In most countries you can leave your house to whoever you like. In France you cannot.
French law reserves a fixed share of your estate for your children, and no will changes that. It has been that way since Napoleon, it applies to the French house of someone who has never lived in France, and it is the single most common unpleasant surprise for foreign owners — usually discovered by the family, at the worst possible moment.
It is also entirely manageable, provided you deal with it when you buy rather than leaving it. Here is how it works.
To be clear at the outset: this is general information, not legal advice. Succession is one of the areas where a notaire earns their fee, and anything below that touches your own circumstances is a conversation to have with one.
The réserve héréditaire
French law divides your estate into two parts.
The réserve héréditaire is the protected share. It belongs to your children — including adopted children, and the descendants of a child who has died before you — and you cannot take it away from them by will.
The quotité disponible is what is left, and that part you may genuinely leave to anyone.
The split depends on how many children you have.
With one child, the reserve is one half and you may dispose of the other half freely. With two children, the reserve is two thirds, leaving one third. With three or more children, the reserve is three quarters and the free portion is a single quarter, shared however you wish.
Notice what this means. If you have two children and you write a will leaving everything to your second husband or wife, the will does not hold. The children are entitled to two thirds of the estate between them, and they can require it.
Where that leaves your spouse
This is the part that genuinely shocks people, so it is worth stating plainly: where there are children, your spouse is not a protected heir in French law. The children are. Your spouse's position depends on what you have arranged.
With no will and no marriage contract, and where all the children are children of both of you, the surviving spouse chooses between two things. Either the usufruct of the whole estate, with the children taking the bare ownership; or one quarter of the estate outright, with the children taking three quarters. The choice must be made in writing within three months, and if nothing is said, the usufruct applies by default.
Where any of the children are from an earlier relationship, that choice disappears. The spouse takes one quarter in full ownership and the children take three quarters. That is the position, and in a blended family it is the one that causes the trouble.
Where there are no children at all, the spouse's position is much stronger and they become the protected heir in their own right, though the share depends on whether your parents are still living.
What usufruct actually means
Usufruct — usufruit — is a French legal idea that has no clean equivalent elsewhere, and misunderstanding it causes a lot of needless worry.
The ownership of the house is split in two. The usufruitier has the right to live in it, or to let it and keep the rent, for the rest of their life. The nus-propriétaires own the bricks but cannot occupy or sell without the usufructuary's agreement. When the usufructuary dies, the two halves rejoin automatically and the bare owners become full owners, with no further tax to pay.
In practice this is a reasonable outcome for a surviving spouse. They cannot be put out of the house and they keep any income from it. What they cannot do is sell it and move on without the children's consent, which matters if they are young enough to want a different life afterwards.
Can you choose your own country's law?
Usually yes, and this is the most useful thing in this article.
A European regulation that has applied since August 2015 lets you elect, in your will, that your whole succession should be governed by the law of a country whose nationality you hold, rather than by the law of where you were habitually resident. The election has to be express, and the sensible place for it is a French will drawn up by a notaire alongside, or consistent with, any will you hold elsewhere.
Note two things. It applies to any nationality, not only European ones — what matters is that you hold the nationality of the country whose law you are choosing. And it covers the whole estate, not only the French part, so it needs thinking through rather than ticking.
For someone from a country with testamentary freedom, this is the mechanism that lets you leave your French house to your spouse outright.
The catch nobody mentions
In August 2021 France added a provision to article 913 of the Code civil, and most of the English-language advice online has not caught up with it.
Where someone has chosen a foreign law under that regulation, and that law contains no equivalent protection for children, each child may make a compensatory deduction from the assets situated in France — enough to restore them to the share French law would have given them.
It applies where, at the date of death, either the deceased or at least one of the children was a national of an EU member state, or habitually resident in one. It bites only on French assets.
So the practical position is this. If you live in France, or one of your children does, or any of you holds an EU nationality, choosing your own national law will not reliably defeat the reserve on your French house. If none of that applies — you are, say, resident outside the EU with children who are too — the election is likely to work as intended. Which of those you are in is exactly the question to put to a notaire.
The tax is a completely separate question
People conflate the two and they should not. Who inherits is one question. What they pay is another, and the answer depends entirely on how closely related they are to you.
Your spouse or PACS partner pays nothing. Inheritance between spouses and civil partners has been wholly exempt since 2007, whatever the sum.
Each child has an allowance of €100,000 against what they inherit from each parent, after which a progressive scale runs from 5 per cent up to 45 per cent on very large estates. For an ordinary house in Brittany or Normandy divided between two children, the tax is frequently nil.
Brothers and sisters get €15,932, then pay 35 per cent and 45 per cent.
Nephews and nieces get €7,967 and pay 55 per cent.
Anyone unrelated gets €1,594 and pays 60 per cent.
That last figure deserves a moment, because of who falls into it. A stepchild you did not adopt is unrelated in French tax law. So is a partner you live with but have neither married nor entered a PACS with. Leaving your French house to either of them means they receive it and hand the French state sixty per cent of its value — frequently meaning they must sell it.
And here is the trap in the PACS: a PACS partner pays no inheritance tax at all, but does not inherit automatically. Without a will naming them, they get nothing. The exemption is worthless unless the will exists.
What people actually do about it
Several ordinary arrangements change the outcome, and all of them are set up through a notaire.
A donation entre époux, sometimes called a donation au dernier vivant, widens what your spouse may take and lets them choose between a larger set of options on your death. It is inexpensive and it is the standard first step for a married couple.
Changing your matrimonial regime to a French community regime, with a clause giving the whole community to the survivor, can pass everything to the spouse on the first death. It is a bigger step and the children's reserve re-emerges on the second death, but for some couples it is exactly right.
A tontine clause, inserted in the purchase deed when you buy, means the survivor is deemed to have owned the property alone from the start. It is powerful and it is close to irreversible, which is both its strength and its danger.
Buying through an SCI, a family property company, converts the house into shares, which are moveable property and follow different rules. It is useful in the right circumstances and overkill in most.
Giving in your lifetime is often the simplest answer of all. Each parent may give each child €100,000 free of tax, and the allowance renews every fifteen years. A couple with two children can pass €400,000 tax-free, twice, over thirty years. Giving the bare ownership and keeping the usufruct lets you carry on living in the house while reducing the eventual bill.
Why the moment to deal with it is when you buy
Every one of those arrangements is made at a notaire's office, and you are already sitting in one when you buy a house in France. The tontine clause in particular can only go into the deed at the point of purchase — it cannot be added afterwards.
It costs very little to raise at that stage and a great deal to fix later. Tell the notaire who you are, who is in your family, where everyone lives and what you want to happen, and let them tell you what applies. They are a public officer with a duty to advise both sides, and this is precisely the thing they are for.
It makes no difference whether the house is new or old — succession law treats them identically. What a new build does give you is a clean, straightforward purchase with a notaire at the table and no complications of title, which is the easiest possible setting in which to get this right.
We build across Brittany, Normandy and the Vendée, every house on a fixed inclusive price with the ten-year guarantee behind it, and the notaire's fees are inside the figure we quote. We are not lawyers and we do not give legal advice, but we will make sure the question gets asked at the right moment rather than twenty years too late. Book a free half-hour, or reach us on WhatsApp or by email for a same-day reply. You can also see what each of our plots comes to, all in, with the build cost calculator.