Some heirs will have to pay more for inheritance fees.
It is a subject which moves all of society and which is widely questioned: that of inheritance costs. All French people must pay it when they inherit from a deceased loved one, regardless of whether they had deep pockets or dry accounts. In the vast majority of cases, there is very little to fix.
Indeed, according to the latest INSEE study on the question of inheritance, 87% of inheritances allow you to inherit less than €100,000, i.e. the maximum amount that you can receive without paying anything to the inheritance. State. Above all, 65% of inheritances are less than €30,000. These are therefore essentially bank fees (account closure, money transfer) which must be paid. However, a small portion of heirs must pay taxes to the tax office.
If the moment is painful and disrupts family life, the law does not give the heirs time to breathe. The latter only have a period of six months after the day of death to pay their tax dues, if they have to pay one. Sometimes, the cash in the deceased’s account can be used to pay them in part or in full, just like savings accounts.
However, it may happen that the heirs do not have the necessary money within the imposed deadline. In this context, it is possible to ask the tax authorities to set up a split or deferred payment. But be careful, this generates an additional cost. And it is on the rise in 2024! This year, the interest rate for these types of payments increased from 1.7% to 2.2%, an increase of 30%! Which is not anecdotal for those who must resort to this means of payment.
A concrete example: a person inherits a total of €300,000. After deducting the 100,000 euros tax-exempt, she will have to pay €18,194 on the remaining €200,000. If she does not have this amount available (the inheritance can simply correspond to the value of a house), she can request a payment split into 8 installments. The rate of 2.2% then applies to all inheritance tax that remains to be paid for each payment, except the first. Thus, at the end, the person will have paid €19,594.94 to the State. This total was only €19,276.54 in 2023, an increase of almost €320.
This increase went unnoticed since it is not linked to a government decision or a vote of deputies but to a mechanical increase, correlated with the average effective rate charged by banks for fixed-rate property loans granted to individuals.
Inheritance fees will be the subject of a debate in Parliament soon. But it will mainly be a question of regulating bank charges after the death of a client. It has already been announced that there will no longer be fees for transferring money from the accounts of deceased minors or people with less than €5,000.