A mother gives a plot of bare land to her daughter. Years later, the daughter and her husband build a house on it, then sell the whole after the mother’s death. To calculate the abatement indemnity owed to the other heirs, should one take the sale price of the house, or the value of the bare land? The Cour de cassation (the French supreme court for civil and commercial matters) settled the point on 12 June 2025, quashing a ruling of the RENNES Court of Appeal.
The facts
The deceased, who died on 8 September 2013, left three children and a will appointing one of her daughters as universal legatee. She had also made two gifts (donations) of land to that daughter, one in 1984 as an advance on her inheritance (en avancement d’hoirie, counted against her share), the other in 2011 outside her share (hors part successorale). The daughter asked for an expert to assess the market value of the gifted or bequeathed property at the date the estate opened, in order to determine the abatement indemnity she owed.
On 17 June 2021, a property comprising part of the gifted land, on which a house had been built, was sold for €803,000. The RENNES Court of Appeal, on 20 September 2022, took that price as the value of the gifted property.
The decision
The Cour de cassation quashes that valuation (Cour de cassation, First Civil Chamber, 12 June 2025, appeal no. 22-24.477). It recalls two provisions of the French Civil Code.
Article 922 provides that the abatement of gifts (réduction des libéralités, the cutting back of gifts that exceed the freely disposable portion) is determined by forming a notional estate of all the assets existing at death, to which the gifted assets are notionally added “according to their state at the time of the gift and their value at the opening of the succession”. If the assets have been disposed of, their value at the time of disposal is taken into account. The Court specifies that notionally added assets which are still in the donee’s estate at the death “are valued like the existing assets, at the date of death, in their state at the date of the gift”.
Article 924-2 adds that “the amount of the abatement indemnity is calculated according to the value of the gifted or bequeathed assets at the time of the partition or of their disposal by the beneficiary, and according to their state at the date the gift took effect”.
Two errors are identified. The sale took place after the death: for the notional estate, the value at the date the estate opened had to be used, not the sale price. Above all, the gifted plots were bare at the date of the gifts: both for the notional estate and for the abatement indemnity, their state at the date of the gifts had to be taken into account, that is, without the house later built by the couple.
What the ruling asks of the expert
Two dates, one state. The valuation concerns the property as it was at the date of the gift (bare land, its area, its buildability at the time), but at the value of the date of death for the notional estate, and of the date of partition or disposal for the abatement indemnity. The expert must therefore reconstruct a property that no longer exists in that form and apply to it the market of another date.
The sale price is not the value. A price observed for a transformed property does not directly tell us the value of the original property. It can serve as a cross-check, by deducting the cost of the construction and its depreciation, but the main method remains comparison with similar bare plots sold around the reference date.
The method must be written down. The Charte de l’expertise en évaluation immobilière (French property valuation charter), 6th edition, November 2025, defines market value as the price at which a property could be sold, at the reference date, between informed parties acting without compulsion (Title III, §1.1), and requires the report to set out its assumptions and reservations (Title I, §2.2 and §4.1). In an abatement case, the reference date and the state of the property used are legal assumptions fixed by the client or by the judge: they appear at the head of the report.
A frequent situation in Brittany
Gifts of building plots to children, followed by construction, are common in families along the coast. At the death, the value of the bare land at that date can be far removed from the value of the finished house, and the heirs who received nothing tend to reason on the latter. The ruling reminds us that the law protects the donee who has enhanced the property with their own work or money: what they added does not enter the notional estate.
Further reading
The Market value page describes the valuation at a past date for an inheritance, its timescale and its fee; the Private clients page presents related situations. On the same theme: Disguised gift and tax reassessment notice from the French tax authority. The ruling can be read on Légifrance.
What next
An old gift to value in an inheritance?
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