You bought the villa in Biarritz or the pine-shaded house in Hossegor, insured it with a French multi-risk policy, and assumed you were covered year-round. For most foreign owners, that assumption holds — until the property stands empty long enough to trigger a clause few non-French speakers have ever read: the clause d’inhabitation, or unoccupancy clause.
1. The clause hiding in your French policy
French home insurance is built around the model of a primary residence, occupied all year. When a property remains continuously unoccupied beyond a duration set in the contract — frequently 60 or 90 days, sometimes less — certain covers can be reduced, made conditional, or excluded. The two covers most often affected are precisely the ones an empty house needs most:
- Theft (vol): higher excess, reduced ceilings, or outright exclusion beyond the unoccupancy period.
- Water damage (dégât des eaux): cover made conditional on specific prevention duties — shutting off the main water supply, draining exposed pipes before winter, keeping frost-protection heating on.
There is no single national rule: each insurer writes its own clause, with its own trigger period and its own duties. The only document that matters is your policy — not a generic summary found online, and not what applied to your home in the UK, the Netherlands or the United States.
2. Why this bites second-home owners on the Basque Coast
Run the calendar honestly. A house occupied in July and August, plus a week at Christmas, stands empty for well over 90 consecutive days every spring and autumn. That is the exact scenario the clause targets.
Now add the classic winter incident: a joint fails under a sink in January, and water runs quietly for weeks. When the claim is filed, the insurer asks two simple questions — how long had the property been unoccupied, and were the prevention duties in the policy (water off, frost protection on) actually met, with proof? If the answers are “four months” and “no evidence”, the settlement discussion starts badly, on a loss that easily reaches tens of thousands of euros.
The problem is rarely an absence of insurance. It is the gap between the cover you assume you have and the cover that actually applies during long absences.
3. Three checks to make this week
- Find the clause. In your policy’s general conditions, look for « inhabitation », « inoccupation » or « logement inoccupé ». Note the trigger duration, the covers affected and the prevention duties attached.
- Map it against your real occupancy calendar. If your empty periods exceed the trigger duration, assume the restrictions apply unless your insurer confirms otherwise.
- Get written answers from your insurer or broker: what exactly is covered during your absences, and what interrupts the unoccupancy count — a relative’s visit, a professional inspection, an overnight stay? If the cover proves inadequate, dedicated second-home policies and endorsements exist, often for a modest premium compared with the exposure.
4. Documentation: what actually protects you when a claim is discussed
Whatever your clause says, one principle holds everywhere in French insurance practice: the file speaks. An owner who can produce dated inspection reports with photographs — boiler checked, water shut off, frost protection active, no damp found on such date — negotiates a claim from a very different position than one with nothing.
This is one of the most underrated benefits of a professional property-verification service: beyond catching the leak in week one rather than month three, every scheduled visit produces a dated, photographic record of the property’s condition and upkeep. Those reports do not replace compliance with your policy’s conditions — but they materialise diligent maintenance, which is exactly what an insurer examines.
5. Reduce the risk at the source
The best unoccupancy clause is the one that never gets tested. Before a long absence: shut off the main water supply, drain circuits exposed to frost, check the roof and gutters before autumn, keep remotely controllable frost-protection heating on, and neutralise the visible signals of an empty house — overflowing mailbox, permanently closed shutters, untended garden.
For higher-value or exposed properties, a residential security audit identifies these vulnerabilities methodically. And if a period of absence carries a specific risk — squatting, malicious damage, a neighbouring construction site — surveillance with patrols and formal reports is available through our CNAPS-licensed private research agency, in its own regulated framework.
In short
The unoccupancy clause is not a trap set for foreigners; it is the contractual translation of a plain fact — an empty house without regular eyes on it is a vulnerable house. The response takes three steps: read your policy (or have it explained in writing), align your cover with your real occupancy calendar, and organise documented local supervision during absences. On the Basque Coast and in the southern Landes, that is precisely the role of a trusted local liaison — English spoken.