Donations: Notaries Propose Halving the Fees
The 122nd Congress of French Notaries, devoted to the theme “The Notary and Taxation,” has published 21 proposals. Several of them directly address family transfers, starting with a halving of the rates applicable to gifts of full ownership.
Notaries speak about taxes with the authority of those who collect them. In 2024, they collected 36.15 billion euros in taxes and fees, which were remitted to the government and local authorities, and they serve 24 million taxpayers annually. Their assessment is that the system has become incomprehensible: France has approximately 480 different taxes and fees, whose complexity and instability hinder projects and delay property transfers.
The most straightforward proposal for families is to encourage the transfer of full ownership. Notaries suggest halving the tax rates applicable to gifts of full ownership or usufruct up to 552,324 euros, provided that the donor is under 75 years of age and the gift is made free of encumbrances. The idea is to facilitate the earlier transfer of wealth to generations who can make use of it.
Making Exemptions Optional
Another proposal will be of interest to families planning their estate transfer over the long term: making exemptions optional—that is, allowing individuals to voluntarily forgo their personal exemption when making a gift in order to preserve it intact at the time of inheritance. Currently, the exemption is automatically applied, which traps donors who transfer a small amount without realizing how much of their exemption they are using up.
Because the least well-known rule of inheritance law is also one of the most costly. The tax counter does not reset to zero upon a parent’s death. Gifts made within the past fifteen years are included in the calculation, the tax exemption already used is not refunded, and the tax brackets resume where they left off. It takes fifteen full years for the tax exemption to be fully restored. Statistically speaking, a gift made at age 68 will never have time to fall outside this period.
Notaries are also proposing to extend the tax exemptions currently reserved for grandchildren and great-grandchildren—which currently apply only to gifts—to estates, and to eliminate the collection of the partition tax for wills that provide for the partition of an estate, in order to align the rules governing such wills with those for gifts that provide for the partition of an estate.
Another measure concerns families’ freedom of organization. The conference proposes allowing for the contractual allocation of taxes in family transfers, letting the parties freely determine the taxable portion of gifts and divisions of property and allocate the tax liability among heirs. The conference also calls for a single regime governing the right of partition, regardless of the origin of the joint ownership, and the unification of the capital gains regime that goes along with it.
Paying Inheritance Tax Without Selling
The legislature is also addressing situations where the estate settlement stalls—specifically, when an heir owns an asset but lacks the cash to pay the inheritance tax. Two measures address this issue. The first extends the payment deferral period for inheritance taxes to five and ten years. The second changes how the tax authorities assess a lack of liquidity, which would be evaluated on a per-heir basis rather than collectively across the entire estate. A co-heir without sufficient cash would thus no longer be penalized by the presence of another co-heir who does have the funds.
In the real estate sector, notaries are calling for the property tax (IFI) for properties leased to a subsidiary of the professional entity, to extend the exemption period for social security contributions on capital gains from real estate for individuals to twenty-two years, and to enshrine in law the principle of a 15% deduction for renovations without requiring proof that the work was actually performed.
The proposal on capital gains goes beyond a simple alignment of time frames. Notaries suggest exempting capital gains up to the amount reinvested in a list of investments to be defined, and allowing the parties to agree by contract on how the tax burden is to be shared between the usufructuary and the bare owner in the event of a sale involving the separation of ownership and usufruct. These are two technical points that carry significant weight in real estate transfer arrangements.
Twenty-one proposals, then, at the very moment when public debate is bringing estate taxes into the 2027 presidential campaign. Some want to tax large inheritances more heavily, while others want to reduce the tax burden. Notaries, for their part, propose above all to stop penalizing those who transfer assets early.
