ALUR Continuing Training: 14 Hours a Year, 42 Hours Over Three Years

Every three years the same scene plays out in French agencies: the estate agency licence is about to expire, the renewal file is being assembled, and somebody discovers that training hours are missing. This is not an administrative detail. No hours, no renewal — and no licence, no trading. Here is exactly what the ALUR duty requires.

The framework: the ALUR law, the 2016 decree, the 2020 decree

Law no. 2014-366 of 24 March 2014, known as the loi ALUR, introduced a continuing-training duty for property professionals covered by the Hoguet law. Decree no. 2016-173 of 18 February 2016 set out the detail: duration, who is covered, content, monitoring. The duty came into force on 1 April 2016.

Decree no. 2020-1259 of 14 October 2020, in force from 1 January 2021, amended the mandatory content to bring in non-discrimination in access to housing explicitly.

The volume: 14 hours a year, or 42 over three years

The rule fits in one sentence: fourteen hours a year, or forty-two hours over three consecutive years of practice.

The alternative wording matters in practice. It allows the effort to be spread across the licence’s validity cycle rather than blocking out two days every calendar year. An agency can concentrate a collaborator’s hours in a quieter trading period, provided the total reaches 42 hours by the end of the cycle.

It has a downside too: a professional who keeps postponing ends up fitting 42 hours into the final months, often at the worst possible time. Year-by-year tracking remains the better hygiene.

The content: what is free and what is not

Training must cover the skills needed to practise: legal, technical, commercial and ethical. The field is broad — co-ownership law, property taxation, mandatory surveys, planning, commercial leases, negotiation techniques, anti-money-laundering.

Two volumes are, however, prescribed within the 42 hours:

• at least two hours on non-discrimination in access to housing;
• at least two hours on the other ethical rules.

Those four hours are not an add-on: they count towards the 42 hours of the cycle. But they are not substitutable — forty-two hours of sales technique do not satisfy the duty.

The non-discrimination requirement is not symbolic. Arthur Acolin, Raphael Bostic and Gary Painter, in “A Field Study of Rental Market Discrimination Across Origins in France”, published in 2016 in the Journal of Urban Economics, used correspondence testing to measure response rates to identical rental applications differing only in the applicant’s name, and documented substantial gaps by the origin the surname suggested (see the study). The mandatory two-hour module is the direct regulatory answer to that kind of finding.

Accepted formats, and the conference cap

Not every hour counts the same way under the decree.

The duty is met through training actions within the meaning of the French labour code, whatever the delivery mode: classroom, distance learning, blended paths. The decree favours no format, which gives agencies room to organise hours around trading activity.

Attendance at conferences and seminars is capped, however: it can only be counted up to two hours a year. That is a useful limit to know for professionals who regularly attend trade shows and network events — those hours count, but marginally. The bulk of the 42 hours must come from structured training actions.

One last methodological point: these are hours of training, not working hours spent keeping up to date. Diligent reading of case law does not convert into ALUR hours.

Who is covered: the holder, and not only the holder

This is the point employers most often miss. The duty applies to:

• licence holders, whether individuals or the legal and statutory representatives of companies;
• their collaborators, employed or not, holding an authorisation certificate — employed negotiators, self-employed commercial agents, network mandataries.

In other words, an agency principal who is up to date on their own hours may still be in default if their negotiators are not. The authorisation regime is detailed in our article on the collaborator authorisation certificate.

What happens at renewal

The estate agency licence is issued for three years. The renewal application goes to the territorial chamber of commerce and industry of the registered office, on Cerfa form no. 15312, within the two months preceding the expiry date.

The training certificate is one of the required documents. Without it, renewal is refused.

What follows is mechanical: on expiry, the holder is removed from the national register of property professionals maintained by CCI France and searchable online. Continuing to trade then amounts to unlicensed practice, punished by article 14 of the Hoguet law with six months’ imprisonment and a €7,500 fine.

The full renewal timeline is described in our article on obtaining the French estate agency licence.

Organising the tracking: a simple method

Three habits are enough never to fall short.

A named tracking table. One row per person — the holder and each authorised collaborator — one column per year of the cycle, the running total, and a column for the four hours of ethics and non-discrimination. Hours are counted per person, not per agency.

Immediate filing. The attendance certificate is filed the same day, named by person and date. Reconstructing them three years later, from providers that may no longer exist, costs far more than filing them as they come.

A mid-cycle review. Eighteen months after the licence is issued, a twenty-minute review flags the collaborators who are behind while there is still time to act.

Choosing a training provider

The rules do not require using a certified provider for ALUR hours to count, but they do require the training to cover the occupation’s skills and attendance to be evidenced.

Where those hours are to be funded from public or pooled funds, however, the provider must hold Qualiopi certification. That is the bridge between the two sets of rules, and it is developed in our article on training property professionals from the provider’s side.

Take action

Open a named ALUR tracking table today, covering the holder and every collaborator, and check that the four hours of ethics and non-discrimination are in it. Our full profile of the French estate agency licence sets out how the title is issued and renewed.