Droits de mutation: three rates, set by département
What buyers call frais de notaire is mostly not the notaire's fee. The bulk of it is droits de mutation, a transfer duty collected for the département, and most départements took the increase available to them in 2025. Three levels are now in use: 5.09% in a handful, the standard 5.80%, and 6.31% where the maximum rise was adopted.
Pick your taux départemental above and the completion figure changes; leave it unset and you get the 5.80% standard rate, which is right for most of the country but not all of it. On a 280,000 purchase the spread between 5.09% and 6.31% is about 3,400 euros.
The remaining 2.2% is the notaire's own emoluments, the disbursements and the registration costs. Together that is why buying an existing French home costs about 8% of the price to complete, one of the highest figures in this calculator.
Note that this is the existing-home basis. A new-build is sold with VAT instead and pays a much lower transfer duty, which is not modelled here.
Assurance emprunteur and a caution, instead of mortgage insurance
France has no mortgage insurance in the American sense. Lenders require assurance emprunteur, a life and disability policy that repays the loan if you cannot, and usually a caution, a guarantee from a body such as Crédit Logement, in place of a mortgage charge over the property. Neither is a loan-to-value premium, so neither appears as a separate field here; the assurance emprunteur premium is a real monthly cost and is worth adding to the home-insurance figure if you want the payment to be complete.
Taxe foncière is calculated from a cadastral rental value times municipal rates, so it behaves as a flat annual bill rather than a percentage of what you paid.