On 1 January 2026, 22.2% of the French population is aged 65 or over, and 11.1% is aged 75 or over. Among those aged 75 and over who live at home, more than three quarters are homeowners. The viager (the French life-annuity sale of a property) ought, therefore, to be a mass market.
It is not. In 2023, 3,857 viager sales were signed in France, out of a little over one million property sales — four per thousand. The figure comes from the Ministry of Housing, in an answer to a written parliamentary question, and it is almost half the “5,000 to 6,000 sales a year” quoted everywhere.
The same ministry acknowledges that “no public database records precisely the number of viager contracts in force” — and the sales files held by the DGFiP (the French tax administration) make it impossible to tell a viager apart from an ordinary sale. This market is not merely small: it is not measured.
What this article covers
Not how to sell en viager — intermediaries take care of that — but what the contract does not guarantee. What actually happens when the annuity stops being paid. Why the price is governed by no official scale, contrary to what you will read. And two legal references that are massively cited even though they were repealed years ago.
The element of chance: twenty days, and two articles not to be confused
A viager rests on a wager about the length of a life. If that wager does not exist, the contract is not one. The code civil sanctions its absence in two ways.
Article 1974 sets aside a contract “created on the life of a person who was already dead on the day of the contract” (our translation). Article 1975 goes further: the same applies to “a contract by which the annuity was created on the life of a person suffering from the illness of which that person died within twenty days of the date of the contract”.
⚠️ Read that sentence literally, because the usual reading adds a condition that is not in it. The text lays down three conditions, and they are purely objective: the seller was ill on the day of the contract, died of that illness, and died within twenty days. What the buyer knew of the seller's state of health forms no part of article 1975. You will very often read “provided the buyer knew of the illness”: that is an addition to the text.
Beyond those twenty days, annulment remains possible but becomes far harder to obtain. On 10 July 2025 the Cour de cassation held that it must be established that death was, on the day of the sale, inevitable in the short term — to the point of stripping the sale of any element of chance. A serious condition is not enough: in January 2023, the Court upheld a sale even though the buyer, who was close to the seller, knew of her end-stage renal failure, on the ground that the date of death remained uncertain.
First out-of-date reference: the element of chance is no longer defined by article 1964 of the code civil, repealed by the ordinance of 10 February 2016. Since 1 October 2016, the definition sits in article 1108, paragraph 2. Recent judgments still cite 1964 because the contracts they rule on predate the reform — that is no reason to cite it as a text in force in 2026.
If the buyer stops paying, you do not get your property back
This is the point that the entire web on the viager handles worst, and it is the one that matters most to a 78-year-old seller whose annuity has stopped arriving.
What the law gives, and what it does not
Article 1978 of the code civil, unchanged since 1804, is explicit: mere default in paying the annuity instalments (arrérages) does not entitle the seller to demand repayment of the capital, nor to move back into the property. All the seller may do is have the debtor's assets seized and sold, and have the proceeds of that sale applied to investing a sum sufficient to service the annuity.
In other words: the law, on its own, does not give you your flat back. It gives you a debt claim and the right to recover it like any other debt claim. It is the rescission clause (clause résolutoire) written into the deed — a contractual stipulation, therefore, not a statutory protection — that allows the sale to be undone. A viager drafted without one leaves the seller with an enforceable title and a bailiff.
And if the clause bites, the bouquet goes back
Rescission operates retrospectively: each party returns what it received. The seller recovers the property but must in principle hand back the bouquet. The Cour de cassation so held on 14 September 2023, in a judgment published in the Bulletin: annuity instalments already paid remain the seller's only if the deed has expressly characterised them as damages.
To check in the draft deed, before signing: that a rescission clause is indeed stipulated; that it specifies the time limit and the prior formal notice; and above all that the instalments received and the bouquet are expressly characterised as damages in the event of rescission. Without that characterisation, winning the case can leave you having to pay money back.
The guarantee everyone cites no longer exists
Pages devoted to the viager almost unanimously present the vendor's lien (privilège du vendeur) as the security that protects the seller-annuitant (crédirentier). That lien was abolished by ordinance no. 2021-1192 of 15 September 2021, which came into force on 1 January 2022. It was replaced by a special statutory mortgage, provided for in article 2402 of the code civil.
The replacement is not merely a matter of vocabulary, and above all the confusion gives away the age of the pages: we found a well-ranked broker page describing the mechanism as being in force and basing it on article 2374 of the code civil — repealed by that same ordinance. A single article cited in the entire page, and it has been dead for four years.
One limit remains that neither the lien nor the mortgage crosses: if the buyer becomes the subject of insolvency proceedings, those securities become largely ineffective. The Congrès des notaires (the annual congress of French notaries) wrote as much in 2023.
The price is governed by no official scale
Here is the other great confusion, and it is an expensive one.
What the two scales invoked actually say
Article 1976 of the code civil states the principle: “A life annuity may be created at whatever rate the contracting parties see fit to set.” Nothing more. No statutory scale applies.
The two tables nevertheless invoked over and over do not govern sales. Article 669 of the CGI (Code général des impôts — the French General Tax Code), which splits usufruct and bare ownership according to age, applies only “for the assessment of registration duties and of the land registration tax” (our translation). Article 762 bis, which sets the value of a right of use and occupancy at 60% of the value of the usufruct, applies only “for the assessment of duties on transfers made free of charge” — inheritances and gifts. Neither of them says what occupancy is worth in a sale. We set out the mechanics of article 669 in our article on the splitting of ownership and the usufruct tax scale.
As for the barème Daubry, the market reference since 1995, it is a private professional tool with no official or regulatory status. The Congrès des notaires is in fact calling for a uniform statutory method to be created: the profession itself is saying that the price of a viager is governed by nothing.
What the gap represents, in euros
Take a case and work it through in full. A flat is worth €300,000 with vacant possession. The seller is 75; her life expectancy is 15.1 years according to INSEE (the French national statistics institute). The market rent for the property would be €900 a month, or €10,800 a year. We take a discount rate of 4%, an assumption that is stated and open to debate.
| Method | Value of the retained right of occupancy | Occupied value |
|---|---|---|
| Economic calculation (capitalised rent) | €112,860 — 37.6% | €187,140 |
| Tax scale (669 then 762 bis) | €54,000 — 18.0% | €246,000 |
| Gap | €58,860 | in the buyer's favour |
The tax scale values the occupancy at half its economic worth. A seller who accepted it out of deference to an “official” figure would be giving up close to €59,000. Case law, for its part, does reason in economic value: since 1998 the Cour de cassation has held that whether the price is a genuine one is assessed by comparing the annuity with the interest on the capital actually transferred, having regard to the right retained.
On the economic basis, with a bouquet of €50,000, €137,140 remains to be converted into an annuity: €1,094 a month.
The methodological error that costs 12% of the annuity
One last subtlety, never flagged, and yet capable of being quantified. Capitalising on average life expectancy — fifteen years of annuity, full stop — is not the same as an actuarial calculation on the life table, which weights each year by the probability of still being alive. Because the discounting function is concave, the simplified method always overstates the coefficient.
In our case, the coefficient goes from 10.45 to 11.17, a gap of nearly 7%. The annuity then falls to €965 a month instead of €1,094: €129 less every month, 12% of the annuity lost, for a difference of method that nobody explains to the seller.
Who pays what, once the sale is signed
Everything turns on a choice that many deeds settle without explaining it: does the seller retain a usufruct or a simple right of use and occupancy? These are not the same powers. A usufructuary “enjoys things owned by another as the owner himself does” — and may therefore let the property. The holder of a right of use and occupancy may not: they occupy, and that is all. In an occupied viager it is almost always this second right that is chosen, and that also changes who is liable for the taxe foncière (the French local property tax).
On works, the code civil draws an old but clear dividing line: article 605 puts maintenance repairs on the party enjoying the property, and major repairs on the owner; article 606 lists those major repairs — main walls and vaults, beams and entire roofs, dykes and retaining walls. Everything else is maintenance.
Tax, on both sides of the deed
For the seller, the annuity is taxable only as to a fraction, fixed according to age when enjoyment of the annuity begins — and that fraction is then frozen for life. Article 158, 6 of the CGI sets it at 70% below 50, 50% from 50 to 59, 40% from 60 to 69, and 30% above 69.
Watch the drafting: the code states a taxable fraction, never an allowance. The two series look alike and run in opposite directions — a 30% taxable fraction above 69 corresponds to a 70% allowance. Inverting them is the most widespread copying error on this subject.
On social levies, one point calls for precision. Since the loi de financement de la sécurité sociale for 2026 (the French social security financing act), the CSG (contribution sociale généralisée — the French general social contribution) on investment income has risen from 9.2% to 10.6%, taking the total to 18.6%. A reduced rate of 9.2%, or 17.2% in total, is maintained — but for an exhaustive list covering “the income referred to in point a of section I of article L. 136-6” (our translation), that is, rental income. Life annuities created for valuable consideration, however, appear in point b of that same article. They therefore fall under the ordinary rate.
⚠️ Several pages, including official ones, still show 17.2% for the life annuity. That rate is indeed the one for rental income and property capital gains, maintained by way of exception — and it is precisely that proximity which keeps the confusion alive. Check the date of the page you are reading. The good news, on the other hand: the base is not the gross annuity but only the taxable fraction, and 6.8 points of CSG remain deductible from total income.
One cash-flow trap is worth knowing about: the property capital gain is calculated neither on the bouquet alone, nor on the sum of the annuity instalments paid, but on the capital value of the annuity plus the bouquet. The seller can therefore be taxed on a price they have not received. The main-residence exemption neutralises the most common case, but it covers neither second homes nor buy-to-let property. To place these mechanisms within a transfer on death, see our article on calculating inheritance tax on a property.
On the buyer's side, registration duties do not bear on the bouquet alone: article 683 of the CGI assesses them on the stated price plus the capital value of the liabilities assumed, that is, here, the capital value of the annuity as expressed in the deed — on €187,140 in our example, and not on €300,000.
Mon Simulateur Immobilier viager calculator
The calculator works out the occupancy discount on the economic value of the retained right, not on a tax scale applied outside its own scope, then splits the price between bouquet and annuity according to the seller's age and the rate chosen. It shows the gap, in euros, against what the article 669 scale would give — so that you know what you are agreeing to if it is put to you.
Conclusion
A viager is not a financial product, it is a contract. It is judged, therefore, not on a headline yield but on what it stipulates: the rescission clause, the characterisation of the instalments, the nature of the right retained, the method used to calculate the price. None of those four points is governed by a scale, and none of them is dealt with by the pages offering you a free estimate in three clicks.
Before signing anything, run the calculation on your own figures with the Mon Simulateur Immobilier viager calculator, then take the result to your notaire — it is the notaire who will draft the clauses on which everything else depends.
