Legal announcements, registry fees, INPI: what company formalities really cost in France in 2026

Three invoices, and a platform that invoices nothing

The first confusion comes down to a single expression: « INPI fees ». Since 1^st January 2023, every company formality goes through the one-stop shop (« guichet unique ») run by the INPI, the national institute that hosts the business formalities portal, and many founders conclude that the INPI is the body doing the invoicing. That is inaccurate.

The one-stop shop is free. The INPI collects money on behalf of the receiving bodies and passes it on to them. Your formality in fact triggers several separate invoices, which share neither the same collector, nor the same calculation basis, nor the same VAT treatment.

• The legal announcements journal (« journal d'annonces légales »): a price regulated by ministerial order, revised every year, subject to VAT at the standard rate of 20 %.
• The commercial court registry (« greffe »): fees set by article A.743-10 of the commercial code, also subject to VAT.
• The BODACC, the official bulletin of civil and commercial announcements: a flat levy — free for an incorporation, but up to 143 € for a transfer of registered office. It is often the heaviest item, and the one most often overlooked.
• The INPI also collects a charge of a few euros for the national business register (« registre national des entreprises »), not subject to VAT. Micro-entrepreneurs are exempt from it.

The incorporation announcement: a flat fee, and no longer a price per character

This is the least well-known change of recent years. Until 2021, an announcement was charged by the number of lines, which encouraged people to draft as briefly as possible. Since then, the incorporation notice has been charged at a flat rate, whatever the number of characters, and that flat rate depends on the legal form of the company.

Here are the amounts applicable since 1^st January 2026, set by the ministerial order of 19 November 2025. They are exclusive of VAT: add 20 % to obtain what you will actually pay.

Two lessons here for a self-employed professional. First, a société civile with no property purpose — an SCM (cost-sharing partnership) or an SCP (professional partnership) — costs 222 € excl. VAT, which is more than a SARL (148 €) and more than an SCI (191 €). Second, the single-member version is systematically cheaper: 142 € for a SASU against 199 € for a SAS.

In La Réunion and Mayotte, these flat fees are increased by roughly 17 to 18 %. Everywhere else the price is identical: placing your registered office in Tours rather than in Paris makes no difference whatsoever to the price of the incorporation announcement.

Registry fees: an SCI costs twice as much as a SAS

The registry scale was revised on 1^st March 2026. It holds a surprise: the schedule sets out a specific, and cheaper, line for the incorporation of a commercial company — 22.14 € excl. VAT — whereas other legal entities, including sociétés civiles and SCIs, fall under the general line at 44.27 € excl. VAT. For an identical service, registering an SCI therefore costs twice as much as registering a SAS.

Adding the filing of the articles of association (6.05 € excl. VAT) and the declaration of beneficial owners (16.11 € excl. VAT), which is compulsory for every company, gives the total actually invoiced by the registry. The BODACC, for its part, charges nothing for an incorporation.

These totals include no fee for drafting the articles of association, nor the deposit of the share capital: those services are freely priced and unregulated.

Amending the company: the single-announcement trap

Amendments are also governed by flat fees, at three levels:

• 109 € excl. VAT — transfer of the registered office, appointment or departure of a director, appointment or departure of a statutory auditor, change to the duration of the company.
• 136 € excl. VAT — change to the share capital, whether an increase or a reduction, and change of corporate purpose.
• 199 € excl. VAT — change of company name or of trading name, conversion into another legal form, changes in the shareholding.

Note in passing that changing your company's name costs exactly the same as setting up a SAS: 199 € excl. VAT. An argument for choosing your company name seriously from the outset.

And here is the costliest trap of all: these flat fees apply only to one amendment per announcement. As soon as a single announcement combines several — you change your address and your manager at the same time — it reverts to per-character pricing, spaces included. Depending on the department in which the registered office sits, a character is worth between 0.185 € and 0.239 € excl. VAT: 0.189 € in Indre-et-Loire, 0.239 € in Paris and the inner suburbs, the highest rate in France.

An announcement combining several decisions quickly runs past a thousand characters. Publishing two separate announcements at the flat rate then often works out cheaper than a single announcement priced per character — a calculation nobody makes spontaneously.

Changing your registered office address: from 201 € to 481 €

This is the cost of most direct interest to anyone hesitating over their domiciliation address, and it varies twofold according to two criteria: the legal form of the company, and whether or not it stays within the same court district (« ressort de tribunal »).

Take care with this second point, which is often badly stated: the legal test is not a change of department but a change of commercial court district — two communes in the same department may fall under two different registries. When the district changes, two legal announcements are required, one in the district being left and one in the district being joined, and the BODACC charges 143 € for the new registration.

The gap between the first two rows and the last two comes from a little-known exemption: a SASU or an EURL whose sole shareholder is an individual who runs the company personally is exempt from publication in the BODACC, including for amending notices. That amounts to 116 € or 143 € saved on every formality. The exemption applies neither to an SCI, nor where the sole shareholder is itself a company.

The comparison is telling: a transfer of registered office costs, in mandatory fees alone, the equivalent of eight to twenty months of a domiciliation subscription. Choosing the wrong address at the outset in order to save a few euros a month is rarely a good deal — it is one of the five points to check before signing a domiciliation agreement.

And if you trade in your own name?

Good news for self-employed professionals who have not set up a company: a sole trader business (« entreprise individuelle ») has no legal announcement to publish. The publication requirement targets legal entities; where you trade in your own name, it does not apply.

Better still: for a self-employed professional trading as a sole trader, setting up is free. They are not registered with the commercial register, so no registry fee is due, and the charge payable to the INPI covers only traders, companies and economic interest groupings.

Micro-entrepreneurs enjoy an even wider exemption, which is often overlooked: article L.743-13 of the commercial code waives the fee not only for registration, but also for amending entries and de-registration. A micro-entrepreneur who changes address therefore pays the registry nothing, where a SAS pays out more than 300 €.

Only a sole trader who is a trader and outside the micro-entrepreneur regime pays a fee, and a modest one at that: 18.12 € excl. VAT, i.e. 21.74 € incl. VAT.

The gap is therefore spectacular: where a SAS pays close to 300 € simply to come into existence, a self-employed professional trading in their own name starts up without paying anything at all. Whether that status is the right one for your activity is a separate question — one of choosing the right regime, not of the cost of the formalities.

Four traps to avoid before you compare

• Excluding or including VAT? Regulated prices are published exclusive of VAT, while comparison sites usually display the VAT-inclusive figure. And on a total that mixes the announcement, the registry and the BODACC, VAT does not apply to the whole: the BODACC levy and the INPI charge are not subject to it. Dividing a VAT-inclusive total by 1.2 gives a false answer.
• The 2025 prices are still doing the rounds. The legal announcement flat fees changed on 1^st January 2026 and the registry scale on 1^st March 2026. Many online articles have not been updated — and some official pages themselves still display the old scale.
• Your VAT position changes the real cost. A VAT-registered business recovers the VAT: its real cost is the amount excluding VAT. A healthcare professional whose services are VAT-exempt does not recover it: their real cost really is the VAT-inclusive figure, 20 % more.
• Service fees are not capped. The ministerial order regulates the price of the announcement, not the intermediary's service: a platform is free to add handling fees on top of the regulated price.

Amounts verified against primary sources: the ministerial order of 19 November 2025 setting the tariff for judicial and legal announcements for 2026, article A.743-10 of the commercial code in the version in force on 1^st March 2026, and the ministerial order of 9 November 2017 on BODACC levies. Article written by Épiphyse Conseil, chartered accountants specialising in advising self-employed and healthcare professionals. Regulated prices change every year: always check the year of publication before relying on an online comparison.