The French film tax credit is sized in the budget, not after the shoot

The mechanism fits in one sentence: a percentage of eligible spend incurred in France comes back to the production company as a tax credit. Everything else is a matter of definitions — what counts as eligible spend, what counts as incurred in France, and how high the base is allowed to go. Two misreadings dominate. The first applies the rate to the budget: the rate applies to the base, which is always smaller. The second treats the credit as a standalone resource, when it is one public subsidy among others and shares a ceiling with national support, regional funds and European money. Here are the parameters that shape the calculation.

This matters before anything else, because the wrong one wastes a month of work. France runs a domestic film tax credit, claimed by a French production company on the films it produces — that is the scheme described here, with the rates and caps above. France also runs a separate scheme for foreign productions that come to shoot in France without a French producer attached, with its own eligibility test, its own application route through the CNC and its own ceiling. The two are not interchangeable and a single work does not stack them. If you are an overseas producer weighing a shoot in France, start by establishing which track you are on: whether a French company is producing or coproducing decides it, and the terms of the international scheme should be checked directly with the CNC, since they are revised periodically.

Language decides the rate, and it is a switch rather than a slider: a film sits at one rate or the other, with nothing in between. A film shot in French, or in a regional language of France, takes the standard rate. A film whose script requires a foreign language — a period piece set elsewhere, a coproduction whose characters would not plausibly speak French — takes the lower one, and that language choice has to be justified by the material rather than by arithmetic. The gap between the two changes the shape of a finance plan long before the shoot: on identical spend, moving from one to the other removes a third of the expected credit. It is a question to settle while the script and the financing are being built, not at filing time.

Eligible spend is spend incurred in France across the main cost categories of the CNC budget structure — the logic Soldum's prefill follows, ticking those categories in the budget and leaving the others unticked. The shortcut the prefill never takes for you is the important one: a covered category is only eligible if the spend is genuinely incurred in France. A DP based abroad, a grip house in Belgium, a grading session handed to a studio outside France all drop out of the base even though their category belongs in it. The table below describes how the prefill behaves. It is not a tax position: it stays to be checked line by line, and your manual decision always wins.

Two rules shrink the base, and both are found out late. The first is the cap: retained eligible spend cannot exceed 80% of the production budget. While a film spends a meaningful share abroad, the cap stays invisible. It bites as soon as a production is overwhelmingly French — which is exactly the case where the credit is counted on hardest. A production that has marked 92% of its budget as eligible will not be paid on 92%; the base comes back to 80%, and the credit with it. The second rule is the deduction: a public subsidy allocated directly to eligible spend comes off the base, pro rata to the eligible share of the budget. The logic is sound — the state does not refund the same euro twice — but the effect is concrete. The more your plan leans on funds earmarked against eligible categories, the narrower the base. That is not a reason to turn money down; it is a reason to model both together instead of one after the other.

Take a feature with a €2,000,000 production budget, shot in French, of which €1,800,000 is marked as incurred in France, with €200,000 of public subsidy allocated against that spend. The point of walking the steps in this order is that they do not commute: the cap applies before the deduction, and the deduction before the rate. Running them in another order gives a different number, and that is the single most common flaw in back-of-the-envelope estimates.

The credit never arrives alone. It adds to automatic support, selective funds, regional money and European schemes already sitting in the finance plan, and that total is bounded by a ceiling expressed as a share of the budget — raised for difficult works and for small budgets. On a modest, heavily supported film it is that ceiling, not the rate, that sets the real limit: every additional award moves the total closer to it, and the tax credit, arriving last, is the first thing trimmed. The practical consequence runs against instinct. Past a certain point, winning one more grant stops adding its full value to the financing. What has to be tracked is the total, not the individual lines.

Between the figure written into the finance plan and the money actually received sits a chain of evidence: invoices, contracts, payroll records, and proof that each cost was genuinely incurred in France. A budget line marked eligible but impossible to document at audit does not leave the base with a warning — it simply leaves, and the shortfall surfaces at the worst possible moment. Which is why keeping the accounting records straight during production beats reconstructing them at the end: the same data serves cost reporting, production accounting and the tax credit file. Rebuilding it afterwards costs days of work and always leaves holes.

Most productions estimate their tax credit in a separate tab. That works once. By the second round of trade-offs — a week of shooting dropped, a location moved abroad, a post-production deal renegotiated — the tab and the budget have drifted, and nobody can say which one is authoritative. In Soldum, eligibility is marked line by line in the budget itself: the prefill proposes the categories covered by the CNC structure, you correct whatever leaves the country, and the estimate recalculates with the cap applied, allocated subsidies deducted and the rate matching the language of the film. The resulting figure syncs into the finance plan alongside the other sources, showing the remaining headroom before the public funding ceiling. Disclosure: Soldum publishes one of the solutions described on this page.

Worth saying plainly, because it is the promise budgeting tools keep least well. An estimate is indicative and non-binding: what you actually receive depends on CNC approval, on the quality of the documentation and on tax validation. No tool decides for you that a cost was incurred in France — it can flag an explicit signal in a location or a supplier, not turn a geocoder into a tax engine. No tool rules that a foreign language is artistically justified, or that a work qualifies as difficult under the raised ceiling. What an integrated calculation removes is the drift between the budget and the estimate: the two numbers move together, so a wrong assumption shows up immediately instead of travelling from version to version.