Renting out a home in France: how to check a tenant applicant’s documents

Choosing a tenant means committing for several years on the strength of a few PDFs. Yet those files can now be edited in minutes: an online editor is enough to change a salary, a taxable income or a name.

Checking an application is not a sign of distrust. It is a routine step, applied the same way to every applicant, which protects the landlord as well as honest applicants, whose genuine file should not lose out to an embellished one.

It still has to be done by the rules: French law strictly limits what you may ask for, and a poorly handled check can expose you more than the applicant.

The list of documents a landlord may require from an applicant, and from their guarantor, is set by decree no. 2015-1437 of 5 November 2015, under article 22-2 of the law of 6 July 1989. It is exhaustive: anything not on it cannot be requested.

It covers four categories: an ID document (identity card, passport, driving licence or residence permit); proof of address (for example the last three rent receipts or a letter of accommodation); one or more proofs of occupation (employment contract, employer certificate, company registration extract, student card…); one or more proofs of income (latest or previous tax notice, last three payslips, pension or benefit statements…).

Conversely, you may not require, among others, bank statements, a certificate of good account standing, a health insurance card, a photograph other than the one on the ID document, a criminal record extract or a reservation cheque. Breaches carry an administrative fine of up to €3,000 for an individual and €15,000 for a legal entity.

The practical consequence: checking does not mean asking for more documents, but scrutinising better the ones you are allowed to receive.

Edits focus on the figures and names that decide the outcome. First comes the payslip and its net pay, used to compute the income-to-rent ratio.

Then the tax notice, whose reference taxable income is raised to match edited payslips; proofs of address — rent receipts, energy supplier certificates — where replacing the holder’s name is enough; and finally the employer certificate, sometimes fabricated outright.

A single forgery is hard to spot. But a falsified application has to stay consistent across several documents at once, and that is often where it gives itself away.

Several issuers offer a direct check. For the tax notice, the French tax administration’s notice verification service on impots.gouv.fr confirms, from the tax number and the notice reference, that it is the latest notice issued; the 2D-Doc code printed on recent notices also lets you compare the signed data with the printed amounts.

For the employer, public company registers such as the French government’s Annuaire des Entreprises let you check for free, from the SIRET number, that the business exists, is active and that its address matches. If you call, use the number found in the register or on the company’s official website, never the one printed on the document.

Some energy suppliers also offer a page to verify their certificates from a reference and a certificate number.

These services all share the same logic, and the same limit: they confirm that a document was issued, based on its references. They do not tell you whether the file you received was altered since — a replaced name or an edited amount on a genuine document keeps its real references.

Put the documents side by side. The name must be spelled the same way everywhere, addresses must follow on logically, and so must dates: an employer certificate dated before the hire, or rent receipts dated after the announced move, call for a question.

On payslips, recalculate the simple relationships — gross, deductions, net — and look at the year-to-date totals, which must match the months elapsed. Twelve months of taxable pay must also stay consistent with the reference taxable income on the tax notice.

Finally, look at where the files come from: a payslip, a tax notice and an energy certificate come from different systems and have no reason to have been produced by the same tool, on the same day, at the same minute.

What remains is what the eye cannot see: the file’s history. A PDF keeps track of the tool that produced it and those that rewrote it, of its successive saves, of patches laid over existing content and of characters reinserted in a different font.

Veritas-Doc reads those traces in seconds. Upload the application’s documents — several files at once if needed — and you get a clear report for each: the editing tool detected, the number of saves, covered areas highlighted on the page preview, with the original text recovered underneath when it is still there, and every clue named with its weight in the score.

The report never delivers a verdict for you: it tells you what the file contains, so you can ask the applicant the right question or request the original document. It exports as a PDF report, to attach to the file and keep a record of your checks.

No installation or technical skill is needed, and your first document is free. For agency or property manager volumes, a subscription plan and an API let you build the check into your tools.

DossierFacile is a free French public service run under the housing ministry: applicants upload their documents, government agents check them, and the applicant then sends the landlord a complete, verified file.

Suggesting applicants use it is a good habit. It does not, however, exempt you from looking at documents you receive through other channels, or from keeping a record of your own checks.

Apply the same level of scrutiny to every application: checks reserved for certain profiles quickly slide into discrimination, which the law punishes.

The documents you receive are personal data. Keep them for the time needed to decide, do not pass them on, and delete those of unsuccessful applicants.

Finally, a technical clue is not proof: a file compressed or merged online can carry the same traces as an edited document. When in doubt, ask for an explanation or the original document rather than drawing a conclusion. Deciding that a document is forged is a matter for the courts, not the landlord.

This article describes a verification method; it is not legal advice.

Only ask for the documents the decree allows. Check at the source what can be checked: tax notice on impots.gouv.fr, employer in public registers. Check the consistency of the whole application. Analyse the PDF files with Veritas-Doc to spot a modification after issuance. And keep a record of every check, for every applicant.