Trêve hivernale 2026–2027: no evictions from 1 November — and no power cut-offs either

From 1 November 2026 to 31 March 2027, France is under trêve hivernale — the winter ban on evictions. For those five months a landlord cannot evict a tenant, even holding a court decision, and on any ground, including unpaid rent.

For someone renting in France for the first year, this is one of the few protections that works by the calendar: nothing to file, nothing to request.

What exactly is banned

The ban covers carrying out the eviction. A landlord with a court decision cannot enforce it before the end of March — neither directly nor through a commissaire de justice (the court enforcement officer).

The same principle has been extended to electricity and gas cut-offs for non-payment. There is an important caveat there, covered separately below.

Who is not protected

The rules list the exceptions:

• people who have been offered alternative housing matching their family's needs;
• residents of a building covered by an arrêté de mise en sécurité — a safety order;
• squatteurs occupying someone else's home, whether that home is the owner's main or second residence;
• squatters of a garage or a plot of land — here the judge ordering the eviction may shorten the truce or remove it altogether;
• a spouse whose eviction from the marital home has been ordered by the juge aux affaires familiales during divorce proceedings (ordonnance de non-conciliation);
• a spouse, PACS partner or cohabitant who has been violent towards their partner or a child, where eviction from the family home is ordered by the judge under an ordonnance de protection.

The debt does not disappear

This is the part that is easy to misread. The truce stops the eviction; it does not cancel accumulated rent arrears. The rules explicitly provide that during these months the tenant should continue or begin repaying. Once the truce ends, a procedure backed by a court decision can resume and be enforced.

So the five months are not a postponement of the problem but the window in which it can still be settled by agreement.

Energy: no cut-off, but the power can be throttled

The ban on cut-offs for non-payment runs over the same dates and covers electricity and mains gas in a main residence. This is how the médiateur national de l'énergie — an independent public authority — describes it on its reference site energie-info.fr.

Caveats worth knowing in advance:

What	How it works
Power reduction	Allowed. For electricity the supplier may throttle the meter to 3 kVA on contracts of 6 kVA or more, and to 2 kVA on smaller ones
Exception	Chèque énergie recipients are not throttled — but only if the attestation sent with the cheque has been passed to the supplier
Not covered	Heating oil, wood, tank gas. Only electricity and mains gas, and only a main residence
After 31 March	Supply can be cut immediately: the truce creates no buffer beyond its end date

A separate rule has applied since 1 April 2023: for some households, a cut-off for non-payment must be preceded by a power-reduction phase of at least 60 days.

Where this came from

The winter ban did not begin as an administrative measure but as the consequence of public shock. The Ministry for the Ecological Transition puts it this way: the trêve hivernale, instituted by the law of 3 December 1956, is an achievement of Abbé Pierre's campaign and one of the fruits of his famous appeal of 1 February 1954.

The current dates — 1 November to 31 March of the following year — were fixed by the ALUR law of 24 March 2014. The rules also provide that in exceptional circumstances, such as a health crisis, the government may extend the period.

Where to go if paying becomes hard

The rules provide several free channels, and approaching them before the end of March is more useful than after:

• the energy supplier — to agree a payment schedule (échéancier); suppliers have a correspondant solidarité-précarité who handles exactly these cases;
• the social services of the commune or the département — the route to the Fonds de solidarité pour le logement (FSL), which helps with housing and energy bills;
• CAF — for housing benefits;
• ADIL — the free housing-law advice agencies in the ANIL network.

If a cut-off does happen during the truce, the order is: notify the supplier in writing, and if supply is not restored, take it to the médiateur national de l'énergie.