The SAP Exclusive-Activity Rule: The Condition Behind the Benefits

It is the most counter-intuitive rule in French personal services: for your customers to enjoy the 50% tax credit, your structure must devote itself exclusively to the activities on the official list. Many entrepreneurs discover it after the fact — when an inspection challenges their registration. Here is how the exclusive-activity condition works, who escapes it, and how to organise cleanly.

The rule: 100% personal services

The SAP declaration is reserved for structures whose activity is limited to the personal services listed in article D. 7231-1 of the French labour code — the 26 official activities: cleaning, gardening, minor DIY, tutoring, childcare, assistance to vulnerable people… delivered at private customers’ homes or in their immediate surroundings (our full guide to the declaration).

Exclusivity is assessed at the level of the legal entity, and continuously:

• a declared gardening business that also sells plants or builds landscaping projects steps outside the frame;
• an IT-services company working for private individuals and for businesses cannot be declared for the whole;
• a home-lessons organisation that develops classroom courses performs an out-of-scope activity (the service must be delivered at home).

The legislator’s logic is explicit: this tax expenditure — one of the largest in the French State budget — must fund identifiable home-based jobs, not indirectly subsidise other markets. Clément Carbonnier and Nathalie Morel’s The Political Economy of Household Services in Europe (Palgrave, 2015) analyses precisely this targeting of tax incentives on the domestic perimeter and its effects on the sector’s structure.

The exemptions provided by law

The labour code exhaustively lists categories of structures exempt from the exclusive-activity condition for their personal-services work — notably:

• CCAS and CIAS (municipal and inter-municipal social-action centres);
• intermediary associations and work-integration structures;
• régies de quartier (neighbourhood management associations);
• serviced residences, for services to their residents;
• certain public bodies or operators of social and medico-social establishments, for their home-based services.

These exemptions stem from their social mission: they do not extend to ordinary commercial companies. If you are not on the list, skip the creative interpretation — organise instead.

The right setup: the dedicated entity

In practice, the standard answer to exclusive activity is spinning off: a dedicated legal entity carries the SAP business (with its declaration, its registration number, its NOVA statistics), while the original entity keeps the rest.

Watch-points of this setup:

1. Real separation: invoicing, employment contracts and resources belonging to the declared entity — an empty-shell subsidiary offers no protection in an inspection.
2. Documented intra-group services: if the subsidiary relies on group resources, formalise the agreements.
3. Commercial consistency: the customer must contract with the declared entity, whose number appears on invoices and on the annual tax certificate.
4. Activity boundaries in writing: what the SAP entity does — and above all what it does not.

The same perimeter reasoning applies beyond SAP: organisations combining personal services with funded vocational training must keep the frameworks apart — tutoring under SAP or Qualiopi certification, the two regimes do not mix.

Three practical cases

The landscaper. He wants to offer tax-advantaged small gardening jobs to private customers while keeping his landscaping projects. The two do not coexist in one company: he creates a dedicated structure for small gardening jobs (with its €5,000 annual sub-cap per household), the historic business keeping the projects.

The independent teacher. She gives lessons at students’ homes (an SAP activity) and runs workshops at the local library (outside the home, hence off-list). To hold the declaration, the workshops must leave her declared structure — or be given up. The home boundary is strict.

The IT-services company. Home troubleshooting for individuals (SAP, €3,000 sub-cap) and managed services for SMEs (outside SAP): again, two legal entities. Many try to declare “just the consumer side” — that is exactly what the exclusivity condition forbids within a single entity.

Penalties: what actually happens

Breaching exclusive activity exposes you to withdrawal of the registration, generally after a request to regularise and then a formal notice. The chain of consequences is heavy:

• your customers lose the tax credit going forward — and you must inform them of the withdrawal;
• your services revert to the ordinary VAT regime;
• the instant advance and CESU vouchers can no longer be used;
• re-declaring requires restoring the conditions, evidence in hand.

On a market where the net price after tax credit is the central argument, a withdrawal amounts to an immediate doubling of your prices against declared competitors. The exclusive-activity condition is therefore not a checkbox at filing time: it is a company-architecture constraint, to be built into the offer from the start.

Take action

Check your activity perimeter before an inspection does: official list, dedicated entity if needed, boundaries in writing. Our guide Declaration, approval and authorisation of personal services recaps the three regimes, the NOVA filings and the ongoing duties — with a free ebook to frame your organisation.