It is a measure that will increase the tax of millions of French people. In his intervention on July 15, François Bayrou announced that he wanted to freeze the scale of income tax 2026. With two concrete consequences: on the one hand, an increase in the tax to be paid for the 18 million taxpayers already liable for IR this year. And on the other hand, the entry of several hundred thousand French people in the category of taxable homes.
Recall that, each year, the IR taxation slices are in principle revalued in order to take into account inflation, which should be between 1.5 and 2 % in 2025. Consequently, tax households whose income increases from one year to the other do not necessarily pay more tax. A rule which will however be exceptionally modified next year, if the government’s project were to appear in the finance law published at the end of the year.
To find out if you will pay the 2026 income tax after the scale freezing, you must take into account the tax thresholds corresponding to the number of tax shares in your home. If the scale remains unchanged, a bachelor would pay the IR in 2026 as soon as his taxable net income received in 2025 reached € 17,438. For a married or PACS couple, this threshold would be € 32,572. The tax threshold then increases with the number of tax shares of the household to reach, for example, € 38,320 for a couple with a child (2.5 parts), € 44,069 with two children (3 shares) and € 5566 with three children (4 parts). Below these thresholds, taxpayers would therefore be exempt from income tax 2026 after the implementation of the discount and the threshold of € 61 below which the tax is not recovered.
For single taxpayers with charges, the tax thresholds would be slightly different. A living parent alone with his child (1.5 share) would be taxable from € 23,187 of annual income, this threshold passing respectively to € 28,935 with two children (2 parts) and 40,432 with three children (3 parts).
To compare your income with these amounts, you must add all the income you plan to receive in 2025 and then deduce the offices, deductible charges as well as land and professional deficits planned for that same year. A slight exceeding of the above thresholds does not necessarily mean that you will have to pay the IR, these amounts not taking into account the tax reductions or credits from which you can benefit from. You might therefore not have to do anything at the taxman next year if you make expenses entitled to tax advantages this year.
According to statistics from the Directorate General for Public Finance, less than half of French people pay today for income tax (IR), the proportion of taxable people decreasing from year to year. A trend that could end in 2026 in the event of voting on the IR scale frost this fall.