The Security Deposit Is Not an Advance on Your Last Month’s Rent
There is one sentence every French landlord eventually hears, whether on the phone or in a text message sent late on a Sunday evening: “For the last month, just take it out of the deposit.”
It is never phrased as a request. It is an announcement. The tenant has already decided, and is merely informing you. Some even have the nerve to add that “everyone does it,” which happens to be true, and which is precisely the problem.
So let us set the record straight, because this particular belief is expensive, and not only for landlords.
To begin with, it is not a “caution”
A brief note on vocabulary, and this is not pedantry. In French law, a caution is a person, not a sum of money. It is your uncle, your father, your employer, whoever signs a deed committing to pay in your place if you fail to. A guarantor shows up, signs, and pledges their own assets. English speakers renting in France are often caught out by this, since the word looks like “caution” but means “guarantor.”
What you hand over to the landlord when you move in is a dépôt de garantie, a security deposit. A sum of money, frozen in place, which for the duration of the lease belongs to no one in particular: it has left your pocket, it has not really entered the landlord’s, it simply waits.
The slippage in language matters. Call it “the caution” and you turn it into a kind of credit line to be drawn down at will. Call it what it is, a security deposit, and its function becomes obvious again: it is a guarantee, it guarantees something, and a guarantee spent in advance guarantees nothing at all.
What the law actually says
The framework is set out in Article 22 of the French law of 6 July 1989, which governs residential tenancies. Here is the substance of it.
The amount is capped: one month’s rent excluding charges for an unfurnished rental, two months for a furnished one (that second case falls under Article 25-6 of the same law). It cannot be revised during the lease, nor indexed to inflation.
The deposit must be returned within one month of the handover of keys if the move-out inspection matches the move-in inspection, and within two months if it reveals damage. Past that deadline, the landlord owes the tenant a penalty of 10 percent of the monthly rent excluding charges for every month of delay begun. The sanction is real, it applies automatically, and landlords who drag their feet are wrong to assume it exists only on paper.
One detail tenants forget without fail: that penalty is owed only if the tenant provided a forwarding address at the time the keys were handed back. Leaving without a new address means forfeiting the very sanction you were counting on invoking. The deadline still runs, but the 10 percent evaporates. Write your new address on the move-out inspection report. It takes ten seconds.
Another provision that triggers accusations of bad faith even though it is perfectly lawful: when the property sits in a condominium building, the landlord may hold back up to 20 percent of the deposit until the building’s annual accounts are settled. The reason is straightforward. The actual charges for the current year are not yet known, so the account cannot be closed. The remaining 80 percent must still be returned within the usual deadlines, and the balance settled within a month of the accounts being approved. This is not a landlord’s trick. It is written into the same Article 22.
On the question of what the deposit actually covers, I have to correct a misconception that circulates widely, including among people acting in good faith: no, it does not apply solely to damage. The law allows the landlord to deduct any sum the tenant owes, which includes tenant repairs, reconciled service charges, and yes, unpaid rent. A landlord may legitimately set an arrears balance against the deposit.
The real distinction lies elsewhere, and it is decisive: the landlord does the deducting, not the tenant the deciding.
The difference between a deduction and a shakedown
When a landlord withholds money from the deposit, it happens at the end, against receipts, after the inspection, with full knowledge of the property’s actual condition. It is a final settlement of accounts.
When a tenant unilaterally skips the final month’s rent, the sequence runs backward: the guarantee is consumed before the risk it covers has had a chance to materialize. It is removing the airbag two minutes before the corner.
And the landlord who goes along with it ends up in an absurd position. A month later, the property comes back. If the floors are intact, fine, nothing lost. If the tenant has left a wreck, there is nothing left to draw on, and all that remains is the courts, meaning months of proceedings to recover perhaps a few hundred euros from someone who moved out without leaving an address.
I have already written here about what a move-out inspection can look like: floors buried under food waste, furniture destroyed, drums of fuel stacked in the garage. In a situation like that, the deposit does not cover even a quarter of the restoration. And if it has already been “spent” on an unpaid final month, it may as well never have existed.
The honest tenant is the one who pays for it
Here is what bothers me most: the practice punishes the wrong people.
Plenty of those who withhold the last month’s rent have nothing to hide. They hand back the property in good condition, they think of the maneuver as clever, and above all they avoid fronting two months of housing costs in the middle of a move. On a human level, it is understandable.
The trouble is that the identical maneuver, word for word, is used by the tenant who has kicked in a door, burned a countertop, or left six months of service charges unpaid. From where the landlord stands, the sentence sounds exactly the same, and there is no way to tell which kind of tenant is speaking until the keys come back. By which point it is too late.
Over time, the landlord stops trying to tell them apart. Screening gets tighter, more guarantees are demanded, a guarantor is required even on a solid file, and unconventional profiles are quietly set aside. The impeccable tenant ends up paying, in restricted access to housing, for the mess left by others. That is exactly the mechanism I describe when I explain how I filter applications before the viewing even happens: that rigidity is not contempt, it is scar tissue.
No, there is no French registry of “defaulting tenants”
While we are dismantling bad ideas, let us deal with the most common threat coming from the landlord’s side.
French-language posts circulate online, translated wholesale from other countries, solemnly explaining that a landlord facing arrears can have the tenant listed on a “registry of defaulting tenants.” This is false. No such registry exists in France, and its absence is not a legislative oversight, it is a deliberate choice. The CNIL, the French data protection authority, has shut down every private attempt to build that kind of blacklist.
Creating or contributing to such a file constitutes unlawful data processing, punishable under Article 226-16 of the French Criminal Code by up to five years’ imprisonment and a fine of 300,000 euros. The landlord who brandishes this threat is in far deeper trouble than the tenant who owes him six hundred euros.
In the same vein: no, you do not “file a criminal complaint” over unpaid rent. Arrears are a civil dispute, not an offense. The complaint would be dismissed without action, and the time spent would never be recovered.
What actually works
The genuine answer is less dramatic than the threat, but it works.
Everything is decided upstream: a verified application, a solid guarantor, rent guarantee insurance or the state-backed Visale scheme where the profile allows it. It is thankless, it takes time, and it is the only real protection there is. The viewing itself often reveals more than a payslip does.
Downstream, the sequence is well marked out: a friendly reminder, then a formal demand by registered letter, then a formal notice to pay served by a judicial officer, which triggers the two-month window under the lease’s termination clause, and finally an application to the tenancy judge. If insurance covers the lease, that is what you call on first, and quickly, because policies impose short reporting deadlines.
And at the end, you return the deposit within the deadline, with a clear statement and supporting documents. A landlord who demands compliance with the law and complies with it himself stands on far firmer ground in front of a judge.
Three habits I recommend to every landlord
While we are here, these are the three practices that have spared me the most trouble. None is mandatory, none costs money, and each one solves a problem before it arises.
Acknowledge the notice in writing, with your calculated end date
Notice periods are the blind spot in the calendar. In designated high-demand areas, and in several personal circumstances set out in the law, a French tenant can give one month’s notice instead of three, and the clock starts when the letter is received. Many landlords realize too late that there will be no time to re-let without a vacancy.
As soon as the notice arrives, reply in writing. Confirm the exact end-of-lease date as you have calculated it, propose a slot for the move-out inspection, and state in the same breath that rent and charges remain due until that date. Nothing aggressive about it, it reads as routine administration. But it sets the frame before the line about the deposit is ever spoken, and it stands as dated evidence if a dispute arises anyway.
Offer an interim walkthrough a month before move-out
The lease does not require it, nothing forbids it, and a tenant acting in good faith almost always agrees. You come by four to six weeks before the departure date, you look together at what counts as ordinary wear and what counts as tenant repairs, and you say plainly what you will withhold on the day if nothing changes.
The benefit runs both ways. The tenant has time to make good, often far more cheaply than a contractor would, which suits them as much as it suits you. And you know what is coming, so you can schedule the restoration work and the next tenancy. Most disputes over security deposits are not really about the amount withheld, they are about the surprise. Remove the surprise and you remove the dispute.
Send a written statement, even when you are returning everything
One page is enough. The deposit amount at the top, the deductions itemized line by line with a reference to the corresponding entry in the inspection report, quotes or invoices attached, the balance at the bottom, and the transfer date. Send it every time, including when there is nothing to withhold and you are returning the full amount.
It is five minutes of work that forecloses any argument, and in front of a judge, the landlord who produces that document starts several lengths ahead of the one explaining from memory what he withheld and why.
It is also, and to my mind this is the crucial part, the exact mirror image of what I hold against the tenant in this piece. He takes without justifying and without warning. You withhold with justification, on the record, within the deadline. That asymmetry is what gives your position its legitimacy, and it only holds if you actually live up to it.
A closing word
I am not among those who spend the year lamenting the fate of landlords. Between the taxation of furnished rentals, property tax and the regulatory pile-up, there is quite enough to say without adding self-pity to the mix.
But on this specific point there is no ideological argument to be had. A security deposit is not an advance on rent, not a savings pot, not a cash-flow convenience. It is a guarantee, and a guarantee is only useful if it is still there when the moment comes.
Pay your final month’s rent. Hand the place back clean. Get your deposit within the month. Everyone comes out ahead, starting with the next tenant looking for an apartment in your town.