France Real House Price Index: Inflation-Adjusted Prices Since 1996

The France real house price index is an Eco3min composite: the Notaires-INSEE existing dwelling price index divided by the national consumer price index, rebased to 100 = 2015 annual average. It answers a question the nominal index cannot — whether French housing has become more expensive relative to everything else, or merely alongside it. Quarterly from the first quarter of 1996, 121 observations. The France real house price index is 12.2% below its 2022 peak while the nominal index is down only 4.8%.

Dataset: France Real House Price Index (1996–2026) · Updated 2026-01-01

Source: INSEE (Notaires-INSEE indices and consumer price index) · Eco3min composite, base 100 = 2015

Macro Takeaway

Construction & Components

The composite removes general inflation from house prices, leaving only the movement of housing relative to everything else a household buys. It is the standard construction used to compare housing cycles across periods of very different inflation regimes.

Formula:

Real House Price Index = Nominal house price index / Consumer price index, rebased to 100 = 2015

Components:

• Notaires-INSEE existing dwelling price index — INSEE, IPLA datasets — quarterly, seasonally adjusted, France excluding Mayotte. The numerator. Chained across the 2010 and 2015 bases over 33 overlapping quarters.
• Consumer price index — INSEE, IPC datasets — monthly, all households, whole of France. The deflator. Chained across the 2015 and 2025 bases over 360 overlapping months.

Frequency reconciliation: The house price index is quarterly and the consumer price index monthly. The pipeline aligns them with a backward as-of merge, so each quarter is deflated by the consumer price index of its first month rather than by a quarterly average. The result is rebased to 100 at the 2015 annual average so the ratio reads as an index rather than as a raw number near 1.

Coverage: First quarter 1996 to first quarter 2026, limited by the start of the chained house price series. The consumer price component runs from 1990 and is not the binding constraint.

Dataset Overview

Dataset Variables

The CSV, Excel and JSON files contain the following columns.

Column names match the CSV headers exactly.

Download the Complete Dataset

The full France real house price index series, including both components, is available in CSV and Excel formats.

Direct Data Access

INSEE publishes both components but not their ratio, and each is split across successive base datasets. The Eco3min structured dataset returns the composite and both inputs aligned on one quarterly grid:

Direct CSV Access — Eco3min Structured Dataset

https://eco3min.fr/dataset/fr/fr-real-house-price-index.csv

This URL returns the complete dataset in CSV format. It can be used directly in pandas, R, curl, or any data tool. JSON and XLSX are available at the same path with the corresponding extension.

Using the Dataset in Python

import pandas as pd

url = "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/fr/fr-real-house-price-index.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url, parse_dates=["date"])

print(df.head())
print(df["real_house_price_index"].describe())

Using the Dataset in R

library(readr)

url <- "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/fr/fr-real-house-price-index.csv"
df <- read_csv(url)

head(df)
summary(df$real_house_price_index)

Both examples load the dataset directly from the URL — no download or API key required.

Methodology

The composite is recomputed daily by an Eco3min pipeline. Both components are themselves chained across INSEE base changes before the division: the house price index across the 2010 and 2015 bases over a 33-quarter overlap, the consumer price index across the 2015 and 2025 bases over a 360-month overlap. Chaining before deflating rather than after avoids introducing a break at either rebasing date.

The monthly consumer price index is aligned onto the quarterly house price grid with a backward as-of merge, so each quarter is deflated by the consumer price index of its first month. Latency is set by the house price index, published roughly two to three months after the end of the reference quarter, which is why the composite ends one quarter behind the consumer price series.

Data Quality & Provider Notes

Latency is dictated by the house price index, published roughly two to three months after the end of the reference quarter. The consumer price component is available monthly and is always ahead, so the composite is never fresher than the housing release.

Revisions propagate on both sides. INSEE revises the Notaires-INSEE indices as late deeds are registered, and revises the consumer price index between provisional and definitive publication. Either revision rewrites the affected quarters of the composite at the next Eco3min run. The chaining factors are also recomputed at each run, so an upstream revision can shift the historical part of the series.

No native alternative exists in this exact form. The OECD and the BIS publish real house price indices for France on their own deflators and base years, which produce different levels and are not directly comparable to this series.

What This Index Captures (And What It Doesn’t)

The composite is a structural measure of housing valuation relative to consumer prices. It is not a measure of affordability and not a market-timing tool.

What it captures:

• Whether housing has repriced relative to other goods, as opposed to moving with general inflation
• The true depth of corrections during high-inflation periods, which nominal indices systematically understate
• Comparability of housing cycles across the 1996-2026 span, in which inflation regimes differ sharply

What it does NOT capture (common misinterpretations):

• Affordability. Deflating by consumer prices is not the same as dividing by household income, and neither accounts for the cost of credit. A real index can fall while housing becomes less affordable, if incomes fall faster or mortgage rates rise. The price-to-income construction is a different series.
• Regional dispersion. The index is national. Paris, the regional capitals and rural areas have followed materially different paths, and a national real index averages them away.
• Total return to an owner. The series is a price index. It excludes imputed rent, transaction costs, maintenance, property taxes and leverage — the last of which dominates the actual return to a mortgaged buyer.
• A deflator everyone agrees on. Using the harmonised HICP, a household consumption deflator, or an income series instead of the national consumer price index would shift both the level and the depth of the corrections. The choice made here is the national index because it is the one French law uses.

The series is most useful for comparing the depth of housing corrections across periods with different inflation regimes, read alongside its two component columns.

Historical Regimes

• 1996–2000 — the real floor. The index bottomed at 52.8 in the first quarter of 1997, its series low, and had only reached 60.1 by the first quarter of 2000. In real terms French housing was cheaper in 1997 than at any point since.
• 2000–2008 — the real doubling. From 60.1 to 111.7 in the second quarter of 2008. Unlike the nominal series, the real index shows unambiguously that this was a relative repricing of housing against all other goods, not a general inflation.
• 2008–2015 — the slow real correction. From 111.7 down to 101.1 by the first quarter of 2015, a 9.5% real decline spread over seven years with no crash. Nominal prices recovered after 2009 while real prices did not, which is the divergence the composite is built to expose.
• 2015–2022 — the zero-rate real ascent. From 101.1 to the series high of 120.1 in the first quarter of 2022. Real house prices rose 19% in seven years while consumer prices were nearly flat, so almost the whole nominal gain of that period was a genuine relative repricing.
• 2022–2026 — the inflation correction. From 120.1 to 105.5, a 12.2% real decline. Nominal prices fell 4.8% over the same span; the remaining seven and a half points were delivered by the 2021–2023 consumer price shock, not by sellers cutting.

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Sources

• INSEE — Notaires-INSEE existing dwelling price indices (IPLA), all dwelling types, France excluding Mayotte, seasonally adjusted. Datasets IPLA-IPLNA-2010 and IPLA-IPLNA-2015.
• INSEE — consumer price index, all households, whole of France. Datasets IPC-2015 and IPC-2025.
• Composite computed by Eco3min from the two chained series above. Underlying transaction data: French notarial deed databases, processed by INSEE under its hedonic index methodology.

Dataset Reference

Eco3min Research. (2026). France Real House Price Index (1996–2026). Eco3min composite from INSEE data.<br> https://eco3min.fr/en/france-real-house-price-index-dataset/