A French national newspaper blames the city’s lost tax revenue on the surcharge for second homes. That is to skip what really matters: the massive transformation of Biarritz’s housing stock by short-term rental platforms, and the regulation that changed everything.
You sometimes need a translation dictionary to read what the French national press writes about the Basque Country. Le Figaro published this week a piece presenting Biarritz as the victim of its own tax policy: by adding a 60 % surcharge on second homes, the city would have lost a million euros. A demonstration, we are told, that trying to curb real estate speculation can backfire.
The argument is seductive. It is also wrong — or, at the very least, seriously incomplete.
What Le Figaro says
The 60 % surcharge on the TH (housing tax) is said to have triggered a flight of second-home declarations toward primary residences, causing €750,000 in lost tax revenue and €250,000 in SRU penalties — a million euros of shortfall, directly chargeable to municipal policy.
The real chronology Le Figaro ignores
To understand Biarritz’s tax situation, the facts must be put back in order. The 60 % TH surcharge was voted in September 2021. At that point, Biarritz already had around 2,500 active Airbnb listings. But it was in March 2023 that the regulation of the Communauté d’Agglomération Pays Basque (CAPB) came into force, imposing a compensation principle for any change of use toward tourist rental.
The result was immediate and spectacular: between March 2023 and March 2024, change-of-use authorizations collapsed by 92 %. In one year. It was not the TH surcharge that restructured Biarritz’s housing stock — it was the Airbnb regulation.
| Indicator | Value |
|---|---|
| Change-of-use authorizations March 2023–2024 | −92 % |
| Active Airbnb listings in Biarritz end of 2023 | 2,500 |
| Biarritz homes on short-term rental | 1/4 — highest in France outside Paris |
| Price per m² rise since the first lockdown | +40 % |
Confusing cause and effect
What Le Figaro describes — owners reclassifying their property as a primary residence to escape the tax — is a real phenomenon. But attributing it to the TH surcharge is to confuse the trigger with the context. The underlying movement is the pressure built up by years of massive short-term rental growth, which pushed owners to optimize their tax position by every available means: declaring as primary residence, switching to long-term rental to escape the surcharge, or keeping the furnished tourist rental status as long as regulation allowed.
By reducing all of this to “the city shot itself in the foot with its tax,” the national daily erases three years of structural transformation of Biarritz’s housing market and the regulatory work carried out at the agglomeration level.
One in four homes in Biarritz is offered as a short-term rental. That is the highest rate in France outside Paris. No serious journalist can analyze local taxation without taking this structural fact into account.
CAPB data, 2023
What the administrative accounts show
Reading the city’s administrative accounts puts in perspective the €750,000 figure of tax losses put forward by France 3 and picked up unchanged by Le Figaro. That loss is real — nobody denies it. But it is the result of a multi-stage process: the explosion of the furnished tourist rental stock, the gradual contraction of declared second homes, then the effect of the 2023 CAPB regulation that shut the valve.
Blaming the TH surcharge for it is reading the effects backwards. The surcharge was voted precisely because the housing stock was emptying out of its permanent residents. It did not create the problem — it tried to respond to it.
A fiscal convention for the future
The convention currently under negotiation between the CAPB and the tax authorities — mentioned briefly in Le Figaro’s article without grasping its scope — is precisely the structural answer to the problem. It will allow cross-referencing residence declarations with utility consumption records, targeting owners who occupy their property a few weeks per year while declaring it as a primary residence. That is serious tax investigation, not the “vicious circle” fantasized by the national press.
Biarritz is paying today the price of twenty years of laissez-faire on tourist rentals. Regulation is finally arriving. To criticize it before it has even produced its full effects, blaming it for dysfunctions that predate it, is exactly the kind of shortcut that makes local policies illegible to the general public.
A matter of fairness, beyond the fiscal
Beyond the lost revenue, what is at stake is a matter of fairness. For Biarritz residents who struggle to find housing, primary-residence fraud has a direct effect: it artificially inflates housing statistics, masks the reality of real estate pressure, and mechanically slows the construction of social housing.
It has a huge impact on the financing of local authorities, but also on housing for the people who actually live here.
For Biarritz owners who actually live in their primary residence, on the other hand, there is nothing to fear: the audits will target multi-occupants whose effective year-round occupancy is corroborated by no indicator — water and electricity consumption first and foremost.
For the new municipal majority, this is a first signal sent. On housing — the central axis of the campaign of the two merged lists (Blanco / Dussaussois) — the city intends to recover, through the agglomeration, the levers that the municipality has never had on its own. Where Le Figaro sees a “vicious circle,” what should be read is a long-term policy that is starting to equip itself with the tools to implement it.
Ici Biarritz · May 2026 · Independent local journalism — Zilbor