In 2025, French banks advanced €9.5 billion in bridging loans (prêts relais). Of that total, €1.9 billion had to be extended because the sale had not gone through in time — roughly one loan in five, against one in four the year before.
Both figures come from the ACPR (Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution — the French banking and insurance supervisor), which publishes them every year without anyone picking them up. They say something simple: failing to sell in time is not a rare accident, it is a statistically ordinary outcome.
The bridging loan is also the only acquisition loan to which the 35% borrowing-ratio rule does not apply. This is not an oversight: the text issued by the HCSF (Haut Conseil de stabilité financière — the French macroprudential authority) expressly excludes it. The one product in five that has to be extended escapes the only automatic brake in French mortgage lending.
What this article covers
Not how to obtain a bridging loan — your bank will see to that — but what happens when the sale does not come. Who will come after you for the money, and why it probably will not be your bank. The remedies open to you, which the pages written on the subject ignore entirely. And three figures repeated everywhere that no text actually states.
The one acquisition loan the safeguard does not cover
Since 2022, a decision of the HCSF has framed the granting of home loans: the debt-service ratio (taux d’effort) capped at 35%, the term limited to 25 years, with a discretionary margin of 20% of new lending. You regularly read that the bridging loan is subject to it. The text says the opposite.
Article 3 of decision no. D-HCSF-2021-7 of 29 September 2021 states that the decision applies to home loans “with the exception of bridging loans as defined in point 16° of article L. 311-1 of the code de la consommation, the French Consumer Code, of loans being renegotiated, of those granted to repay early a loan taken out with another credit institution — known as external buy-outs — and of those arising from a consolidation of loans” (our translation). Neither the 35% cap nor the 25-year maturity therefore concerns this product. The three other exclusions all cover the restructuring of debt already taken on: the bridging loan is the only loan financing an acquisition that escapes the framework.
A decision of December 2023 goes further. Since 1 January 2024, bridging loans whose proportion advanced (quotité) is at or below 80% “are excluded from the calculation of the debt-service ratio”. The text spells out the denominator, and that is decisive: the proportion compares the bridging loan with the value of the property put up for sale, “net where applicable of the capital still outstanding on the loan running on that property”. If you are still repaying that home, the denominator is far lower than it looks.
⚠️ This is not a scandal, it is a prudential choice — and it should be put that way. A bridging loan is transitional debt secured on an asset that is meant to be sold: including it in a debt-service ratio calculated over twenty years would make little sense. The factual consequence is nonetheless worth stating: the only automatic brake in French mortgage lending does not apply to the product one in five of which has to be extended. And the rule becomes fully applicable again the day the bank converts the bridging loan into an amortising loan — that is, precisely the day you need it.
Three figures everyone repeats, and no text states
“Two years maximum”
No text sets that term. The only legal definition, at point 16° of article L. 311-1 of the code de la consommation, speaks of a “limited term” (our translation) without offering a figure. The HCSF itself writes “generally two years”. It is banking practice, not a rule — with a direct consequence in both directions: you have no right to run to twenty-four months, and nothing stops you going beyond if your bank agrees.
“80% of the property’s value at most”
The 80% does exist in a binding text, but there it does not denote a borrowing cap. In the HCSF decision, that proportion is the threshold at or below which the bridging loan is excluded from your debt-service ratio — automatically: the text is in the indicative, and it is not a discretion left to the bank. The most repeated figure on the subject therefore means, in its only legal source, roughly the opposite of what it is made to say: not what you may borrow, but the level below which the bank need not count it against you.
“The bridging loan is subject to the 35% rule”
False, as we have just seen, and it is the one of the three with the greatest consequences: it lets people believe in a safeguard that does not exist.
What happens if you do not sell
At maturity, the sums fall due. Your bank is under no obligation to extend: no text creates a right to an extension. In practice it often does — the €1.9 billion extended in 2025 was, according to the ACPR, “mostly for a period of less than six months” (our translation). But that is a negotiation, not a right.
If it refuses and you do not pay, the sequence is a familiar one: formal notice to pay (mise en demeure), then acceleration of the loan (déchéance du terme) — the whole balance becomes immediately due — then enforced sale of the property.
This risk, contrary to what is often read, is not getting worse: the share of bridging loans extended fell from 25.2% in 2024 to 19.8% in 2025, after 17.4% in 2023. The strain peaked with the collapse in transactions in 2023-2024, then eased as they picked up again. One reservation is nevertheless in order: these figures describe 2025 and are published a year in arrears. They say nothing about the market you are facing today.
It will not be your bank that comes after you
This is the point nobody explains, and it concerns the great majority of borrowers: 72.4% of 2025 lending is secured by a caution — a third-party guarantee institution — and not by a mortgage charge. In the event of default, the guarantee institution pays the bank, then turns against you.
And that claim is far harder to contest. In its own personal recourse, the guarantor that has paid does not have to bear the lender’s failings. That is what the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal held on 15 October 2015, in a bridging loan case of €471,000: after acceleration, the guarantor had paid, then claimed €395,267.34 from the borrower with interest; the borrower could not raise against it the bank’s breaches of its duty to advise and to warn. The appeal against that judgment was dismissed by the Cour de cassation on 11 January 2017, on a narrower ground: the borrower had not shown that, at the time of payment, he had the means to extinguish the debt. The ruling is unreported — it stands as an illustration, not as settled principle.
In other words: the arguments you might have made against the bank — inadequate warning, an over-optimistic valuation — carry no weight against the guarantee institution claiming the same sum from you. It is a difference in kind, not in degree.
Before all that, the price cut
In practice, enforced sale is rare, because a seller under a deadline drops the price. That is the real and invisible cost of a bridging loan: it does not show on the amortisation schedule but on the sale price. A property listed at €250,000 and sold at €230,000 to close before the deadline has cost €20,000. At 4.87%, that is the equivalent of two years of deferred interest on a bridging loan of about €205,000 — in practice, more than the bank would have advanced you against that property.
Hence a simple rule of conduct, and one rarely followed: the proportion your bank advances rests on a valuation. If that valuation is optimistic, you are not merely borrowing too much — you are committing to a price the market will have to confirm. Have the property valued by a third party with nothing to sell, and work from the low figure.
What you can still do
The material devoted to the bridging loan generally stops at “sell it cheaper”. Yet three levers exist, all written into the law, and none is mentioned by the pages that rank on these searches.
The three levers, in the order you use them: article 1343-5 of the code civil (the French Civil Code) allows the judge to defer or stagger payment for up to two years. By a special, reasoned decision the judge may also order that the deferred instalments will carry interest “at a reduced rate at least equal to the statutory rate” — the statutory rate is a floor, then, not the target — or, on the alternative limb, that payments will be set against capital first. The decision suspends enforcement proceedings already under way, and any clause to the contrary is treated as unwritten. Article L. 314-20 of the code de la consommation allows the juge des contentieux de la protection (the judge with jurisdiction over consumer protection disputes) to suspend the borrower’s obligations, with the possibility of neutralising the interest during the suspension. Lastly, since 16 February 2022, article L. 711-1 of the same code prohibits refusing an over-indebtedness procedure (surendettement) on the sole ground that the debtor owns their main home, where its value assessed at the date the file is lodged equals or exceeds the total of their debts. The protection covers the main home, and only that: a second home, a rental property or a plot of land give no such right.
This last point deserves emphasis, because it undoes a stubborn belief. Many owners stuck with a bridging loan rule out the over-indebtedness commission, thinking their assets exclude them. The text has said precisely the opposite for four years. Good faith, on the other hand, is still required.
What a bridging loan really costs
The bridging loan has its own usury ceiling (taux d’usure) category, and it is the dearest in property lending. In the 3rd quarter of 2026, the average effective rate charged on bridging loans stood at 4.87%; increased by one third as article L. 314-6 requires, it gives the usury ceiling of 6.49% applicable in the 4th quarter. For a fixed-rate loan of twenty years or more, the same two figures are 4.05% and 5.40%. That is a gap of 0.82 percentage points on the average rate.
Mind the period: these ceilings apply from 1 October to 31 December 2026. Those for the first quarter of 2027 replace them from 1 January. Always check the current quarter; these values are not annual.
That rate applies to the TAEG (taux annuel effectif global — the French annual percentage rate of charge, the APRC), fees and compulsory insurance included — as we explained in relation to the advertised rate on home loans, which is not a price. On a bridging loan, the difference is far from theoretical: the insurance is paid on the capital advanced throughout the deferral period.
One piece of good news remains, and it is often overlooked. When the sale finally goes through and you repay, early repayment is a right. A penalty is due only if the contract stipulates one, and it is capped at the lower of two amounts: six months’ interest on the capital repaid, or 3% of the outstanding capital. The mechanism is the same as on a standard loan, which we set out in our article on early repayment penalties.
The figure that governs everything, and does not exist
A bridging loan is a bet on how long a sale takes. Yet that period is measured nowhere.
No French public statistic tracks how long it takes to sell an existing home. Neither INSEE, nor the Notaires de France, nor the ministry’s statistical services publish it. The irony is documentable: the State does time how long stock takes to sell, but only for new-build, by means of a survey that has been compulsory since 1995. The one market where the delay decides whether a committed household stays solvent is precisely the one nobody times.
The selling times quoted by estate agency networks — around a hundred days, depending on the brand — are measurements of private portfolios, based on undisclosed methods and not comparable with one another. You can use them as an order of magnitude; you cannot build a cash-flow plan on them.
Mon Simulateur Immobilier bridging loan calculator
The calculator works out how much can be advanced given the proportion your bank applies, the cost of the interest during the deferral period, and what will be left to you once the sale is done and the loan repaid. Above all, it shows you what becomes of the operation if the sale takes six months longer than planned — the scenario commercial simulations do not display.
Conclusion
The bridging loan is not a bad product: it solves a real timing problem, and four fifths of the amounts lent are repaid without any extension. But it is a loan that escapes the common safeguard, whose term is set by no text, whose fate depends on a delay nobody measures, and whose default leaves you facing a creditor against whom your usual arguments no longer count.
Before you sign, run the unfavourable scenario, not just the good one: the Mon Simulateur Immobilier bridging loan calculator gives you the cost of six months’ delay. And read the extension clause in your offer: it is that clause, and not the law, that will say what happens to you at maturity.
