Buying a House in France as a Norwegian Buyer: Ten Days You Never Had

In Norway an accepted bid is already a contract. In France you get ten days to change your mind, and a transfer bill more than twice the size.

Two things move at once. Transfer duty on an existing French home totals 5.81% of the price where the département held its rate, and about 6.32% where it voted the higher one, against Norwegian dokumentavgift of 2.5%. In return French law gives the buyer a ten day withdrawal period that Norwegian law does not.

What the buyer pays on transfer of an existing home

Where the buyer is buying	Rate (%)
France, raised departmental rate		6.32%
France, standard departmental rate		5.81%
Norway, dokumentavgift		2.50%

What are frais de notaire actually made of?

Mostly tax, and only a slice of it reaches the notaire. DMTO is short for droits de mutation à titre onéreux, the duties charged when a property changes hands for money. On its page for buying an existing property, the Direction générale des Finances publiques, the French public finances directorate, splits them into a departmental duty of between 1.20% and 4.50% of the price, with 4.50% the most widespread in practice, an additional 1.20% collected for the communes, and assessment and collection costs for the state worth 2.37% of the departmental duty. It puts the maximum overall rate at 5.81% of the purchase price, with a contribution de sécurité immobilière of 0.10% on top.

Why does the same house cost more in one département?

A local vote decides it. The Bulletin officiel des finances publiques, the tax administration's official bulletin, records that the loi de finances pour 2025 allows départements to charge beyond 4.50% and up to 5%, for three years from 1 April 2025. Run the same components on a 5% departmental duty and the total works out at about 6.32%.

The bulletin adds that the increase does not apply where the property is a first property for the buyer and is intended as their main residence, and that the 2026 finance law changed the timetable for those departmental decisions. That relief is written around a first main home, which is not what a French holiday house is.

On a 400,000 euro apartment the arithmetic is blunt. At 5.81% the duty is 23,240 euro; at 6.32% it is 25,280 euro. Norwegian dokumentavgift of 2.5% on the same price would be 10,000 euro.

The ten days a Norwegian has never had

France hands the buyer a statutory retreat that Norwegian law does not. Service-Public, the French government's public information service, states that a non professional buyer of residential property has 10 days to withdraw, running from the day after the registered letter notifying the preliminary contract is first presented. It puts the deposit on a compromis de vente at generally 10% of the sale price, held in the notaire's escrow account until the sale completes.

Norway runs the other way round. Home sales there are governed by avhendingslova, the act on the transfer of property, and once a bid is accepted both sides are bound: no second contract stage, no statutory period to reconsider. A Norwegian who treats the French compromis as the point of no return is giving up ten free days.

Norway also sits outside the European Union but inside Schengen, so the 90 days in any 180 limit the European Commission sets out for third country nationals does not bind Norwegians.

What owning it costs every year

Three recurring bills, plus one that reaches only larger holdings. Service-Public sets out the taxe foncière, owed by whoever owns the property on 1 January, and the taxe d'habitation sur les résidences secondaires, which survived the abolition of the main residence version and varies by commune. Charges de copropriété, the service charges of the owners' body, sit on top.

If the property is let, the Direction générale des Finances publiques applies a minimum rate of 20% to a non resident's French source income, rising to 30% above a threshold, with the option of the taux moyen where that is lower. And a non resident whose net French property exceeds 1,300,000 euro on 1 January falls into the IFI, the impôt sur la fortune immobilière, France's wealth tax on real estate.

Where the numbers stop

Nobody publishes how many French homes Norwegians buy. Notaires de France, the profession's national body, reports that non resident foreigners made about 2% of purchases of existing homes on average across 2005 to 2015, and 1.5% across 2010 to 2015. Its nationality breakdown puts Denmark, Sweden and Norway on a single line labelled Scandinaves, worth 5% of non resident foreign buyers in 2015. Norway is never split out on its own, and Finland does not appear at all.

We do not give buying or selling advice, and nothing here is a view on French property. What the cited sources support is checkable: 5.81% total duty where the département held at 4.50%, about 6.32% where it voted the 5% ceiling, ten days to withdraw with no reason given, and the IFI above 1.3 million euro. Our piece on how a département sets your transfer bill goes further into the local vote, and the Spanish version covers a market where the rate is regional.

AiMYNDi reads the listing, the copropriété accounts and the legal paperwork for a specific property, so a charge or a voted works programme shows up before the compromis rather than after it. You can see an example of what a report looks like first.