Deadline for correcting income tax declaration

The deadline to declare your 2020 earnings has now passed. But if you made a mistake in filing your tax return online, you have up until December 15th to change the following details: the number of people in your care; whether you have paid a TV license fee; your revenue; your expenses; your tax credits; and the tax paid on property fortunes (IFI) worth more than €1.3 million. 

You can make these changes via your personal account on the impots.gouv.fr website. 

If you sent your tax return by post and made a mistake, you will have to amend any of these details in writing. Further details can be found here.  

If there is a minor error in your tax declaration, you will likely receive a letter asking you to repay the outstanding sum – without a penalty.

Significant errors on the other hand, you will be asked to repay the outstanding amount with a monthly rate of interest, meaning that the amount you have to pay increases more the longer you fail to do so. For blatant tax fraud, there are significant financial penalties and possible imprisonment.  

Deadline for paying vacant property tax

In certain communes, you must pay a tax if you own a property that has been unoccupied for an extended period of time. The deadline to pay this tax is December 15th.  

If your property is in a zone tendue (a commune with more than 50,000 residents that has a housing shortage), you must pay the taxe sur logements vacants (TLV). You can find a list of the relevant communes HERE. The tax applies if the property has been unoccupied for a year or more. 

The TLV to be paid is fixed 12.5 percent of the value of the property during the first year that remains unoccupied. It rises to 25 percent in the following years that the property remains vacant. A further 9 percent of the TLV must be paid as a “management fee” to the French tax authorities. 

If your property is not in a zone tendue, you might have to pay the taxe d’habitation sur les logements vacants (THLV). This only applies to you if your commune has voted to enact this tax. It concerns properties that have been vacant for two years or more.

As with the TLV, you do not need to pay this tax if you have stayed in the accommodation for more than 90 consecutive days in a year; have put it on the rental market; or are doing building work worth at least 25 percent of the property value. If you are already paying the taxe d’habitation, you do not need to pay the THLV. 

There is an online simulator that tells you whether or not your property is situated in a zone tendue. There are various exemptions to these taxes available on the service-public.fr website.