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France’s tax authority just put in writing what homeowners have complained about for decades: many property tax bills are still built on rental values frozen in the 1970s.
The admission, buried in a new statistical note from the country’s public finance directorate (DGFiP, roughly France’s IRS and Treasury rolled into one), is fueling fresh calls for homeowners to challenge their assessments, especially as property taxes keep climbing and the system hits households harder than businesses.
In 2025, France expects to collect about €55.1 billion (roughly $60 billion) in property taxes on buildings, up 2.8% from the year before, according to the DGFiP note. Individual homeowners, about 31 million of them, will pay €34.7 billion (about $38 billion), or 63% of the total, averaging €1,117 per household (around $1,220).
A property tax system stuck in the 1970s
The DGFiP note states it plainly: the “rental value” used to calculate taxes on housing is based on locally observed rents from the 1970s.
That matters because France’s property tax (taxe foncière) is calculated from a government-set “cadastral rental value”, a theoretical rent the property could generate, rather than today’s market conditions. While commercial properties saw a major update in 2017 using real-world rents, residential properties largely did not.
Households are paying faster increases than businesses
The DGFiP also quantifies the gap. Between 2018 and 2026, the cumulative revaluation for housing and unrevised industrial properties reaches +23.7%, compared with +9.6% for revised commercial properties.
In other words, homeowners have been hit with increases about two-and-a-half times faster than businesses, on top of a residential tax base that critics say was never properly modernized. The result, analysts argue, is a patchwork of inequities across regions and between taxpayers.
Yes, homeowners can challenge assessments, good luck doing it alone
French law allows property owners to dispute their cadastral rental value. But in practice, the process is notoriously technical. Assessment sheets can be hard to interpret, comparable data can be difficult to access, and most taxpayers don’t have tools to spot errors, so challenges are rare.
A legal-tech platform claims many bills contain costly errors
Orka.tax, a French legal-tech platform focused on property tax reviews, says its internal audits show significant overbilling. Across cases where its team conducted a full review, checking cadastral assessment forms line by line, verifying declared surface areas, and reviewing coefficients applied, the average overpayment it found was €260 per household per year (about $285).
When an error is confirmed, homeowners may be able to seek refunds for non-expired years and get their rental value updated going forward, potentially lowering future tax bills.
What Orka.tax is selling
Orka.tax pitches itself as an automated, consumer-friendly way to check whether a property’s cadastral rental value makes sense and to flag common problems such as the wrong property category, mismeasured area, or an inappropriate coefficient.
The platform was founded by Manon Bellin, a lawyer specializing in local taxation, and Gary Cahn. It charges €78 per property (about $85) for a full verification and complaint package, while offering a free simulation. The company says customers recover an average of €435 per year (about $475).
Why this matters now
With France’s own tax administration acknowledging that the residential calculation is rooted in decades-old rent data, the debate is shifting from whether the system is outdated to how long homeowners will keep paying for it, and whether a wave of challenges could force broader reform.
