For foreign owners
Airbnb rules and tax in the Dordogne: what you actually need to know
Registration, classification, taxe de séjour and income tax get talked about as one process. They're four separate things. Here's how to tell them apart — and where to check the specifics for your own property.
Why this is confusing for foreign owners
If you own a holiday rental near Bergerac or Sarlat and live in Britain or the Netherlands, the French rules have probably reached you as a pile of unrelated fragments. Something about a number from the mairie. Something about stars. Something about a tourist tax appearing on guest invoices. Something about how the income gets taxed. They sound like one process. They are not. They are four separate things, handled by different offices, and each can apply to you on its own.
That is what makes them hard to get straight from a distance. The forms and the official guidance are in French, the detail changes from one commune to the next, and nothing tells you which parts are compulsory, which are optional, and which order they come in.
This post is an orientation to those moving parts, written so you can tell them apart and ask better questions. It is not legal or tax advice and it is not a substitute for a professional. Where a figure depends on your commune or your circumstances, I say so rather than guess at it.
The four moving parts
1. Registration with your mairie
Short-term rental properties in France, meublés de tourisme, generally need to be declared to the local town hall, which issues a registration or declaration number for the property. That number comes from the commune the house actually sits in, so it's Eymet's town hall for a house in Eymet, not a national portal. How the declaration is handled varies between mairies: some take it online, some want you at the counter. Your mairie is the authority on the procedure where you are.
2. Classification, and what it does to your tax
Separately, you can have your property formally classified as a meublé de tourisme classé, through an official rating visit. It's optional — unclassified is a normal state to be in. What classification changes is the tax treatment of your rental income under the micro-BIC regime: unclassified gets a 30% flat-rate abatement up to €15,000 a year in revenue; classified gets a 50% abatement, on a threshold that's revalued periodically — €77,700 for 2025 income, revised to €83,600 for 2026 income. That's a deduction applied to your declared revenue before tax, not a rebate, so what the difference is worth depends entirely on what your property actually earns. (Source: impots.gouv.fr)
3. Taxe de séjour
This is the per-guest, per-night local tourist tax that applies to short-term rental stays in France. There's no single national figure to quote — the rate is set locally by each commune and région and varies. What matters most to you as an owner is how it's being collected: typically either taken automatically by the booking platform at checkout and remitted to the commune, or collected directly by you, depending on how the property and platform are set up. Knowing which is happening on your listing is the part owners most often haven't checked.
4. Income tax, in general terms
Furnished rental income in France is taxed under its own regime rather than treated like ordinary salary, and as above, classification changes the abatement that applies under the micro-BIC treatment. Beyond that, which regime suits you, how it interacts with tax in your home country, and what you file and when, is genuinely an accountant's question rather than mine.
What to actually do about it
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Start with the mairie
A short call or a visit to the town hall of the commune your property sits in will tell you whether you're declared, whether you have a registration number, and how the procedure works locally. That's the layer with the least ambiguity in it, and the sensible first move.
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Decide on classification using your own numbers
Those two abatement rates only mean something set against your own rental income, which is why a personalised calculation tells you more than any general article can. That's exactly what the classification-value calculation on this site is for: it works out, from your actual figures, what classifying would be worth to you.
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Check how taxe de séjour is handled on your listing
Look at what your platform is collecting and remitting on your behalf, and confirm with your commune what's expected of you directly.
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Bring in a professional for anything that's genuinely advice
For anything that's genuinely tax or legal advice rather than general orientation, get an expert-comptable or a notaire involved. There's also a French-language, Dordogne-specific step-by-step guide on this site that goes through the mairie declaration, the registration number, classification and taxe de séjour in more procedural detail than this post does.
None of this is difficult once it's pulled apart
It is simply opaque from another country, in another language, when nobody has laid out which office does what. That's the part I can help with. I can walk you through what's generally involved, go through the paperwork with you in plain English or Dutch, and point you to the right local office, or to a qualified professional when the question stops being orientation and starts being advice. I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, and I won't pretend otherwise.
CoHost Dordogne is new. There's no client list or track record to wave at you, and I'd rather say that than invent one. What there is: someone who lives here, covers Bergerac, Sarlat, Eymet, Lalinde, Issigeac, Périgueux and the villages between, and will give you a straight answer about where your property stands. If that would help, get in touch — or see exactly how the process works first.
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