France Small Business Loan Rate: Monthly Rate on Corporate Loans up to EUR 1m Since 2003

This dataset tracks the average interest rate on new loans of up to EUR 1 million granted to French non-financial companies, as published by the Banque de France in its MIR1 statistics, monthly from January 2003 across 280 observations. The EUR 1 million threshold is the standard European proxy for small-business borrowing, since loans of that size are overwhelmingly taken by small and medium-sized firms. The series runs from a low of 0.62% in May 2020 to a high of 5.77% in September 2008, and it repriced faster between 2022 and 2023 than at any other point in its history.

Dataset: France Small Business Loan Rate (2003–2026) · Updated 2026-06-01

Source: Banque de France, Webstat MIR1 · new loans to non-financial corporations, amounts up to EUR 1m

Macro Takeaway

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 small business loan rate dataset is available in CSV and Excel formats.

Direct CSV Access – Eco3min Structured Dataset

https://eco3min.fr/dataset/fr/fr-corporate-loan-rate-small.csv

This URL returns the complete dataset in CSV format. It can be used directly in pandas, R, curl, or any data tool. The upstream series is published by the Banque de France through Webstat, in the MIR1 dataset.

Using the Dataset in Python

import pandas as pd

url = "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/fr/fr-corporate-loan-rate-small.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url, parse_dates=["date"])

print(df.tail())
print(df["small_loan_rate"].describe())

Using the Dataset in R

library(readr)

url <- "https://eco3min.fr/dataset/fr/fr-corporate-loan-rate-small.csv"
df <- read_csv(url)

tail(df)
summary(df$small_loan_rate)

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

Methodology

The Banque de France collects new-business interest rates from a sample of French credit institutions in its MIR1 statistics, the national contribution to the harmonised euro-area survey. This line reports the volume-weighted average annual rate on loans of up to EUR 1 million agreed with non-financial corporations during the reference month, all maturities and all rate-fixation periods combined.

The EUR 1 million cut-off is a loan-size threshold, not a company-size classification. It is used across the euro area as a proxy for small-business lending because size of loan correlates strongly with size of borrower, but a large company taking a small loan enters this series and a small company taking a large one does not.

The Eco3min pipeline pulls the series through DBnomics, which mirrors Banque de France Webstat, and writes the CSV, Excel and JSON files, rebuilding the full history on each run.

Data Quality & Provider Notes

Loan size is a proxy for firm size, not a measurement of it. This is the most important limitation. The series describes the price of small loans, from which small-business borrowing conditions are inferred. The inference is standard and reasonable, and it is still an inference.

The average mixes maturities and rate types. A month in which short-term revolving credit dominates new business will print differently from one in which long-term investment loans do, even with no change in any single quoted rate. Composition effects are a real part of the month-to-month variation.

It is a rate on new business, not on the outstanding book. Firms holding loans agreed in 2021 are still paying 2021 rates. This series says nothing about the average cost of debt actually carried by French SMEs, only about what a new loan costs today.

Latency and revisions. MIR1 publishes with roughly a two-month lag. The pipeline rebuilds the whole file on each run, so revisions replace history rather than accumulating beside it.

Licence. Banque de France Webstat data is published under the Licence Ouverte 2.0 (Etalab), which permits reuse including commercial reuse, subject to attribution of the source.

Historical Regimes

2003–2008 – The pre-crisis cycle. Annual averages rise from 3.65% to a 2008 peak of 5.43%, with the all-time high of 5.77% reached in September 2008. This remains the most expensive credit in the file for small French firms.

2009–2012 – Crisis and its aftermath. The rate falls sharply, though less sharply than for large borrowers, with the largest twelve-month decline of 2.15 points recorded in October 2009. Annual averages settle between 3.27% and 3.93%, well above the levels large corporates were obtaining.

2013–2019 – The long compression. Seven consecutive years of decline, from a 2.91% average in 2013 to 1.61% in 2019, as euro-area policy moved to and then below zero.

2020–2021 – The floor. The series reaches its all-time low of 0.62% in May 2020, in the first weeks of the pandemic support schemes, with annual averages of 1.22% and 1.34%.

2022–2023 – The fastest repricing in the record. The annual average more than doubles, from 1.97% to 4.20%, and the largest twelve-month rise in the series, 2.62 points, is recorded in June 2023.

2024–2026 – A high plateau. The 2024 average of 4.45% is the highest since 2008. Easing follows, to 3.78% in 2025 and 3.71% so far in 2026, with April 2026 at 3.76%, above the series median.

Related Macroeconomic Datasets

A small-loan rate is read against the large-loan rate, the premium between them, and the policy rate above both.

Macroeconomic Dataset Hub

This dataset is part of the Eco3min macro-financial data repository.

Explore the Eco3min Dataset Hub

Sources

• Banque de France – Webstat, MIR1 statistics, new loans to non-financial corporations up to EUR 1 million, series M.FR.B.A20.A.R.0.2240U6.EUR.N
• Licence Ouverte 2.0 (Etalab), reuse permitted with attribution to the source
• Eco3min Research – structured dataset compilation

Dataset Reference

Eco3min Research. (2026). France Small Business Loan Rate, Monthly Data (2003–2026).<br> https://eco3min.fr/en/france-small-business-loan-rate-dataset/