Debt Collection in France: Your Debtor Has a File

There is a phrase in French business that does more unpaid labor than any other: le règlement est en cours. Payment is in process. You have heard it four times now. You have re-read the contract twice, drafted the furious email, deleted it, and sent something polite instead. Your debtor in Lyon is counting on exactly that.

This briefing does something different. It follows one file from first excuse to frozen bank account, with the numbers attached. Names redacted. Procedure intact.

The bill your debtor's accountant has already calculated

France does not treat payment terms as a suggestion. The Commercial Code caps them at 60 days from invoice (45 days end-of-month where agreed), and the moment an invoice goes past due, two things attach to it by law — whether or not your contract mentions them.

First, late-payment interest at the European Central Bank rate plus 10 points, which in recent conditions has meant double digits. On €86,400, that is roughly €28 accruing every day the debtor stalls. Second, a fixed recovery indemnity of €40 per unpaid invoice. Per invoice. Here is what file FR-2481 actually looks like under French law at day 127:

The exporter, like most foreign creditors, had been politely requesting €86,400 — leaving four thousand euros on the table because nobody told him the bottom two lines exist. Put them in the demand. The point is not the €560. The point is that a demand itemized this way tells the debtor's counsel, in their own legal grammar, that you are fluent. Fluency changes how the file is handled on the other side.

In France, even anger has a procedure

The next document in FR-2481 is the mise en demeure: the formal notice of default. Registered letter, acknowledgment of receipt, contractual basis stated, principal, interest and indemnities itemized, hard deadline of 15 days. Sent from a foreign email address, it is a letter. Served through French counsel or by a commissaire de justice, it is an event.

Field note: the mise en demeure that works is the one the debtor's lawyer reads. Write it for the lawyer, not the debtor.

What happens on the other side is worth knowing. The letter lands, counsel is consulted, and counsel checks three things: is it itemized correctly, does it cite the statutory add-ons, is the deadline real. If all three are yes, the standard advice is to settle, because counsel knows precisely what document comes next — and that it costs the creditor almost nothing.

The €35 lawsuit

Day 143. The deadline has passed. The exporter's counsel files an injonction de payer at the commercial court: France's payment-order procedure and one of the great bargains in European civil justice. The application is decided on documents alone. The debtor is not heard at this stage. The court fee is around €35 — the price of a modest lunch in Lyon, which is fitting, because that is roughly how long the judge needs.

The order is granted and served. The debtor now has one month to lodge opposition, which would push the case onto the ordinary litigation track. The overwhelming majority never do — opposition means starting a real lawsuit, with real costs, over a debt the paperwork already proves. One month passes in silence. Day 196: the order becomes an enforceable title. The exporter has, functionally, won a lawsuit for €35 and two signatures.

Two refinements. Where the contract sets its own late-payment rate, French law imposes a floor of three times the legal interest rate, so a token contractual figure cannot shelter the debtor. And for urgent cases where the debt is not seriously disputable, the référé-provision offers a second fast lane — a summary hearing ordering provisional payment within weeks, built for debtors whose solvency is visibly deteriorating. For claims against debtors elsewhere in the EU, the European Payment Order runs on the same logic with one form in 27 countries.

The state knows where the money is

Now the part that shocks creditors from almost every other jurisdiction.

France maintains a registry of every bank account in the country. It is called FICOBA, it has existed since 1971, and as a judgment creditor you are on the guest list. The enforceable title goes to a commissaire de justice — the profession formerly known as bailiffs, renamed in 2022 and considerably more powerful than the old title suggests — who queries the registry, identifies where the debtor actually banks, and executes a saisie-attribution: a seizure that freezes the account at the instant of service, up to the amount owed.

In most jurisdictions, finding the debtor's bank is the creditor's problem, solved with luck and invoices. In France it is a database query performed by an officer of the law. Creditors who have spent two years chasing accounts in jurisdictions without registries tend to develop strong feelings about this.

File FR-2481: account frozen on day 206. Full settlement — principal, interest, indemnities, costs — within 72 hours. Nothing accelerates a debtor's payment process like discovering it has already happened.

The trap: when the debtor is dying

One scenario rewrites every rule above. If the debtor enters French insolvency — sauvegarde, redressement, liquidation — collection stops and a clock starts. Creditors must declare their claims within two months of the proceeding's publication in the official bulletin, or the claim is barred from the proceeding entirely. Foreign creditors get four months, an extension that exists precisely because they find out late.

The four-month clock is a courtesy to foreigners. The forclusion that follows it is not. France logged record business failures in 2025 — a wave we dissected in our analysis of the French late-payments crisis — which means every significant French customer belongs under monitoring. Insolvency publications are public. The creditors who collect from distressed French debtors are the ones already moving when the bulletin publishes; everyone else is queuing at the deadline.

And on healthy debtors, a quieter clock: commercial claims in France prescribe after five years. Our map of limitation periods across Europe shows how discreetly that guillotine falls.

The field manual

The FR-2481 sequence, generalized:

The entire documented path costs less than the interest accruing while a creditor waits politely. France rewards those who follow its forms, and it does so with a precision that borders on affection. The full procedural picture, timelines included, is on our France coverage page. Bring your documents. The Republic brings the database.