In 2024, 496,654 applications to switch mortgage borrower's insurance (assurance emprunteur) were filed in France. In the same year, 22.15 million policies were in force. In other words: one policy in forty-five was the subject of a switching request, even though the law has allowed that switch at any time, free of charge and without notice, since 1 June 2022.
It is not that borrowers are unaware of their right. It is that, for a good many of them, exercising it gains them almost nothing — and nobody has any interest in telling them so.
In 32% of cases, the bank's group policy is the cheapest on the market — and for 36% of borrowers, the gap with the best alternative offer stays below €2,000 over the whole term of the loan, or €8.50 a month. This does not come from a broker: it comes from the CCSF (Comité consultatif du secteur financier — the French financial sector advisory committee), in its report to Parliament.
What this article covers
Exactly what the law gives you, text by text, and what 1 September 2026 actually changed — far less than you are being told. Why two thirds of borrowers gain nothing by switching, and from what age an outside policy (délégation d'assurance) becomes more expensive. What the price does not tell you. And what to do if your bank refuses.
What the law gives you, text by text
The loi Lemoine (Law no. 2022-270 of 28 February 2022) gave borrowers three rights that have not moved since. The point is worth making at the outset, because half the pages devoted to the subject suggest otherwise: as at 3 September 2026, no text has amended this regime. All the articles that carry it display, on Légifrance, the same note “amended by Law no. 2022-270” (our translation) and none later.
Cancel whenever you like, including on an older loan
Article L. 113-12-2 of the Insurance Code is unambiguous: the insured “may cancel the policy at any time from the signing of the loan offer” (our translation). Two points matter. First, that right “belongs exclusively to the insured” — the insurer, for its part, cannot cancel on the ground of an aggravated risk. Second, if the lender refuses, “the insurance policy is not cancelled”: you are never left uncovered between two policies.
The regime applies to every policy. Article 8 of the act had staggered the entry into force in two steps — new offers on 1 June 2022, policies already running on 1 September 2022 — and both of those deadlines are four years behind us.
Borrowing without a health questionnaire, and the right to be forgotten
Article L. 113-2-1 of the Insurance Code removes the medical questionnaire on two cumulative conditions: the insured share does not exceed €200,000 per insured person, and repayment ends before the 60th birthday. The ceiling is assessed per person, across all credit institutions combined — that detail is not in the code but in Article 3 of the order of 27 May 2022. A couple each insured for 50% can therefore borrow €400,000 without filling in a questionnaire.
This ceiling has never been uprated. The act provides that a decree adopted after consultation of the Conseil d'État “may lay down more favourable conditions” (our translation): four years on, that power has not been used. The €200,000 of 2022 buys markedly less housing today.
The right to be forgotten, for its part, is set by Article L. 1141-5 of the Public Health Code: five years after the end of the treatment protocol and with no relapse, for cancers and hepatitis C, with no age condition. We come back to it below: it is the most massively wrong figure on the web on this subject.
1 September 2026 is not a law
For some weeks now, several pages have been announcing “what changes on 1 September 2026”. Something does change, indeed, but not in the way people think.
On 26 May 2026 the CCSF adopted an opinion, published on 24 June, which gathers voluntary undertakings from the industry. Insurers propose in particular to apply a total permanent disability threshold of 66%, to assess incapacity by reference to the occupation actually carried on, and to cover death whatever its cause. These are real advances. They are not rules.
⚠️ The distinction is not legal fussiness. An industry undertaking recorded in an opinion cannot be relied on before a court, carries no penalty, and its timetable is the one the industry itself proposed: application to new business from 1 September 2026, general roll-out announced for 1 January or 1 June 2027 depending on the strand, and a review “by 2028” (our translation). Writing “the law now requires” is false. Writing “insurers are undertaking, under the aegis of the CCSF” is accurate.
And on the most sensitive point there is no undertaking at all. Clauses excluding pre-existing medical conditions — the ones that hollow out the cover for anyone who has already been ill — are not removed. The opinion notes the existence of “diverging legal analyses” and the Committee confines itself to “taking the view, for its part” that they do not comply with the purpose of the act. A senator did put the point to the government in February 2026, disputing that an advisory committee can add to the law; written question no. 07803 has still received no answer.
Why two thirds of borrowers gain nothing
This is where this article parts company with what you will read elsewhere, and it is better said plainly: we do not sell insurance, and that is what allows us to write what follows.
The figure the market never quotes
In its review of borrower's insurance submitted to Parliament, the CCSF compared, for one and the same file, the bank's group policy and the best alternative offer available. The result: in 32% of cases, the bank policy is the cheapest. For a further 36%, a gap exists but stays below €2,000 over the whole term of the loan — the Committee itself translates this as “a monthly saving of only €8.50” (our translation). Gaps above €7,000, the ones brandished in advertising, concern 2% of customers, overwhelmingly managerial and professional households.
The same imbalance shows up in the usage statistics: higher socio-professional categories account for 58% of switches, while they make up only 27% of the mortgage book. The right is the same for everyone; the gain is not.
After 45, the balance tips
There is no official scale of “average rates by age” — every range in circulation is a reconstruction. The only primary source is the CCSF, which publishes annual premiums in euros per €100,000 borrowed, across nine standard profiles. Expressed as a percentage of the capital borrowed, those premiums give the following order of magnitude.
| Profile | Group policy | Outside policy |
|---|---|---|
| 25-30 years old | ≈ 0.19% | ≈ 0.07% |
| 40 years old | ≈ 0.28% | ≈ 0.15 to 0.20% |
| 50 years old | ≈ 0.31 to 0.38% | ≈ 0.44 to 0.59% |
The crossover happens between 40 and 45. Beyond that, an outside policy becomes more expensive than the group policy — the clearest example in the CCSF's surveys being a 45-year-old building-trade manual worker who smokes, charged €683 a year on an outside policy against €307 on the group policy.
The explanation is structural and deserves to be understood: a group policy pools risk, an alternative offer segments it. Segmentation favours young, non-smoking, sedentary profiles; it penalises precisely those whom pooling protected. The “two to four times cheaper” you read everywhere describes a thirty-year-old borrower, a manager and a non-smoker. It does not describe the market.
These premiums date from 2023 and relate to constructed profiles, surveyed across four banking networks and four alternative providers. They give an order of magnitude and a slope, not a quotation. The only figure that counts for your own file is the one on your standardised information sheet.
What the price does not tell you
Comparing two insurance policies on price alone is like comparing two cars on fuel consumption. The law itself acknowledges as much: the lender cannot refuse a policy offering “an equivalent level of cover” (our translation), and the CCSF specifies that “equivalence of the level of cover does not imply that the cover is identical” (our translation).
In practice, your bank draws on an industry list of 26 criteria, of which it may retain eleven at most, plus four for loss of employment. It is those eleven criteria, and those alone, that your new policy has to satisfy; they appear on the personalised sheet the bank must give you. The “eighteen criteria” figure in circulation is wrong.
⚠️ The most counter-intuitive fact in the file: the ACPR has measured a claims refusal rate of 23% on alternative policies, against 13.5% on those distributed by lenders — and more than a third of providers refuse over 40% of disability claims. A cheaper policy that pays out less often is not a good deal. Of 139 policies analysed, 85 also provide for benefits to stop on cancellation.
Three points therefore deserve to be read before the price: the definition of incapacity — assessed by reference to your own occupation or to “any occupation whatsoever”, which is not remotely the same cover — the waiting period, frequently 90 days and sometimes extended to 120 or 180, and the exclusions, first among them back conditions and psychiatric conditions. The package the CCSF regards as comprehensive includes them; many cheap policies leave them out.
For an honest comparison, a single indicator does the job: the TAEA, the annual percentage rate of the insurance (taux annuel effectif de l'assurance). It is calculated as the difference between the TAEG (the annual percentage rate of charge) with insurance and the TAEG without, and the law requires it to be displayed together with the total cost in euros over the term of the loan. It neutralises the question of the calculation base — initial capital or outstanding capital — which makes the “rates” on display impossible to compare with one another.
If your bank refuses
Refusal is not discretionary, and the procedure is bounded by precise deadlines.
What to do, in order: send your switching request with the new policy and its standardised information sheet; the bank has ten working days to reply; a refusal must be explicit and fully reasoned, identifying the equivalence criteria that are not met; if it agrees, the amendment to the loan agreement must be issued within ten working days and no fee may be charged to you. Once those deadlines have passed, or faced with an unreasoned refusal, refer the matter to the bank's ombudsman and then report it to the DGCCRF (the French consumer protection and antifraud authority).
That last point is not theoretical. The DGCCRF inspected 61 institutions and found an irregularity rate of 25%; its 2025 activity report records nearly €900,000 in fines imposed on four banks that were obstructing the exercise of this right. The penalties are administrative — €3,000 for an individual, €15,000 for a legal entity — and they really are imposed.
Insurance is not, for that matter, the only line in your loan agreement open to renegotiation: early repayment penalties are also subject to a statutory cap that is often overlooked.
One figure to put the worry in perspective, all the same: of the 496,654 switching requests filed in 2024, 93.91% were accepted. Refusal is the exception, not the rule. The real brake is not the bank's refusal: it is that most borrowers never ask.
Four false claims in circulation
“The right to be forgotten is ten years”
It is five years, since 2 March 2022, and with no age condition. The wording still found everywhere — ten years, cut to five if the cancer occurred before the age of eighteen — is the one that applied before the loi Lemoine. It is repeated on pages updated recently, which makes it all the more credible and all the more wrong.
“The bank risks a €3,000 fine if it does not reply”
The article on which that claim rested, L. 341-39 of the Consumer Code, was repealed by the loi Lemoine itself. But do not conclude from that that the penalty has gone: it was moved to Article L. 341-44-1, in the form of an administrative fine, and that is the one the DGCCRF applies. The penalty exists; it is simply no longer where people look for it.
“The AERAS ceiling is €320,000”
It is €420,000. The AERAS agreement — a French scheme giving access to borrowing and insurance for people with an aggravated health risk — has had its ceiling set at that level since September 2024, as the guide published by France Assureurs (the French insurance industry federation) confirms. Many broker pages are therefore about two years behind on a figure that governs access to the scheme for the borrowers concerned.
“Insurance accounts for 30% of the cost of credit”
That figure no longer has any current official measurement. Its only institutional trace goes back to a CCSF report of 2020, in an aside expressly tied to the low-rate context of the time: insurance weighed heavily because interest weighed little. Rates have risen since — 3.27% in June 2026 for new housing loans, against about 1.1% in 2020 — and the share taken by insurance has therefore fallen as a matter of arithmetic. The only figure that counts is your own TAEA, which appears on your offer.
Mon Simulateur Immobilier borrower's insurance calculator
The calculator compares the total cost of two policies over the whole term of your loan, taking account of the calculation base — initial capital or outstanding capital — of your insured share and of your age. It gives you the gap in euros and the month from which a switch becomes worthwhile, rather than an average percentage that describes nobody.
Conclusion
The loi Lemoine did what was asked of it: it opened a right, whole and unconditional. What it could not do was guarantee that exercising it would earn anything. For a young, non-smoking borrower in good health, switching insurance remains one of the most profitable savings in the whole loan file. For many others, the gain runs to a few euros a month — and sometimes to cover lost.
The right question is therefore not “should I switch?” but “how much, and for what cover?”. Do the sums on your own figures with the Mon Simulateur Immobilier borrower's insurance calculator, and compare TAEAs rather than headline rates. If the gap is eight euros a month, you will at least know you are not missing out on a fortune. To place insurance within the file as a whole, see also our article on the salary needed to borrow €200,000 to €300,000.
