Tenant Notice Period in France: Préavis Rules and the One-Month Exception

You have decided to leave your French rental and you want to know one thing: how many months of rent you are still on the hook for. The honest answer is that it depends less on your circumstances than on what you write in the letter. French law gives a reduced one-month notice to a long list of tenants, and then quietly takes it away from anyone who does not claim it correctly on the day the congé goes out.

That is the trap this page is built around. A tenant who is genuinely entitled to a one-month préavis, and who sends a perfectly polite letter that simply says "I am leaving", gets three months. The reduced period is not a status you have. It is a claim you make, in writing, with evidence attached, at the moment you give notice.

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

The default: three months unfurnished, one month furnished

Article 15 of loi n 89-462 du 6 juillet 1989 sets the ordinary tenant notice at three months for an unfurnished principal residence. You can give notice at any time, without giving a reason, and without waiting for the lease anniversary. There is no penalty for leaving early in the sense of a break fee. The cost is simply the rent and charges due across the notice period.

Furnished lettings run on a different article. Article 25-8 lets a furnished tenant end the lease at any time on one month's notice, with no reason required and no supporting document. That one-month period applies even where the lease itself is only nine months long, which is the standard student format.

The landlord's position is the mirror image and much more restricted. A landlord's congé on an unfurnished lease requires six months' notice, delivered before the lease term expires, and it must rest on one of three grounds: repossession for the landlord or a close relative, sale, or a legitimate and serious reason such as the tenant's own breach. On a furnished lease the landlord's notice is three months, on the same three grounds.

The one-month notice is a claim, not a status

This is the part that costs French tenants real money. Article 15 lists the situations in which the tenant's notice falls to one month, then adds a sentence that governs everything: the tenant must state the ground relied on and justify it at the moment the congé letter is sent, and failing that, the applicable notice period is three months.

Two things follow. First, the ground has to appear in the congé itself, not in a later email once the landlord objects. Second, the proof has to travel with it. A medical certificate, a mutation letter, an attestation from France Travail, a social housing allocation decision: whichever document evidences your ground goes in the envelope with the letter.

The zone tendue ground has its own drafting habit. Because there is nothing personal to prove, the official guidance is that the letter should give the address of the let dwelling and state expressly that you are relying on the reduced one-month notice under article 15 of loi n 89-462 and the annexe to décret n 2013-392. Simply living in Lyon is not a claim. Saying so in the letter is.

The grounds that reduce notice to one month

Article 15 in its current form gives the reduced period to a tenant whose dwelling is in one of the zones referred to in article 17 I, commonly called zones tendues, and to a tenant who obtains a first job, is transferred, loses a job, or obtains a new job following a job loss.

It also covers a tenant whose state of health, established by a medical certificate, justifies a change of address; a tenant in receipt of the revenu de solidarité active or the allocation aux adultes handicapés; a tenant who has been allocated social housing; and a tenant who is the victim of domestic violence covered by an ordonnance de protection or a relevant criminal conviction.

Several near misses are worth naming, because they catch people out. Reaching the end of unemployment benefit entitlement is not job loss and attracts three months. A new job that is not consecutive to a job loss within the same lease attracts three months. A transfer for a self-employed person or a member of a profession libérale is not a mutation and attracts three months. And medically documented fatigue, physical or psychological, is not on its own the health ground.

The over-60 condition on the health ground was abolished

If you have read elsewhere that the health ground only helps tenants over sixty, you have read the pre-2014 law. The original 1989 text did tie the medical ground to tenants aged over sixty. Loi ALUR removed that age condition in 2014, and the current article 15 asks only for a state of health, established by a certificate, that justifies a change of residence.

The outdated version survives on a surprising number of French property sites and in a lot of agency boilerplate. It is worth pointing to the current text if an agency pushes back, because the wording of the article is unambiguous and carries no threshold of age.

Zone tendue does not mean rent control

Zone tendue is a tax concept that housing law borrowed. The list of communes sits in the annexe to décret n 2013-392 du 10 mai 2013, which defines the scope of the annual tax on vacant dwellings. Article 15 points at the first table of that annexe only, the communes in a continuous urban area of more than 50,000 inhabitants. The annexe carries a second table of tourist communes that are in scope for the tax but do not get the reduced notice period, so being named somewhere in the decret is not enough. The annexe has been amended repeatedly, most recently by décret n 2025-1267 du 22 décembre 2025, in force from 24 December 2025, which refreshed the list to reflect commune mergers and creations among other changes. Several thousand communes are on it.

Being on that list shortens your notice. It does not mean your commune caps rents. Rent capping through a loyer de référence set by préfectoral order is a separate, opt-in scheme running in a limited number of territories, and most zone tendue communes are not in it. Treating the two as the same thing is the single most common error in French tenant guidance.

Because the annexe changes, do not rely on a list you found in an article. The government publishes an official lookup at the zone tendue simulator on service-public.gouv.fr, and that is the check worth making before you draft the letter.

One situation escapes the notice rules entirely. Where the dwelling is subject to a safety order or is insalubrious, service-public.gouv.fr states the tenant may leave without notice, provided they first notified the landlord of the defects and took steps to compel the works.

Delivery and when the clock starts

Article 15 accepts three delivery routes: a lettre recommandée avec avis de réception, service by a commissaire de justice, and handing the letter over in person against a signed receipt or émargement. A lettre recommandée électronique is also accepted, but where the recipient is a private individual it is only valid if they agreed to that channel. A plain email is not valid notice, and it does not become valid because the landlord replies to it.

The start date follows the method. With a recorded letter, notice runs from the day the landlord actually takes delivery, so a letter left uncollected and returned to you has given no notice at all, and a late delivery pushes the end date back by the same amount. With service by a commissaire de justice it runs from the day of signification, and with hand delivery from the day of the signed receipt.

The period then runs to the corresponding date in the later month. A congé received on 5 September ends a one-month notice at midnight on 5 October, not at the end of October, and a three-month notice on 5 December. Where the day does not exist in the later month, the notice ends on that month's last day. Weekends and public holidays are counted and do not extend anything.

What you owe during the notice

Rent and charges run for the whole notice period. The exception is where the landlord signs a new lease and the new tenant physically occupies before your notice expires, at which point your liability stops. If the notice ends part way through a month, that final month is charged in proportion to the number of days you had the dwelling.

Two related points cause arguments. You cannot unilaterally set your deposit off against the final months of rent; the deposit is returned after the exit inspection, on its own timetable. And a landlord can pursue unpaid rent or charges for three years after they fell due, so leaving the country does not end the exposure.

Before you hand back the keys, it is worth re-reading the inspection report you signed on the way in, because that document, not the notice letter, decides what comes out of your deposit. Our guide to the move-in inventory in France covers what the entry report has to contain and what happens when there is not one.

If the landlord disputes the reduced notice

Disputes about préavis are almost always disputes about the letter rather than about the underlying facts. If the landlord says the ground was not stated or not evidenced, the practical consequence is a claim for the two extra months of rent.

The free route is the commission départementale de conciliation for the département where the dwelling is, which handles landlord and tenant disputes without a lawyer. A conciliateur de justice is also free. If conciliation fails, the competent court is the juge des contentieux de la protection at the tribunal covering the dwelling. The ADIL network runs free, neutral housing law advice clinics in every département and is a sensible first call before any of that.

For the wider picture of how French housing, privacy and consumer rules fit together, see our France legal guides.