Political communication on tax matters, first lesson: Present as exceptional what is meant to become structural.

By Maître Maximilien Dechamps, Attorney at Law

Updated on 02.12.2025

Nearly fifteen years ago, the 2012 Finance Act introduced a seemingly temporary tax, the exceptional contribution on high incomes (CEHR), conceived “in a context of reducing public deficits and restoring our public finances” and intended “to request an exceptional effort from the wealthiest taxpayers¹.” At the time, the public deficit amounted to 103 billion euros, or 5.3% of GDP, and was decreasing compared with 2010². Parliamentary debates show that the initially proposed contribution was meant to apply only until income year 2013, justifying the label “exceptional”³. The Finance Committee, then dominated by the right, removed this time limit on the grounds that the government’s “reluctance to tax the wealthiest” was “unacceptable,” without modifying the name of this new contribution.

In 2024, the public deficit amounts to 168.6 billion euros, or 5.8% of GDP—this time increasing compared with the previous year⁴—and not only has the “exceptional” contribution not disappeared, but lawmakers, still eager to plug a persistently stubborn deficit, have given the CEHR a younger sister: the “differential contribution on high incomes,” further increasing the tax burden on supposedly “wealthiest” individual taxpayers who have not yet crossed the border.

Two lessons may be drawn from this semantic sleight of hand: first, in tax law, what is “exceptional” can quite easily become “structural”; and second, lawmakers—and behind them, the Directorate of Tax Legislation—have at their disposal an extensive lexical toolbox with which to give their new levies names as reassuring as they are misleading.

The terminological proximity between the recent “exceptional contribution on the profits of large corporations” and the CEHR raises little hope that this new measure will remain truly “exceptional.” This new levy, which adds to the roughly four hundred eighty existing taxes, contributions and duties in France⁵, applies to corporate profits at a rate of 20.6% of corporate tax (CIT) for taxpayers with turnover between one and three billion euros, and 41.2% of CIT for those with turnover above three billion euros⁶. Thus, a company with turnover exceeding three billion euros will face an effective corporate tax rate unseen since the Mitterrand era⁷.

The semantic analogy also applies to the explanatory memorandum, which again aims to “contribute to restoring our public accounts” by “targeting the largest corporations⁸.” Moreover, parliamentary documents indicate that this new contribution is intended to be temporary⁹.

The current drafting of the 2026 Finance Bill should prompt the following question among the attentive: will this exceptional contribution on large corporate profits be maintained? Notably, unlike the CEHR, which was codified directly by the 2012 Finance Act, the exceptional contribution on large corporate profits appears only in the 2025 Finance Act¹⁰, meaning that in the absence of renewal in the 2026 Finance Act, it would lapse. The thanks for this absence of codification go to the Government¹¹—a circumstance that would be reassuring only if it still held a majority in the Assembly.

The initial answer was… yes. On 14 October 2025, a Finance Bill for 2026 was tabled in the National Assembly, whose Article 4 renewed the exceptional contribution on large corporate profits for one year¹². The rates were initially to be halved, from 20.6% to 10.3% and from 41.2% to 20.6%—as anticipated when the 2025 Finance Act was adopted—but a government amendment passed on 27 October ultimately set these rates at 5% and 35.3%, concentrating the burden on companies with turnover exceeding 3 billion euros.

The explanatory memorandum of Article 4 states that this renewal applies for only one year. Beyond the limited confidence we may reasonably place in such an assertion, recall that an exceptional contribution on profits had already been introduced for the year 2017, under similar conditions—albeit at lower rates¹³. The temporary nature was indeed respected, but the periodic adoption of a similar contribution would necessarily make it far less “exceptional,” especially since the underlying context—public deficit—is itself structural.

Fortunately, the Senate sought to remind the Government of its commitments. Thus, on 29 November, thanks to three amendments targeting Article 4 of the draft bill, the Upper House removed the renewal of the exceptional contribution on large corporate profits. The senators responsible for this salutary censure noted that the renewal “undermines the credibility of public commitments, given the pledge made before the Senate Finance Committee by the Minister for Public Accounts, who declared in June 2025 that ‘some points can be affirmed without hesitation: the corporate surtax will no longer exist in 2026’”¹⁴; that it “is unjustified, as French companies are already among the most heavily taxed on the planet”; that it “constitutes a breach of the commitment made by the Government in the last Finance Act, which explicitly limited its application to a single fiscal year”¹⁶. And the press release concludes: “The Senate’s vote restores the credibility of public commitments and improves the predictability and stability of the tax framework applying to entrepreneurs in France”¹⁷.

What remains to be seen is the compromise that will emerge in the Joint Committee, with the hope of a retreat by the Assembly, for the perpetuation—or periodic revival—of this exceptional contribution on large corporate profits, much like that on high incomes, would be regrettable. Indeed, although this contribution is expected to concern fewer than five hundred French companies¹⁸, and although many emphasize that the implicit corporate tax rate is higher for SMEs than for large corporations¹⁹, we have recently learned that the 117 companies belonging to AFEP, nearly all of which generate turnover above one billion euros, already pay 19% of all corporate taxes and contributions in France, while representing only 13% of total value added²⁰. This amounts to 85.1 billion euros; in this respect, given that parliamentary forecasts place the revenue from the exceptional contribution on large corporate profits at eight billion euros in 2025, one can see that this “exceptional contribution” is far from being a mere drop in the ocean of the tax burden already borne by large corporations.

The explanation for this unfortunate divergence in perception, which drives ever-increasing pressure on France’s largest corporations, lies in the tendency to focus solely on the headline corporate tax rate, whose beneficial reduction since 2018²¹ has been more than offset by the exceptional contribution for companies with turnover above three billion euros. This overlooks the fact that the heaviest component of compulsory levies is social contributions, which represented 53.6 billion euros in 2024 for AFEP’s 117 member companies, or 62% of their total tax burden.

In addition to this cognitive bias, the overlapping of political and media calendars makes it easy to imagine a causal link between this exceptional contribution and the controversy surrounding Total’s so-called “superprofits” in 2023, widely discussed in early 2024. Public and journalistic indignation at the idea that a French company might be profitable likely provided ample comfort—if any was even required—to propose yet another levy on the profits of large corporations. Less discussed was the effect that this public pillorying—combined with environmentalist pressure—likely had on Total’s “side step” toward America, with the opening of a secondary listing in New York.

Far from enabling any hope of balancing public accounts in the long term, the accumulation of taxes, surtaxes, and “exceptional” contributions actually has destructive indirect effects, as it reduces corporate investment. While French firms have indeed benefited over the past decade from some significant incentives—notably the Research Tax Credit and the now-defunct Competitiveness and Employment Credit—France still has one of the highest average effective tax rates in the OECD, and the third highest in the European Union²², to which social contributions must again be added. More broadly, France is the OECD country where the tax-to-GDP ratio is highest (43.8% in 2023)²³, all taxes and contributions combined.

Sadly, just as the Court of Auditors’ reports are never read, it seems unlikely that this implacable accumulation of publicly available data will enter into the discernment of lawmakers. Whether or not the exceptional contribution on large corporate profits is retained, the trend toward increasing tax pressure will likely continue, heading toward the outer limits of a Laffer curve which, in France’s case, has long coincided with the vertical axis.

But after four hundred eighty different levies, what new titles can be found for future and inevitable fiscal inventions? After such lexical exertion, where can inspiration be drawn? This is a formidable semantic challenge for the Directorate of Tax Legislation; nevertheless, since winning recipes are seldom changed, we need only wait—fifteen years, but surely less—for the emergence of the differential contribution on the profits of large corporations.

¹National Assembly, Explanatory memorandum to the 2012 Finance Bill, 28 Sept. 2011
²INSEE, Public sector accounts in 2011, May 2012
³Finance Committee debate on the 2012 Finance Bill
⁴INSEE, Public sector accounts in 2024, May 2025
⁵According to a count by the Fondation pour la recherche sur les administrations et les politiques publiques, June 2021
⁶Art. 48 of Law n°2025-127 of 14 February 2025 on the 2025 Finance Act
⁷Until 1985, the corporate tax rate was 50%, see Caubet-Hilloutou J.N., Girard P., Redondo P., *La baisse du taux de l’impôt sur les sociétés depuis 1986*, Économie & prévision, no. 98, Feb. 1991
⁸National Assembly, Explanatory memorandum to the 2025 Finance Bill, 10 October 2024
⁹Senate General Report on the 2025 Finance Bill, Vol. II, Part I, 21 November 2024
¹⁰As well as Ordinance n° 2013-837 of 19 September 2013 adapting the Customs Code, the General Tax Code, the Tax Procedure Code and other tax and customs provisions applicable to Mayotte
¹¹Senate General Report on the 2025 Finance Bill, Vol. II, Part I, 21 November 2024
¹²Article 4 of the 2026 Finance Bill n°1906, tabled 14 October 2025
¹⁴Article 1 of Law n°2017-1640 of 1 December 2017, amending the 2017 Finance Act
¹⁵Amendment submitted by Mr. Husson on behalf of the Finance Committee, 24 November 2025
¹⁶Amendment submitted by Messrs. Capus, Malhuret et al., 26 November 2025
¹⁷Amendment submitted by Ms. Lavarde, Mr. Darnaud et al., 24 November 2025 — Senate Press Release, “The Senate abolishes the corporate surtax for FY 2026,” 29 Nov. 2025
¹⁸Senate General Report on the 2025 Finance Bill, Vol. II, Part I, 21 November 2024
¹⁹According to an INSEE study (Sept. 2025) entitled “Implicit corporate tax rates between 2016 and 2022 are higher for SMEs than for large corporations,” widely reported in the media
²⁰AFEP, Tenth edition of the survey on the economic and tax contributions of member companies, September 2025
²¹Article 84 of Law n°2017-1837 of 30 December 2017 (Finance Act for 2018)
²²OECD data
²³OECD data