing a claim.

Read these two together rather than separately. The deposit rules only make sense once you understand that the inventory is the evidence, and the inventory only feels worth arguing about once you understand what the deposit rules do with it.

During the Tenancy: What the Rent Can Do

The default position on rent inside a running lease is more restrictive than most tenants expect. A landlord can only increase the rent during the lease if the lease itself contains a revision clause, and where there is no clause there is no annual increase, no matter how long the tenancy has been running. Where there is a clause, the increase is not discretionary either: it follows a formula fixed by law and built on the INSEE reference index for rents, and there are deadlines on claiming it.

Our guide to rent increases and the IRL formula sets out the formula, works through it with real published index figures, explains the deadline for claiming a revision, and disposes of a cap that a great many sites still present as current law when it has in fact expired.

A separate and much narrower system, encadrement des loyers, caps the level of the rent itself rather than its annual movement. This is where the most persistent misunderstanding in French tenancy law lives. Being in a zone tendue is a wide status shared by thousands of communes, and by itself it does not give you a capped rent. Encadrement des loyers is an opt in experiment running in a small number of participating territories, where a préfet sets reference rents and a hard ceiling above them. Our guide to encadrement des loyers and where rent caps actually apply lists the territories, explains the reference rent, the ceiling and the complément de loyer, and gives the date the experiment is currently due to end unless Parliament extends it.

The third money rule is the energy one, and it now behaves like tenancy law rather than like a building regulation. The diagnostic de performance énergétique rating attached to a dwelling determines both whether the rent can move at all and, on a schedule of fixed dates, whether the property can lawfully be let. Our guide to the energy rating rules and the passoire thermique letting ban sets out those dates and, crucially, which leases each date actually catches, because the ban applies to new leases and renewals rather than to a tenancy already under way.

Ending the Tenancy: Notice, Eviction and the Winter Truce

Ending a tenancy is not symmetrical in France. A tenant may give notice at any time, provided the notice is in the right form and runs for the right period. A landlord may only bring an unfurnished or furnished main residence lease to an end at its term and on limited grounds, with a much longer notice period, which is why the tenant side of this is mostly about deadlines and the landlord side is mostly about grounds.

The tenant's préavis is where most practical questions arise. The default period depends on whether the lease is furnished or unfurnished, and it can be shortened in a list of defined situations. The reduction is never automatic: the ground has to be stated and justified in the notice letter itself, and a notice that omits it falls back to the full default period. That single formality is the most common way tenants lose a reduction they were actually entitled to. Our guide to the tenant notice period and the one month exception lists the grounds, explains what proof goes in the letter, sets out the accepted delivery methods and identifies when the clock starts.

Where a tenancy ends badly, the process is judicial from end to end. A landlord cannot change the locks, remove a tenant's belongings or cut off supplies to force a departure. The sequence runs through formal service by a commissaire de justice, a délai, a hearing before the juge des contentieux de la protection, a judgment, and only then a formal order to leave the premises followed, if necessary, by the intervention of the préfecture. Our guide to the eviction procedure and its stages walks through that sequence in order, including a transitional rule that means two different délais are currently in circulation depending on when the lease was concluded or renewed.

Sitting across the whole of that is the trêve hivernale, the winter suspension of evictions. It is widely misunderstood as a general pause on tenancy problems, and it is not. It suspends the execution of an eviction during defined winter months; it does not cancel a judgment, does not erase arrears, and does not stop a case being started or continued in the meantime. There are also defined situations in which it does not apply at all. Our guide to the trêve hivernale and what it does not stop gives the dates, the exceptions and the related protection against energy disconnection.

Where a Tenancy Dispute Actually Goes

Two venues matter. The commission départementale de conciliation is a free, non judicial body that hears many categories of residential tenancy dispute and can produce an agreed outcome without a hearing. For some categories of dispute it is a normal first step rather than an optional one, and it is referred to on several of the guides above.

The juge des contentieux de la protection, sitting within the tribunal judiciaire, is the court for residential tenancy litigation, including eviction. It is a specialist protective jurisdiction, which is part of why residential eviction cannot be handled as an ordinary debt claim. For free, independent and non commercial advice on an individual situation, the ADIL network coordinated by ANIL exists specifically for housing questions and is the standard referral point in France.

Before You Rely on Any Figure

French tenancy law changes frequently, and several of its most quoted numbers are index values or scheme dates that move. Some of them, notably an expired rent cap and the end date of the rent control experiment, are widely reproduced in outdated form across the French web. Each guide in this section states what was verified and when, and points to the official source so that a figure can be re checked directly rather than taken on trust.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is French tenancy law the same for furnished and unfurnished homes?

No, and the difference is one of the most common sources of confusion. Loi n 89-462 du 6 juillet 1989 governs both, but furnished main residences are dealt with by their own set of articles in the same statute, and those articles change several of the headline numbers. The notice a tenant must give and the maximum deposit are both different, which is why our notice period guide and deposit guide give the two figures side by side. Before applying any rule you read, check which of the two categories your lease falls into.

Does living in a zone tendue mean my rent is capped?

No. Zone tendue and encadrement des loyers are two different things and mixing them up is the single most common error on this subject. Zone tendue is a wide status covering thousands of communes, and its main effect for a tenant is to shorten the notice period. Encadrement des loyers, the system of reference rents with a hard ceiling, applies only in a small number of participating territories. Our rent control page sets out which territories those are and the date the experiment is currently due to end.

My landlord never did an état des lieux. Does that help me?

Usually the opposite. Under article 1731 of the Code civil, where there is no état des lieux the tenant is presumed to have received the dwelling in good repair and must hand it back in that condition, which is a rule that works for the landlord. There is an important exception where one party obstructed the report, and the practical step that engages it is a formal mise en demeure. The move-in inventory page explains how that exception is applied and who then has to prove what.

Can a landlord evict a tenant without going to court in France?

No. A residential eviction runs through a defined sequence of formal steps that ends with a judgment from the juge des contentieux de la protection and, if the occupant still does not leave, the involvement of the préfecture. A landlord cannot change the locks, remove belongings or cut off services to force a departure. The eviction guide walks through the order of those steps, and the trêve hivernale page covers the months in which execution is suspended.

What happens if my home has a poor energy rating?

The diagnostic de performance énergétique now has direct legal consequences for letting, not just informational ones. The worst ratings are being phased out of the rental market on a schedule of fixed dates, and a home in the lowest bands is also subject to a rent freeze rather than the ordinary annual revision. The energy rating rules page sets out the dates and, importantly, which leases each date actually catches, since the ban bites on new leases and renewals rather than on a tenancy already running.