Every three years, a quiet recalculation in Paris decides how many French freelancers get to keep their simplest tax status. For 2026 through 2028, that recalculation just gave hundreds of thousands of micro-entrepreneurs more room to grow before the paperwork gets complicated — but the increase comes with rules that trip up a surprising number of otherwise careful business owners.
If you run a micro-entreprise (the status most people still call auto-entrepreneur) in France, or you're advising clients who do, here's exactly what changed, why it changed, and the two ceilings people constantly confuse with each other.
What Changed for 2026–2028
France revalues the auto-entrepreneur revenue ceilings (plafonds de chiffre d'affaires) every three years, in line with the pace of inflation over the preceding period. The new figures took effect January 1, 2026, and will hold until the next revaluation in 2029.
| Activity type | 2023–2025 ceiling | 2026–2028 ceiling | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sale of goods, and furnished accommodation/hosting | €188,700 | €203,100 | +€14,400 |
| Services and liberal professions | €77,700 | €83,600 | +€5,900 |
In practical terms: a freelance consultant, designer, tutor, or tradesperson selling services can now bill up to €83,600 a year in gross revenue and stay a micro-entrepreneur. Someone selling physical goods, or renting out a furnished property, can go up to €203,100.
These are gross annual revenue ceilings, not profit. The micro-entrepreneur regime's entire appeal is that you never calculate real expenses — you pay social contributions and (optionally) income tax as a flat percentage of what comes in the door. Go over the ceiling, and that simplicity disappears.
Mixed Activities: Two Numbers, Not One
Plenty of micro-entrepreneurs do both — a potter who sells finished pieces (goods) and teaches workshops (services), for instance. The rule for mixed activities is straightforward but easy to miscalculate:
- Your combined revenue across both activities cannot exceed the higher ceiling (€203,100).
- Within that total, the services portion alone cannot exceed €83,600.
The two thresholds don't stack. A business doing €150,000 in goods sales and €90,000 in services isn't fine just because the combined figure is under €203,100 — the services slice alone blows past its own €83,600 cap. Track the two revenue streams separately from day one, not just at year-end.
If you're starting mid-year, the ceiling is prorated for the number of days your business actually existed that calendar year, not the full annual figure — a common surprise for people who launch in, say, September and assume they have the full-year allowance.
What Actually Happens If You Exceed the Ceiling
This is the part that causes the most anxiety, and the actual rule is more forgiving than most people assume:
- Exceed it once, in a single calendar year: nothing changes. You keep micro-entrepreneur status for the following year as if nothing happened.
- Exceed it two years in a row: you lose the regime, effective January 1 of the year after the second breach, and get moved onto the standard "régime réel" — real business accounting, actual expense deduction, and a materially heavier compliance load (proper bookkeeping, potentially a chart of accounts, corporate-style tax filings).
So a single strong year — a big contract, a seasonal spike — doesn't knock you out of the simplified regime. Two consecutive strong years does. That's exactly why the ceiling increase matters: raising it from €77,700 to €83,600 for services gives freelancers who are growing steadily an extra buffer before that two-year clock starts ticking.
The Ceiling You're Thinking of Is Probably a Different Ceiling
Here's where almost every article and forum thread on this topic gets muddled: the revenue ceiling above is not the VAT registration threshold, and the two move independently.
The VAT exemption threshold (franchise en base de TVA) — the point at which you must start charging and remitting VAT — stayed unchanged for 2026:
| Activity type | Base threshold | Increased ("majoré") threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Goods sales / accommodation | €85,000 | €93,500 |
| Services | €37,500 | €41,250 |
Notice these numbers are far lower than the revenue ceilings above. That means it's entirely possible — common, even — to be a fully compliant micro-entrepreneur while also being VAT-liable. Losing your VAT exemption does not mean losing your micro-entrepreneur status; they're separate systems with separate math.
The VAT rule has its own exceed-the-ceiling logic, and it's less forgiving than the revenue-ceiling rule:
- Exceed the base threshold (e.g., €37,500 for services) but stay under the increased one: you lose the VAT exemption starting January 1 of the following year — you get a runway.
- Exceed the increased threshold (e.g., €41,250 for services) at any point during the year: you become liable for VAT immediately, from the very day you crossed it — no runway at all.
There was real talk in 2024–2025 of collapsing this into a single, much lower €25,000 VAT threshold for all micro-entrepreneurs regardless of activity type. That reform was not adopted. If you've seen alarmed posts about a €25,000 VAT cliff, they're describing a proposal that didn't happen — the €37,500/€85,000 structure (with their respective "majoré" ceilings) remains current law for 2026.
A Practical Tracking Checklist
Because two different ceiling systems apply simultaneously, and because "over once" and "over twice" mean very different things, the freelancers who navigate this cleanly are the ones tracking revenue continuously rather than checking once a year:
- Log revenue by activity type (goods vs. services) as it's invoiced, not in a year-end scramble — this is what lets you catch a mixed-activity breach before it's a surprise.
- Keep a running year-to-date total against both the revenue ceiling and the VAT threshold, since they're independent tripwires with different consequences.
- If you're in your first partial calendar year, calculate your prorated ceiling explicitly rather than assuming the full annual figure applies.
- If you cross a threshold, note the date, not just the fact — the VAT "majoré" breach is immediate, so the exact day matters for compliance.
This is really just accurate bookkeeping applied to a regulatory question: the business owners who get blindsided by these rules are almost always the ones whose only record of revenue is their bank balance, discovered too late to plan around a second consecutive over-ceiling year.
Simplify Your Financial Tracking
Whether you're a micro-entrepreneur in France watching two separate ceilings or a freelancer anywhere else trying to keep goods and services revenue straight, the underlying problem is the same: you need records that are accurate, dated, and easy to query by category. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency over every transaction — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in, and revenue you can tag and total by activity type in seconds. Get started for free and see why developers and finance-savvy freelancers are switching to plain-text accounting.