How to Rent Out a Furnished Apartment in Paris: Owner's Guide

Three things changed for Paris owners inside eighteen months. The tax ceiling for unclassified tourist lets dropped from €77,700 to €15,000 while the allowance fell from 50% to 30%, which ended short-term letting as a default strategy for most people. G-rated properties left the rental market entirely in January 2025. And the rent control framework that governs every furnished primary residence lease in the city now carries an expiry date of 24 November 2026, with a bill still moving through Parliament.

Long-term furnished letting absorbed most of that shift, and it remains a strong position to hold. Paris furnished rents reached €38.46 per square metre in the first quarter of 2026, and more than eight applicants compete for every available rental in the city. The demand is not the problem. The rules around it are stricter than most owners expect.

This guide covers the decisions in the order you actually face them: which lease to choose and what it costs you in rent control exposure, the eleven items that make a lease legally furnished, how the rent ceiling works and what the November deadline means, whether your DPE rating still allows you to let, what management really costs, and how to reach the executive, diplomatic and family tenants who rarely appear on public platforms. It is written for owners, including those living outside France.

Your lease type decides whether rent control applies to your property, and that single choice moves your annual income more than anything else in this guide. It also has to be made before anything else, because it determines the deposit you can take, the notice you can give, and the tenant profile you should be targeting.

France gives you three realistic options for a furnished Paris apartment. Each one serves a different tenant, and choosing the wrong one is difficult and expensive to unwind.

The standard furnished lease

The bail meublé is the default for a furnished apartment that will be someone's main home in Paris. It is governed by the loi du 6 juillet 1989, the framework that provides French tenants with protections, and it includes a fixed set of terms you cannot negotiate away.

The lease runs for one year and renews automatically unless notice is given. For a student tenant, you can use a nine-month version that ends without either party giving notice. You can ask for a deposit of two months' rent excluding charges, which is double what an unfurnished let allows.

Notice periods are asymmetric, and this is the part owners find frustrating. Your tenant can leave at any point with one month's notice. You can only give notice at the end of the term, with three months' warning, and only for one of three reasons: you are selling the property, you or a close family member will live in it, or the tenant has seriously breached the lease.

The trade-off is that this lease is subject to rent control. Your rent cannot exceed the ceiling for your zone.

When a civil code lease applies

The bail code civil is the exception that owners of premium Paris property should understand properly, because it sits entirely outside the 1989 law.

It applies when the apartment is not the tenant's main French residence. In practice that means corporate housing, diplomatic postings, and pied-à-terre arrangements. Rent is freely negotiated, the term is whatever both parties agree, and there is no statutory minimum. Crucially, rent control does not apply.

There is one condition that catches people out. If the tenant's actual occupancy does not match the non-primary-residence basis you declared, the contract can be reclassified under the 1989 law, which removes exactly the flexibility you chose it for. You cannot simply write "civil code lease" on a contract and rent to someone who lives there full time.

That makes the real constraint a practical one rather than a legal one. This lease only works if you can genuinely reach corporate, diplomatic and executive tenants, which is a question of access rather than paperwork. We come back to it later in this guide.

Where the mobility lease fits

The bail mobilité runs from one to ten months, cannot be renewed, and requires no deposit. It is reserved for tenants in defined mobility situations such as a training course, a professional assignment, or a temporary transfer.

Rent control does apply. It is a useful bridge when you have a gap between tenants or a property you plan to sell, but it is not a strategy for a well-located Paris apartment you want occupied consistently.

A furnished lease is only legally furnished if eleven specific items are present in the apartment. Miss one, and your tenant can ask a court to reclassify the lease as unfurnished, with effect backdated to the start of the tenancy.

This is the most avoidable problem in this entire guide, and also the one that causes the most damage when it goes wrong.

The eleven mandatory items

The list comes from décret n°2015-981 of 31 July 2015, and it has not changed since:

1. Bedding with a duvet or blanket
2. Window blackout in every bedroom
3. A hob
4. An oven or a microwave
5. A refrigerator with a freezer compartment
6. Crockery
7. Kitchen utensils
8. A table and seating
9. Storage shelving
10. Lighting
11. Cleaning equipment

Two details are worth flagging because they trip up owners who assume they have complied. A convertible sofa bed counts as bedding, but a plain sofa does not. And sheer curtains do not satisfy the blackout requirement, which needs shutters, blinds or genuinely opaque curtains.

The full text of the decree is available on Légifrance if you want to check the wording against your own inventory.

What reclassification would cost you

If a court reclassifies your lease as unfurnished, four things happen at once:

• Your one-year lease becomes a three-year lease
• Your deposit is capped at one month instead of two
• You lose LMNP status and with it the ability to depreciate the property
• All of this applies retroactively

The tax consequence is the expensive part. Losing depreciation on a backdated basis can reopen several years of declarations, and correcting it after the fact takes time and usually costs money.

Why the inventory matters more than the furniture

Owners tend to focus on purchasing the items. The harder part is proving they were present when the tenant moved in.

The inventory must be drawn up jointly with the tenant and annexed to both the lease and the entry état des lieux. It is the document that protects you, and a vague one is close to worthless if a dispute reaches a court.

Owners at a distance carry this risk disproportionately. Nobody checks that last year's tenant left the microwave behind, and a missing item discovered by an incoming tenant becomes a reclassification argument rather than a shopping trip. A thorough inventory at every entry and exit is the single cheapest protection available to a Paris landlord.

Paris rent control applies to every furnished primary residence lease in the city, and the arrêté currently in force expires on 24 November 2026. That makes rent setting a timing question this autumn, not only a pricing one.

The mechanism itself is straightforward once you see how the numbers are built.

Finding the ceiling for your apartment

Your maximum rent is the loyer de référence majoré, which is the median rent for comparable properties plus 20%. Four characteristics determine which median applies to you:

• Your geographic sector, since Paris is divided into 80 zones
• The number of main rooms
• The construction period of the building
• Whether the property is furnished or unfurnished

Furnished reference rents sit above unfurnished ones, generally by 10 to 15%. Across the city, ceilings currently range from roughly €18 to €52 per square metre. Both the median and the ceiling must be written into the lease itself at the date of signature.

The City of Paris publishes a simulator that returns the exact figure for a given address on its rent control page.

What happens on 24 November 2026

The rent control experiment was created by article 140 of the ELAN law of 2018 and extended by the 3DS law of 21 February 2022, which set its end date at 24 November 2026.

The current arrêté reflects that uncertainty directly. The City of Paris states that the arrêté of 12 June 2026 applies exceptionally, for now, from 1 July 2026 to 24 November 2026, while Parliament considers a text on continuing the scheme.

Where things stand as of July 2026: the Assemblée Nationale adopted a bill to make rent control permanent on 11 December 2025 by 105 votes to 56, against the government's advice. The government has since backed a narrower version, extending existing experiments by two years without adding new municipalities, and the amended text goes to the Sénat when Parliament returns.

The practical point for an owner is simple. A lease signed on 23 November and one signed on 25 November may not fall under the same regime. If you have a vacancy this autumn, the signature date is worth thinking about alongside the rent figure.

Using a rent supplement with caution

A complément de loyer lets you charge above the ceiling where the apartment has genuinely exceptional characteristics that comparable properties in the same category lack.

It is also the most contested part of the framework. Around 40% of Paris listings exceed the reference ceiling, and non-compliance is more pronounced in furnished lets than unfurnished ones. A tenant who disputes a supplement can go to the conciliation commission, and a poorly justified supplement is a refund liability rather than extra income.

If you use one, document the specific features that justify it before the lease is signed, not afterwards.

Since 1 January 2025, a G-rated property cannot enter a new rental agreement anywhere in France. Furnished status grants no exemption, and neither does a mobility lease.

This is the rule most likely to stop a letting before it starts, and the one owners most often assume does not apply to them.

Where your property sits on the timeline

The restrictions arrive in stages:

• G-rated: banned from new leases since 1 January 2025
• G-rated renewals: blocked in 2026, including for tenants already in place
• F-rated: banned from 2028
• E-rated: banned from 2034

Two further consequences apply while you hold an F or G property. You cannot raise the rent at all, including when a tenant changes. And a tenant can go to court to compel you to bring the property up to standard, with payment suspended in the meantime.

Why furnished status changes nothing here

Decency criteria are universal. A furnished let, a student let and a bail mobilité are all covered on the same terms as a standard unfurnished lease.

This is worth stating plainly because the assumption runs in the opposite direction. Owners who moved from short-term to long-term letting sometimes carry over the idea that furnished arrangements are treated more loosely. On energy performance, they are not.

The constraint in central Paris

If your apartment is in a protected zone, and much of the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th arrondissements are, the standard renovation advice may not be available to you.

Architectes des Bâtiments de France almost systematically prohibit external insulation in these areas, which rules out the most cost-effective route to a better rating. Internal insulation, glazing and heating system upgrades are usually where the work has to happen, and each of those has consequences for floor area and building consent.

One piece of good news: an updated assessment can mechanically move a property from F to E or D, particularly since the electricity conversion coefficient dropped from 2.3 to 1.9 in January 2026. If your certificate predates that change and your apartment uses electric heating, a fresh assessment may be worth commissioning before you assume renovation is the only path.

Expect ongoing management to cost between 4 and 10% TTC of monthly rent, plus roughly one month's rent each time a new tenant is placed. Those two figures cover most of it, but they are not the whole picture.

The costs that damage returns are usually the ones that never appear on a fee schedule.

Where the money actually goes

Management fees, placement fees, GLI premiums and legal costs are all deductible under the régime réel, which reduces the net cost meaningfully for owners in higher tax brackets. Our guide to property management fees in Paris breaks down how these figures behave across different agency models.

Vacancy, arrears and procedure

Three costs sit outside the fee schedule and routinely exceed it.

Vacancy is the largest. Two weeks of avoided vacancy per re-letting roughly funds an entire year of management. Take a 40 square metre apartment at the Paris average of €1,773 a month. If you're unsure what your own apartment could achieve, our Paris rental price guide provides current average rents by neighbourhood and property type. Six weeks empty costs around €2,660, which is more than a full year of management at 8%. The cheaper agency is not automatically the cheaper outcome.

Arrears are rising. Rent late payments jumped 86% between December 2025 and January 2026, and 175,000 formal payment demands were issued to tenants across France in 2025. Tenant screening at the application stage is the decisive moment, and GLI eligibility acts as a useful filter in itself since insurers will not cover a weak file.

Procedure costs arrive last and hurt most. Once a dispute reaches a bailiff or a court, legal fees accumulate on top of the rent you are not receiving.

Reading a fee schedule properly

The headline percentage is one component of an annual cost that also includes placement fees, renewal fees, maintenance coordination and GLI.

Ask for the complete written schedule before signing any mandat de gestion. Transparency on this point is a reasonable competence test for any manager you are considering, and a reluctance to provide it tells you something useful.

The tenants you can reach determine which lease you can legally use and how quickly the apartment fills. In Paris, the strongest profiles often never appear on public listing platforms at all.

This is where the civil code lease question from earlier resolves itself, because that structure is only usable if the right tenant is actually available to you.

Where quality international tenants come from

Executives, diplomatic staff and international professionals rarely start their housing search on a portal. They arrive through employers, embassies and relocation channels, and the search is often initiated before they land in France.

What that means for an owner is a difference in file quality rather than volume. These tenants come with verified income, structured employer guarantees, and prior experience of formal lease documentation in other markets. With more than eight applicants competing for every available Paris rental, the constraint has never been finding applicants. It is finding applicants whose file holds up.

Matching your property to the right profile

Different profiles want genuinely different things, and small preparation decisions affect which ones will consider your apartment:

• Expat families with children prioritise proximity to international and bilingual schools, a real second or third bedroom rather than a converted space, and buildings that work for daily family life. They also tend to stay longest.
• Diplomats and embassy staff typically need an employer-held tenancy under a civil code structure, discretion, and buildings with reliable access control. The 7th, 8th and 16th arrondissements and Neuilly-sur-Seine concentrate this demand.
• C-suite executives expect turnkey condition and responsive management. The lease is often signed by the employer, and the standard of furnishing matters more than square metres.
• Entrepreneurs and business owners value flexibility on term and usable workspace inside the apartment, along with a central, well-connected location.
• American and British nationals need documentation and management they can follow in English, and arrive from rental systems that work very differently from the French one. Professional responsiveness carries disproportionate weight with this group.

How a relocation-led manager changes the equation

An agency that works on both the incoming relocation side and the property management side holds a tenant pipeline before a property is ever advertised. That is a structural difference rather than a service feature.

For an owner, it changes three things: the profiles you see are pre-screened and often employer-guaranteed, the entire process runs in English if that is what you need, and the lease structure can be matched to the tenant rather than retrofitted after the fact.

At Relocation in Paris, our property search and accommodation service works with arriving executives, diplomatic staff and families, while our property management service handles the owner side of the same market. Our service packages set out what each level of support covers. If you are letting from outside France, our guide to managing a Paris property remotely covers the practical side in more detail.

Furnished rental income is taxed as BIC, meaning bénéfices industriels et commerciaux, not as property income. Filing it in the wrong category is the most common and most expensive error owners make, and the French tax authority reminded landlords of exactly this in May 2026.

The rules differ enough from unfurnished letting that carrying over an old declaration is a genuine risk.

Choosing between micro-BIC and régime réel

Under micro-BIC, long-term furnished income benefits from a €77,700 ceiling with a 50% flat allowance, both unchanged for 2026.

Under the régime réel, you deduct actual charges and depreciate the property excluding land value, which can neutralise taxable income for years. It requires proper accounting.

One change matters for anyone planning to sell. The 2025 finance law reintegrates deducted depreciation into the capital gains calculation on resale, which narrows the advantage of the régime réel for medium-term holders considerably.

What non-resident owners should check first

Three things are worth confirming before your next declaration:

• Whether you need a SIRET number and how CFE applies to your situation
• That your declared regime, your lease type and the actual occupancy of the property all match
• That any change from unfurnished to furnished letting has been reflected in your filing

A mismatch tends to surface at the worst possible moment, usually at sale, refinancing or during a regularisation. Our detailed guide to rental income tax rules in Paris covers this in full.

This section is orientation rather than tax advice. Confirm your position with a French accountant before filing.