French Personal-Services Declaration (SAP): How to Get It in 2026

Launching a cleaning, gardening, tutoring or home-help business in France? Before your first customer, one filing determines your entire competitiveness: the personal-services declaration (déclaration de services à la personne, or SAP declaration). Optional in law, it is unavoidable in practice — it is what lets your customers recover 50% of your invoices as a tax credit. Here is how to obtain it in 2026, step by step.

What the declaration actually changes

The declaration is one of the sector’s three regimes, alongside the agrément (State approval) and the autorisation (departmental authorisation) — we cover the difference between approval and authorisation in a dedicated article. It grants you nothing you could not already do: an undeclared cleaning company operates legally. But registration triggers three decisive effects:

• your private customers get the 50% tax credit on the sums they pay (within annual caps — €12,000 of expenses in the standard case, with increases);
• your services qualify, depending on their nature, for reduced VAT (10%, or 5.5% for assistance with the essential daily acts of vulnerable people), some services remaining at the standard rate;
• you can offer the avance immédiate (the real-time tax-credit advance) and accept the CESU préfinancé (employer-funded service vouchers), two commercial accelerators that have become standard on this market.

This tax-driven solvency mechanism is the heart of the French model: Clément Carbonnier and Nathalie Morel’s The Political Economy of Household Services in Europe (Palgrave, 2015) shows how these incentives structured the sector — and why a provider outside the scheme is priced out.

The conditions to meet

Activities from the official list

Only the activities listed in article D. 7231-1 of the French labour code open the right to declare — 26 activities recorded by the official personal-services portal: housework, small gardening jobs, minor DIY, childcare over three, tutoring and home lessons, meal preparation and delivery, IT and administrative assistance, teleassistance, pet care and walks for dependent people, and so on. Services must be delivered at the customer’s home or in its immediate surroundings.

Beware: childcare under three requires a prior agrément (State approval), and assistance to elderly or disabled people in provider mode requires a departmental autorisation. The declaration alone does not cover those audiences.

Exclusive activity

This is the central condition: the declared structure must perform only personal-services activities. A company that also sells equipment or takes on out-of-scope works loses the scheme’s benefit — the classic answer is to spin the SAP business into a dedicated entity. We devote a full article to the exclusive-activity condition and its exemptions.

The NOVA filing, step by step

1. Register your structure (company, association, micro-enterprise): the SIRET (establishment registration number) is the prerequisite for everything.
2. Create your organisation account on NOVA, the national personal-services platform — the process is free.
3. Enter your activities, matching each to the official list, with its delivery mode (prestataire — you employ the workers — or mandataire — the customer is the employer).
4. Certify exclusive activity and attach the required documents.
5. Receive your receipt: it carries your registration number (“SAP” followed by your SIREN), valid nationwide without a time limit.

The declaration is registered by the DREETS (the regional directorate for the economy, employment, labour and solidarity). Once the receipt is in hand, you can advertise the tax advantages to your customers — not before: never announce “50% tax credit” on quotes until registration is effective.

After registration: the duties that keep it alive

Registration is kept, not forgotten. Four recurring duties:

Duty	Rhythm	Risk if breached
Activity statistics via NOVA	Regular (activity returns + annual table)	Formal notice, then withdrawal
Tax certificate for customers	Annual	Complaints, lost trust
Registration number on invoices	Every invoice	Tax credit unusable
Exclusive activity	Continuous	Withdrawal of registration

Withdrawal is not theoretical: repeated failure to submit statistics and breaches of the exclusive-activity rule are its two classic grounds. A withdrawal forces you to inform your customers — who lose the tax advantage going forward — and sends you back to square one.

What timeline to plan for

The filing itself is free and quick once the file is complete: most of the lead time lies upstream, in preparation. Allow for registering the structure, precisely framing the activities (and their delivery mode) and gathering the documents. Once the receipt is issued, the effect is immediate: you may print the registration number on invoices, and your customers’ tax credit applies to sums paid from registration onwards — not retroactively. Hence a simple rule for founders: file the declaration before signing your first contracts, not after. If your project also includes young-childcare or help to vulnerable people, launch the approval or authorisation files in parallel: their processing is markedly longer, and nothing prevents you from opening the declared activities in the meantime.

Micro-entrepreneur, association, company: all eligible

The declaration is open to every legal form, from the micro-enterprise to the association or the single-shareholder company. If you are still weighing the legal vehicle, our article on the micro-entrepreneur route walks through the trade-offs — with one nuance: in personal services, the exclusive-activity rule usually argues for a dedicated structure rather than housing everything in an existing entity.

One last boundary: if your offer drifts from tutoring into funded vocational training (CPF — the French individual learning account —, OPCO funding), you change regulatory framework — the Qualiopi certification then applies, as we explain in Tutoring: SAP or Qualiopi?.

Take action

The SAP declaration comes down to one well-prepared NOVA filing: activities correctly qualified, exclusive activity locked in, recurring duties tooled up. Our guide Declaration, approval and authorisation of personal services gathers the detailed steps, frequent questions and a free ebook to get your file right the first time.