If you have spent any time looking at French rental listings, you will have seen a coloured A-to-G chart attached to almost every property. That is the Diagnostic de Performance Énergétique, the DPE. Many expats glance at it and move on. That can be an expensive mistake. The DPE affects your heating bills, your comfort in both summer and winter, your landlord’s ability to increase the rent, and in some cases whether a property can legally be rented at all.
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DPE ratings A to G at a glance
The DPE gives each property a rating based on its calculated energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions. It covers five main areas: heating, hot water, air conditioning, lighting, and auxiliary systems such as ventilation. The assessment takes into account insulation, windows, heating systems, and the energy source used. The landlord commissions and pays for it; you are entitled to see the full report, not just the coloured label in the advert.
Don't treat the DPE as "A good, G bad" and nothing more
France has an enormous variety of housing. A compact D-rated apartment in a neighbourhood you love may be a far better choice than a B-rated property you dislike. The DPE is best treated as a question generator, a signal to investigate further, rather than the single criterion on which you accept or reject a home.
When ratings become a legal problem
The DPE has significant legal consequences for landlords, and these consequences are tightening year by year. Understanding the timetable matters when you are choosing a rental you intend to keep for several years.
The practical implication for tenants: if you are signing a three-year lease on an F-rated property today, that property will hit the 2028 threshold before your tenancy naturally concludes. Ask the landlord what their plan is.
What "G-rated properties can't be rented" actually means
The rule applies progressively as leases are renewed or tacitly reconducted, not on a single date when all G-rated tenants must leave. Someone who signed a lease before the new rule applied was not suddenly required to move out. But a landlord renting a G-rated property now, under a standard residential lease, faces a genuine legal problem.
How the energy rating affects what your landlord can charge
For properties rated F or G, the normal annual rent revision using France’s Indice de Référence des Loyers (IRL) is frozen where the statutory conditions apply. This freeze started from 24 August 2022 for qualifying leases. Other mechanisms through which rents can normally increase, at renewal, at reletting, are also restricted for these properties.
These are two separate rules, worth distinguishing:
- The rent freeze prevents F- and G-rated landlords from applying the normal annual IRL revision in qualifying leases
- The decency rule prevents a G-rated property from meeting the legal standard required for a standard rental in metropolitan France under post-2025 rules
An F-rated property in 2026 can still be rented legally but cannot have its rent increased under normal mechanisms. A G-rated property faces both restrictions simultaneously.
What the DPE tells you about running costs and liveability
Every rental advert for a property requiring a DPE must show the estimated annual theoretical energy expenditure. This figure is calculated on standardised assumptions, it is not a prediction of your exact bills. Your actual costs will depend on how warm you keep the home, how many people live there, how much hot water you use, and the weather. Two households in the same property can produce very different bills.
The figure is still useful. It lets you compare properties on a standardised basis. A house advertised at €1,100/month may look like much better value than one at €1,300/month. But if the cheaper house is expensive to heat, requires a car for every journey, and has significantly higher utility costs, that €200 gap can disappear quickly. We always encourage clients to think about the total cost of the home, not just the headline rent.
The DPE also includes a summer comfort indicator, which can be particularly important when looking at top-floor apartments or properties in southern France. Bear in mind that this indicator assesses passive summer comfort only, it does not account for air conditioning. A property could score poorly on the indicator while having air conditioning installed, or vice versa. Use it as a prompt for questions, not a definitive answer.
What type of heating does the property use? Are the windows double-glazed? Is there roof and wall insulation? Is heating individual or part of a collective building system? Are there signs of damp or condensation? If you are viewing in July, imagine the property in January. If you are viewing in February, imagine a top-floor apartment in August. The DPE starts the conversation, the viewing and your questions finish it.
How the DPE calculation changed this year
A significant methodological change took effect on 1 January 2026: the primary-energy conversion factor for electricity in the DPE calculation fell from 2.3 to 1.9. This makes the calculation more favourable to electrically heated homes, meaning some properties improved their rating as a result.
Existing valid DPEs are not automatically invalidated. Where the new coefficient would improve a property’s classification, an official updated attestation can be generated free of charge through ADEME’s DPE observatory without requiring a new diagnostician visit. A further reduction, from 1.9 to 1.7, is confirmed for 1 January 2027, likely improving the rating of another group of electrically heated homes.
When browsing 2026 listings, if a property uses electric heating, ask whether an updated attestation exists under the new calculation. The building itself has not changed, the methodology has, so the physical characteristics still matter as much as the letter.
Frequently asked questions about the DPE in France
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