Everyone buying in France is told to allow seven or eight per cent for the notaire. Almost nobody is told what that number is made of, which is a pity, because once you see the breakdown two things become obvious: most of it is not the notaire's money at all, and how much you pay depends enormously on what you are buying.
On a €200,000 purchase the difference between the worst case and the best is comfortably more than ten thousand euros. That is worth twenty minutes of anybody's attention.
It is mostly tax
The phrase frais de notaire is misleading, and French buyers complain about it as much as foreign ones. The notaire's own fee is the smallest part.
The bulk is transfer duty — tax collected by the notaire and handed to the department, the commune and the state. On an older property this is now around 6.3 per cent of the price on its own.
The notaire's actual fee is a regulated national scale, identical whoever you use, and it tapers as the price rises. Above €60,000 the top band works out at under one per cent of the purchase price.
Then disbursements: the searches, the planning certificates, the land registry entries, the cadastral extracts. A few hundred euros, plus a land registration contribution of about a tenth of a per cent.
Put together on an older house, the total commonly lands between seven and eight and a half per cent, and the percentage is higher on cheap properties because the fixed costs do not shrink.
What a notaire actually does for that, and why the role has no equivalent in most countries, is in what a notaire does.
The increase most people have not heard about
Here is a change that has not reached most of the English-language guides.
The 2025 finance law allowed departments to raise their share of the transfer duty by half a percentage point, from 4.5 to 5 per cent, for a three-year window running from April 2025 to March 2028. Almost every department voted it through.
So if you are working from a guide written before 2025, your seven per cent estimate is now light. Budget towards the top of the range rather than the bottom.
There is relief for first-time buyers, and it is worth knowing even if you assume it cannot apply to you. A buyer who has not owned a main residence in the previous two years, and who is buying somewhere to live in as their main home, is exempt from that half-point increase on the first €250,000. Some departments have added further local reductions on top.
That is narrower than it sounds — it is about main residences, not holiday homes — but people moving to France permanently sometimes qualify and never ask.
The discount nobody requests
A small thing that costs nothing to try.
On purchases above €150,000, a notaire is permitted to discount their own regulated fee by up to 20 per cent. It is entirely at their discretion, most buyers have no idea it exists, and it applies only to the notaire's portion rather than the tax — so on a €250,000 purchase it is a few hundred euros rather than a fortune.
Still. Ask politely at the outset, not at signature.
Now the part that matters if you are building
This is where the numbers separate, and it is the single most under-explained point in French property.
A construction contract does not go through a notaire at all. A CCMI — the fixed-price building contract — is a private contract between you and the builder. There is no notarial deed, so there are no notaire fees on it. None.
What goes through the notaire is the land. That is the only part of a build that attracts these costs.
And the rate on the land depends on who is selling it. A plot sold by a private individual carries the full transfer duty, so roughly seven to eight per cent of the land price. A plot sold by a professional developer is in the VAT regime instead, where registration duty is sharply reduced and the total comes out nearer two to three per cent.
Either way, you are paying a percentage of the land only, not of the whole project.
What that means in money
Take two purchases at the same headline figure.
Buy an existing house for €200,000 and you will pay somewhere around €16,000 in fees on top, in a department at the new 5 per cent cap.
Build a house for the same €200,000 and the fees apply to the land element alone. The construction — which is the larger part of what you are spending — carries nothing at all. In practice the difference between the two routes on an identical budget is routinely ten thousand euros or more, and on some plots considerably more than that.
That is not a marketing claim, it is arithmetic, and it is one of the genuine structural advantages of building rather than buying in France. It rarely appears in the comparison people make in their heads, because they compare the house prices and assume the costs on top are the same percentage. They are not remotely the same.
Our listed prices are all-inclusive and the notaire estimate is shown on each one, so you can see the real total before you enquire. The build cost calculator gives you the same figure by region and size.
Four practical points
You cannot usually borrow them. French lenders generally advance against the property price and expect the purchase costs to come from your own funds. If you are buying at the limit of a mortgage, the fees are the thing that catches you out, so have them sitting in cash.
You pay them at completion, to the notaire, along with the balance of the price. Any excess over the actual cost is refunded afterwards, usually a few months later, and it is normally a modest sum.
One notaire can act for both sides, which is completely normal in France and does not cost more. If you prefer your own, you may appoint a second and the two share the same regulated fee between them — it does not double. There is no good reason not to have your own notaire if you want one.
Keep every invoice afterwards. The costs of improvement work can usually be set against the gain if you ever sell, which reduces the tax. That and the other taxes of ownership are in what a holiday home in France costs you in tax.
The short version
Allow eight per cent on an older property, not seven, because most departments raised their rate.
If you are building, the fees apply to the land alone and nothing to the construction, which on an equivalent budget usually saves five figures.
Ask about the first-time buyer relief if you are moving permanently, and ask about the discount on anything above €150,000.
And budget the fees in cash, separately from the price, because that is the part that trips people up at the last moment.
If you want to see the real all-in figure for a specific plot — price, notaire estimate and everything else in one number — book a free half-hour and we will go through it with you. You can also reach us on WhatsApp or by email for a same-day answer.