If you are building a new home in France, one set of four letters matters more than any other: CCMI. It stands for Contrat de Construction de Maison Individuelle, and it is the most heavily regulated building contract in Europe.
For a British or Irish buyer used to the way construction contracts work at home, it takes a moment to believe. The price on the contract is the price you pay. The date on the contract is the date you get your keys. If the builder fails, an insurer finishes the house. None of that is goodwill; all of it is written into French law.
What a CCMI actually is
A CCMI is a contract between you and a single builder who takes responsibility for the whole house. You are not managing a series of trades and hoping the numbers add up at the end. You sign once, with one company, for one price.
The contract can only be signed once the builder has produced a set of specific documents: the plans, a detailed technical specification of everything included, the price, the payment schedule, the construction period in days, and proof of the builder's guarantees. If any of those are missing, the contract is not a CCMI and you do not have the protection.
The price is genuinely fixed
This is the part that surprises people most. Under a CCMI, the agreed price cannot be revised upwards during the build. If material costs rise, if a subcontractor walks away, if the builder has underestimated the groundworks, that is the builder's problem, not yours.
There are only two things that can change the figure. The first is a variation you request yourself, in writing, and agree in advance. The second is a price revision index, which can only apply between signature and the start of works, and only if the contract says so and caps it.
What this means in practice is that the budget you set at the beginning is the budget you finish on. For anyone buying from abroad, working in a second currency and unable to drop in on site every week, that certainty is worth a great deal.
The guarantees behind the price
A fixed price is only as good as the company standing behind it. French law does not leave that to chance, and a compliant CCMI comes with several layers of protection.
- Garantie de livraison à prix et délais convenus. A bank or insurer guarantees that your house will be delivered at the agreed price and within the agreed time. If your builder goes out of business mid-build, the guarantor appoints another company to finish it and absorbs the extra cost.
- Garantie de parfait achèvement. For a year after handover, the builder must return and put right anything you have listed as defective.
- Garantie biennale. For two years, the equipment that can be removed without damaging the structure, such as heating and shutters, is covered.
- Garantie décennale. For ten years, anything affecting the structure or making the house unfit to live in is covered.
- Dommages-Ouvrage. This is your own insurance policy, taken out before works begin. If a ten-year defect appears, it pays for the repair straight away and argues about who was responsible afterwards. Without it, you can wait years for a court to apportion blame.
The payment schedule is set by law
You do not hand over large sums up front. Payments are released in stages tied to real progress on site, and the maximum percentage at each stage is fixed by decree rather than by the builder.
The pattern runs from a small deposit at signature, through the foundations, the walls, the roof being made watertight, the partitions and joinery, and finally completion, with a small percentage held back until handover. You pay for work that exists. If the site stalls, the money stops.
Where the notaire fits in
The land and the house are two separate transactions, and they are taxed differently. Notaire fees apply to the land purchase, at the rate for existing property. The house itself, built under a CCMI, carries no notaire fees, because you are not buying an existing building, you are commissioning one.
This is a genuine saving compared with buying a finished older property of the same value, and it is one of the reasons new build has become so much more attractive over the last few years.
What a CCMI does not cover
It is worth being clear about the edges. A CCMI covers the house as described in the technical specification. It does not automatically include the land, the connection of services to the plot boundary, landscaping, fencing, a terrace, or a garage unless those items appear in the specification.
That is why reading the specification line by line matters more than reading the headline price. Two quotes that look similar can differ by tens of thousands of euros once you compare what is actually written into each one. A good adviser will put the two specifications side by side before you sign anything.
Why new build is now the sharper option
Building under RE2020, the current French energy standard, produces a house that behaves completely differently from the stone longère most people first imagine when they think of rural France. A reversible heat pump, a thermodynamic hot water cylinder and a properly insulated envelope give you a DPE A rating and running costs that bear no relation to a period property.
Add a fixed price, a guaranteed delivery date, ten years of structural cover and no notaire fees on the build, and the case for building rather than restoring has rarely been stronger, particularly in Morbihan, the Côtes-d'Armor, the Vendée and the Manche where good plots are still available within reach of the coast.
Before you sign
Three things are worth doing every time. Check that the builder holds a valid garantie de livraison for your specific project, not simply a general policy. Read the technical specification in full and question anything vague. And make sure your Dommages-Ouvrage policy is in place before the first spade goes into the ground, because it cannot be taken out afterwards.
Get those three right and the French system will do more to protect you than almost any equivalent arrangement elsewhere in Europe.