Paris’ city council considers a tax increase on wealthiest tourists

Thursday, September 29, 2022

The city of Paris is considering a tax on wealthy tourists.

In a recent report, the city council has recommended a higher tax on vacant housing and offices, and on more affluent visitors, which would require legislative intervention.

While the city estimates the cost of France‘s health crisis at 1.2 billion euros, between lost revenue and additional expenses, the current system of local government taxation is out of breath, and needs to be urgently reformed, said Nicolas Bonnet-Oulaldj, head of the Socialist Party, and Paul Simondon, deputy mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo’s Finance Department.

Among these, three are incentives for housing: the launch of an additional tax on vacant offices, the increase of the tax on vacant housing (at least four times) or the removal of the ceiling on the increase in the housing tax on secondary residences in tense areas.

Others are aimed at the most affluent tourists, with a removal of the ceiling on the tourist tax on luxury hotels and palaces.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Cannes, David Lisanard is openly inviting businessmen to settle in the southern French City.

He’s turned Paris’ tax project on large companies into an opportunity to attract companies. “Come to Cannes,” Lisanard wrote on his social media account.

Tax attractiveness and quality of life. Ideal for creating jobs and wealth, making a profit, investing, innovating.

The services of the Cannes Lérins Agglomeration and the city hall of Cannes are at your disposal, in particular for the availability of land and real estate, Lisanard wrote.

Anne Hidalgo’s administration in Paris blames the government for a lack of financial support since the health crisis.

It advocates a “national reflection in order to better tax the profits of multinationals based in Paris” and to make the digital economy and the delivery business contribute more through the creation of a tax on delivery fleets or products delivered.

For Simondon, the incentive tax tools can “be shared very widely by elected officials” of all stripes, including conservative mayors “in cities where the housing situation is very tense”.

If the loss of fiscal autonomy is the subject of a unanimous observation by elected officials, regardless of their political stripe in France, the capital has experienced an “amplified impact of the crisis” and there is a Parisian specificity on tourist taxes and second homes, said Bonnet-Oulaldj to a news agency.

Deputy mayor Simondon assures that some of the measures presented are “applicable as early as 2023” if a parliamentary majority is reached on the subject.

The tourist tax does not cost anything to the State, nor to the working classes, said Bonnet-Oulaldj, for whom these are measures of social justice.

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