The French rental property market has just experienced an unprecedented episode: a significant number of properties classified as G have been withdrawn from the market since January 2025, not because they were renovated, but because the Climate and Resilience Act made them illegal to rent. Fifteen months later, the Lecornu government is reintroducing them through legislation, on condition of commitment to carry out works. In the meantime, approximately 140,000 properties changed energy class without a single radiator being replaced, thanks to a revision of the energy performance certificate (DPE) calculation coefficient. It is in this gap between the reality of buildings and the figures that describe them that housing policy in France is being played out.
The “housing recovery” bill presented on April 23, 2026 does not constitute an abandonment of the energy transition. It is a different wager: that renovating through use — by keeping owners in the market under contractual constraint — will produce more work than prohibition, which mainly produced hoarding and anxiety. The wager is defensible. The conditions for it to hold deserve close examination.
The essentials
- A significant portion of properties classified as G has been excluded from the rental market since January 2025, with limited effect on actual renovation of the property stock
- The “housing recovery” bill of April 2026 would allow up to 700,000 properties classified F and G to return to the market under contractual commitment to carry out work within 3 to 5 years
- Approximately 140,000 properties of less than 40 m² changed DPE class without any work following the July 2024 reform, illustrating the fragility of the measurement instrument
- Financing remains the crux of the matter: MaPrimeRénov’ covered in 2025 only a fraction of the necessary high-performance renovations, and small landlord owners remain the worst supported
- The central issue is now contractual execution: without a credible control mechanism, the commitment to carry out work risks becoming an administrative formality
The Prohibition That Did Not Renovate
The 2021 Climate and Resilience Act had clear logic: making the rental of energy-inefficient properties illegal would force owners to renovate. The timeline was gradual — prohibition of G-rated properties in January 2025, F-rated in 2028, E-rated in 2034. Data available on January 1, 2025 reveals what this logic actually produced.
Of the G-rated properties withdrawn from the market, some did indeed undergo work. But a substantial other portion simply disappeared from the rental supply without being renovated: some owners chose to sell, leave the property vacant, or switch to seasonal rental. In tight markets — Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux — this contraction fueled a rise in rents for compliant properties, penalizing low-income households, which make up precisely the population in energy-inefficient properties.
The paradox is brutal. The measure intended to improve living conditions for the most vulnerable first reduced their access to the market. Not because renovation was impossible, but because financing did not follow.
MaPrimeRénov’ supported a significant number of renovations through isolated measures in 2025 — boiler replacement, attic insulation. But so-called “high-performance” renovations, which actually move a property from G to D or better, remain rare according to the Anah balance sheet. They cost an average of between 30,000 and 80,000 euros for an apartment, amounts that small landlord owners — often retirees holding one or two properties — cannot mobilize without massive support and controlled out-of-pocket costs.
Properties Saved by a Spreadsheet
The second act of this sequence is even more revealing. In July 2024, the DPE calculation method was revised. The order of March 25, 2024, applicable from July 1, 2024, adjusted the weighting coefficient applied to domestic hot water consumption for properties of less than 40 m², with the effect of moving approximately 140,000 properties out of the “energy-inefficient property” category. These properties changed class on paper. Their insulation, windows, and heating systems remained exactly the same.
This is not fraud. The revision of the coefficient responded to legitimate criticisms of the previous method, which particularly penalized small spaces in assessing their energy consumption. But the political and statistical effect is striking: without a single euro of work, the stock of energy-inefficient properties was reduced by some 140,000 units.
This raises a serious question about the robustness of the DPE as a public policy instrument. When the letter designating your property can change by decree without the property itself changing, the energy performance certificate becomes a tool with variable geometry. Buyers, tenants, and owners who made significant financial decisions based on a previous DPE find themselves in legitimate uncertainty.
For renovation policy, it is an ambiguous signal. If targets can be partially reached through method adjustments, the temptation to resort to this instrument again will be great. This is precisely the risk that the April 2026 pivot must avoid reproducing.
The Wager of Renovation Through Use
The “housing recovery” bill rests on reasoning that its designers assume: blunt constraint did not produce the expected work, contractual constraint might work better. An owner who signs a commitment to work over 3 to 5 years to keep their property on the market is, in this logic, more likely to renovate than an owner who simply withdrew their property from the market waiting for the rules to change.
The argument has an empirical basis. In several European countries, mechanisms of progressive commitments have produced results superior to outright bans, notably because they maintain a relationship between the owner and support schemes. A landlord remains in contact with financing bodies, tradespeople, France Rénov’ advisors. An owner who has withdrawn their property from the market is no longer in this chain.
But the wager carries several real risks, which the text will need to address precisely to be credible.
The first is timing. Three to five years of commitment is a long time. A tenant who signs a lease in a G-rated property with a promise of renovation in five years risks leaving before the work takes place, or undergoing it during occupation in difficult conditions. The law will need to define clear protections for occupants during the work period.
The second is control. What body will verify that the work has actually been carried out by the deadline? According to what reference standard? With what penalties if the commitment is not fulfilled? France has a tradition of commitment schemes whose execution is poorly monitored. If the commitment to work becomes a box to check without real follow-up, the mechanism will produce neither renovations nor credibility.
The third is financing. Nothing in the broad outlines of the bill as presented in April 2026 suggests a significant scaling up of renovation aid for small landlord owners. Yet without sufficient aid, the commitment to work will remain an intention, not a construction site.
Why Small Landlords Did Not Renovate
To understand what the new scheme must correct, we must understand what blocked the previous one. Small landlord owners — those holding one or two properties, often as a retirement supplement — represent the majority of the stock of rental energy-inefficient properties. They are not slumlords. They are often elderly, poorly organized, and face work whose cost can represent several years of rent.
MaPrimeRénov’ was theoretically accessible to these owners. In practice, the scheme was perceived as complex, unstable — the rules changed several times in three years — and insufficient for comprehensive renovations. The out-of-pocket cost of a high-performance renovation, even with maximum aid, often remained above 20,000 euros for a medium-sized apartment. For an owner whose property generates 600 euros of monthly rent, the equation is difficult.
Third-party financing — a mechanism by which an organization pre-finances the work and reimburses itself from energy savings or future rents — exists in several regional schemes and has proven its effectiveness in unblocking situations where advance financing is not possible. But it remains marginal on a national scale and little known to the owners concerned.
This is where the new scheme will or will not find its limit. If the “housing recovery” law keeps owners in the market without giving them the means to renovate, it postpones the problem by a few years. If it is accompanied by simplification of MaPrimeRénov’, scaling up of third-party financing, and individualized support — what France Rénov’ is supposed to provide but does not yet have the means to ensure at large scale — then the wager becomes more solid.
What the European Calendar Imposes
The context of the French pivot cannot be separated from the European regulatory calendar. The revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), adopted in 2024, imposes precise trajectories on member states. For the residential stock, it sets a national reduction in average primary energy consumption of 16% by 2030 and 20 to 22% by 2035, without imposing mandatory minimum standards for each property. Minimum energy performance standards per building — class E by 2030 and class D by 2033 — apply to non-residential buildings. Member states retain flexibility in mechanisms, but not in national trajectory objectives.
France, by reauthorizing the rental of energy-inefficient properties under commitment to work, does not abandon these objectives. It changes method to achieve them. But the time window is narrowing. If commitments to work run until 2029 or 2031, they overlap with European deadlines of 2030 and beyond. The scheme will need to be designed so that owners who commit now can meet both timelines without having to renovate twice.
This technical point is crucial and rarely highlighted in public debate. An owner who renovates today to move from G to E will not necessarily have satisfied the requirements of the national trajectory by 2035. The renovation trajectory must be conceived from the outset to achieve a sufficiently high-performance level, not merely to escape the prohibited category at the moment. This requires technical advice at the time of commitment that goes beyond simple administration.
The Conditions for the Wager to Hold
The work commitment scheme can produce real results if three conditions are met, and experience with renovation policies in Europe allows us to identify them with reasonable precision.
The first is administrative simplicity. Landlord owners who did not renovate under the old regime are generally not cynical actors who made a cold calculation of their interest. They are often people overwhelmed by the complexity of schemes. My main point of vigilance: that the commitment to work does not itself become an additional administrative path.
The second is continuity of aid. The instability of MaPrimeRénov’ between 2021 and 2025 created legitimate mistrust among owners who did not want to commit to work without knowing if aid would still be there at the end. A 3 to 5-year commitment is only credible if the financial schemes are themselves guaranteed over the same duration.
The third is control with real penalty. Without this dimension, the scheme will be circumvented. Belgium experimented with similar mechanisms with mixed results precisely because penalties for breach of commitments were theoretical. Conversely, the Netherlands achieved high execution rates by coupling commitments to automated controls and effective tax penalties.
France has the advantage of having a dense network of France Rénov’ advisors and a tax administration capable of cross-referencing data. Monitoring work commitments is not technically inaccessible. What has been lacking so far is the political will to exercise it.
What the Balance Sheet Will Say in Three Years
The real test of the 2026 pivot will be written between 2028 and 2030. By then, the question is not whether the 700,000 F and G-rated properties will return to the market — they probably will, because owners have an interest in renting them. The question is how many will actually have undergone substantial work by that date.
If the execution rate of commitments exceeds 60%, the wager will be won and the doctrine of “renovation through use” will have demonstrated its superiority over outright prohibition. If this rate remains below 30%, as might be feared without strengthening of control and financing mechanisms, the scheme will have been nothing but a disguised moratorium, and the debate will start again.
Between the two, one question remains open: what role can tenants themselves play in monitoring their owner’s commitments? Organizations such as the National Federation of Housing or CLCV have the capacity to support tenants in seeking recourse in case of breach of commitments. Formally integrating them into the monitoring scheme — by giving them access to signed commitments and simplified recourse channels — would be a way to make the mechanism robust without burdening administration.
Sources
- SDES – The stock of properties by energy performance class as of January 1, 2025, Ministry of Ecological Transition: statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr
- Anah – MaPrimeRénov’ 2025 Balance Sheet: anah.gouv.fr
- European Directive on Energy Performance of Buildings (revised EPBD), Official Journal of the European Union, 2024
- Franceinfo – “Housing recovery” bill, April 2026
- Selexium – Analysis of the rental market and impact of the freeze on energy-inefficient properties, 2025-2026
- Ministry of Ecology – What’s changing on January 1, 2025 in housing: ecologie.gouv.fr
- Decideurs-Immo – Lecornu housing bill: launch of ANRU 3 and relaxation of rules on energy-inefficient properties, April 23, 2026: decideurs-immo.com
- European Commission – Adoption of the Directive on Energy Performance of Buildings, April 2024: france.representation.ec.europa.eu
- Anah – 2024 Balance Sheet of High-Performance Renovations: anah.gouv.fr
- Afedim – DPE and small spaces: what’s changing on July 1, 2024: afedim.fr
- Actu-Environnement – Housing recovery bill: return to the rental market of energy-inefficient properties: actu-environnement.com
- Embuild.eu – Revised EPBD 2024: what’s changing: embuild.eu