A DPE report (Diagnostic de Performance Énergétique — the French Energy Performance Certificate, or EPC) can be perfectly compliant — every mandatory statement in place, a valid ADEME number, a certified assessor — and still be systematically optimistic. This is not fraud: it is a run of assumptions all pulled in the same direction. Insulation "declared" without an invoice, a construction year rounded off, a floor area measured by eye, a piece of equipment recorded without verification. Taken one by one, each of those choices is defensible; added together, they are sometimes enough to shift a label by one band — which in 2026 is the line between a still-lettable home and a G-rated home, banned from letting since 1 January 2025 (art. L. 173-1-1 CCH).
This is what is known in France as a complacent EPC, and it is precisely what French law does not catch easily: no statute creates an offence bearing that name. The good news, whether you are buying, selling or letting: complacency leaves traces on the report itself. Six checks, five minutes, no technical skill required.
More than 350,000 EPCs are issued every month in France, against 120,000 in 2018 — and 70% of certificates showed anomalies in 2023 under consumer law, which the Cour des comptes (the French national audit office) attributes "principally to unfamiliarity with the regulations among new professionals rather than to fraud" (report of 3 June 2025).
What this article covers
This guide separates methodological complacency from outright fraud, which French law does not punish in the same way. It explains why the default values of the 3CL-DPE method are not the tool of complacency, and why the list of supporting documents is the real control point. Then come the six-point checklist, a costed case from the Cour de cassation, and the three traps to avoid before any claim.
Complacent EPC or fake EPC: what French law distinguishes
Article L. 271-6 of the French Construction and Housing Code (CCH), as amended by Law no. 2025-594 of 30 June 2025, imposes four cumulative obligations on the assessor: to offer "guarantees of competence", to have "appropriate organisation and resources", to hold professional indemnity insurance, and to have "no connection liable to undermine their impartiality and independence, either with the owner or their agent, or with a firm able to carry out the works". The same article establishes a public directory of practising assessors.
Article R. 271-3 of the CCH adds two directly verifiable guarantees: a prior sworn statement handed to the client, and the mandatory wording "This report is drawn up by a person whose competence is certified by…" followed by the name and address of the certification body. That text also prohibits any advantage, direct or indirect, paid to the assessor by an estate agent or a works contractor.
Breach of these conditions falls under article R. 271-4 of the CCH, which targets both the person who draws up "or agrees to draw up" such a document and the person who requests it from a non-compliant provider: the instructing party is therefore exposed too.
| Classification | What it requires | Penalty | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breach of practising conditions | Drawing up, agreeing to draw up or requesting an EPC without meeting competence, organisation, insurance or impartiality requirements | Fifth-class fine, i.e. €1,500 | art. R. 271-4 CCH; art. 131-13 Criminal Code |
| Forgery and use of forgery | Fraudulent alteration of the truth, liable to cause harm, in a document intended to establish proof of a right | 3 years' imprisonment and a €45,000 fine | art. 441-1 Criminal Code |
| Misleading commercial practice | False information, or information likely to mislead, in a commercial context | 2 years and €300,000, the fine being raisable to 10% of average annual turnover; 5 years and €750,000 where committed online | art. L. 132-2 Consumer Code |
| Civil liability | Breach of the duty to inform causing loss | Damages, most often on a loss-of-opportunity basis | general law of liability |
Methodological complacency falls between these boxes: assumptions that are systematically favourable yet formally admissible amount neither to a fraudulent alteration of the truth nor necessarily to a breach of practising conditions. That is what separates it from outright fraud — a certificate issued without a site visit, a recycled ADEME number, a stolen identity — whose warning signs are set out in our guide to detecting a fake DPE.
The vocabulary deserves caution. The only public estimate comes from the French state: roughly 70,000 fraudulent certificates a year out of 4 million, close to 1.7% (press release of 28 April 2025). It concerns fraud; methodological complacency is quantified by no official source. The Cour des comptes records 46% more certified assessors between 2019 and 2023 and puts the 2023 anomalies down to that surge in activity rather than to bad faith.
Why an EPC can be compliant and complacent at the same time
The 3CL-DPE 2021 methodology (the conventional calculation method required for dwellings) starts from input data: construction year, habitable floor area, walls, windows, heating, domestic hot water, ventilation. For each of them the assessor records a value backed by a document, a value observed on site, or a default value. Complacency plays out in how those three levels are combined.
Default values are not the tool of complacency
The regulatory logic is the opposite of the received idea: default values are designed to be penalising, precisely to push owners to produce their supporting documents. An EPC saturated with them is therefore not complacent — it is a certificate unfavourable to the seller, produced on an empty file. Complacency, conversely, consists in recording a favourable characteristic without any supporting document: loft insulation "declared" but documented nowhere, recent windows never evidenced, an advantageous construction year taken without deed or planning permission.
Key takeaway: it is not the presence of default values that should alert you, it is their absence on items that no document in the file can justify.
The list of supporting documents, the page that gives it away
The order of 31 March 2021 on the EPC for dwellings in mainland France requires the report to include "the list of supporting documents provided by the owner" (articles 4, 8 and 11 point 17 for houses and flats, articles 16 and 19 point 15 for buildings). The reference list of those documents appears in annex 2.2 of the "methods and procedures" order of the same date, in force since 1 July 2021.
This is check no. 1 on the list: an empty or missing list means that every characteristic of the building fabric rests on declarations alone. That does not make the EPC unlawful, but it makes any favourable characteristic it contains indefensible. It follows the same logic as a breach of the assessor's duty to inform, sanctioned by the Cour de cassation on 17 October 2024 in a case of poorly established floor area and insulation.
Habitable floor area, a binding definition that is often ignored
Article R. 156-1 of the CCH, in force since 1 July 2021, defines habitable floor area as built floor area after deduction of walls, partitions, steps and stairwells, ducts and door recesses. Excluded are unconverted lofts, cellars, basements, storerooms, garages, terraces, loggias, balconies, conservatories, glazed volumes and communal areas, as well as any part of a room less than 1.80 m high. This area differs from the "Carrez" private floor area and from the planning floor area: a gap between the two in a sale file is therefore not, in itself, evidence of complacency.
Beware of a very common shortcut: floor area is indeed the denominator of the kWh/m²/year ratio, but it also enters the numerator, since domestic hot water needs and part of the heat losses depend on it. An overstated floor area therefore does not mechanically improve the label: it distorts the calculation, which is enough to justify a check, but the direction of the effect cannot be guessed from reading the report.
What the 2025 rules have already locked down
Two orders of 16 June 2025 have narrowed the room for manoeuvre. The first, amending the order of 31 March 2021, requires a certification QR code to be shown to the client during the site visit (1 July 2025), an ADEME QR code on the first page of every report (1 September 2025) and, above all, bars software from displaying the energy and climate labels and the consumption figures until the EPC has been filed with ADEME (1 October 2025): adjusting assumptions until the desired label appears is no longer possible during the visit.
The second order of 16 June 2025, amending the certification order of 20 July 2023, introduces monitoring by automated statistical analysis of each assessor's activity, raises suspension from 6 to 18 months and rolls out the public directory with a verification QR code. Since 1 October 2025, an assessor issuing more than 1,000 EPCs for houses or flats over a rolling 12 months is suspended unless they provide an acceptable justification. This tightening is analysed in detail in our piece on the crackdown on EPC assessors.
The six checks that spot a complacent EPC in five minutes
None of these checks calls for thermal expertise: they are done on the PDF of the report, with the sale or letting file alongside. If you have never opened an EPC in detail, our guide to reading an EPC page by page locates the sections referred to below.
| # | What you check | Where to find it | What the sign means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The list of supporting documents provided by the owner | Dedicated section (order of 31 March 2021, art. 11 point 17) | Empty or missing list: the whole building fabric rests on declarations. |
| 2 | The certification wording and the certification body | Assessor identification panel | Missing name and address of the body: breach of article R. 271-3 of the CCH. |
| 3 | The ADEME QR code | First page of the report | Mandatory since 1 September 2025. Its absence on a later report signals an unfiled document or an outdated template. |
| 4 | The habitable floor area used | Property description | Must exclude unconverted lofts, basements, conservatories and any height under 1.80 m (art. R. 156-1 CCH). |
| 5 | Favourable characteristics of the fabric | Description of walls, windows, construction year | Cross-check every advantageous entry against the list in point 1: insulation "declared" without an invoice is the central sign. |
| 6 | Declared equipment | Heating, hot water and ventilation description | A recent boiler or heat pump recorded without an invoice, rating plate or photo rests on the seller's word alone. |
What to check on your EPC: find the list of supporting documents, then trace every favourable characteristic in the description back to a document on that list. Any line that leads nowhere is a declarative assumption: those, and only those, will support a request for explanations from the assessor or a complaint to their certification body.
A seventh reflex, more statistical: look at where the result lands. A consumption figure sitting a few kWh/m²/year below a band boundary deserves a closer reading of the input data — not because that position is suspicious in itself, but because that is where the smallest shift in an assumption changes the label. Our EPC reliability barometer measures the actual spread of labels between comparable homes.
What an optimistic EPC costs in court: €20,268.34
Complacency has no criminal classification of its own, but it has a civil price. The third civil chamber of the Cour de cassation ruled on 17 October 2024 (appeal no. 22-22.882) on a directly transposable case: an assessor had recorded an incorrect loft insulation thickness before the preliminary sale agreement, then sent a corrected certificate to the notary just before completion. The buyers obtained a finding that the duty to inform had been breached.
The loss was not compensated at the cost of the insulation works: it was classified as a loss of the opportunity to negotiate the price, and the trial judges set that rate at 50% in the exercise of their discretion. The buyers' appeal against that assessment was dismissed.
Scenario — the arithmetic of loss of opportunity (Cass. 3rd civ., 17 October 2024, no. 22-22.882)
| Item | Detail | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Loss-of-opportunity rate | discretionary assessment by the trial judges | 50% |
| Damages borne by the assessor | judgment of 17 October 2024 | €20,268.34 |
| Implicit loss base (reconstructed, indicative only) | €20,268.34 ÷ 50% — not stated in the judgment | €40,536.68 |
| Share of the loss left uncompensated | complement of the loss-of-opportunity rate | 50% |
The economic lesson is clear: even once found at fault, the assessor bore only half of the loss. In a judgment published in its bulletin, the same chamber had already held on 21 November 2019 (appeal no. 18-23.251) that the loss suffered by the buyer of a home with an incorrect EPC does not consist in the cost of the insulation, but in the loss of an opportunity to negotiate a price reduction.
⚠️ Warning: both judgments concern EPCs issued before 1 July 2021, the date on which the certificate became legally binding (only the recommended works remain purely indicative). No Cour de cassation ruling applying that binding regime to an EPC has been published to date: the legal consequences of the change are analysed in our article on the legally binding EPC, but it would be premature to infer that compensation will become full.
Three traps to avoid when you suspect a complacent EPC
Trap no. 1 — Confusing default values with complacency
This is the commonest mistake, and it makes you challenge the wrong report. If your EPC shows walls "not insulated" by default throughout, you do not have a complacent certificate: you have a penalising one, for want of supporting documents. The right reflex is to gather your paperwork — insulation works certificate, window invoice, planning permission, notarial deed — and to ask for the certificate to be redone on the documents.
Trap no. 2 — Believing the 2026 recalculation fixes a complacent EPC
The order of 13 August 2025 lowered the final-to-primary energy conversion factor for electricity from 2.3 to 1.9 on 1 January 2026: around 850,000 homes leave thermal-sieve status, out of the 4.8 million recorded on 1 January 2023. Earlier EPCs remain valid, and a new-label certificate can be downloaded free of charge from the ADEME observatory, with the same period of validity as the EPC whose label it replaces.
Do not misread its scope: that certificate replaces the label, it corrects no input data. It is not a new EPC. A certificate resting on declared insulation and an approximate floor area is just as fragile after recalculation at 1.9 as it was at 2.3, with a simply more flattering label. This is the major trap of 2026.
Trap no. 3 — Expecting ADEME to "cancel" the EPC
A private individual cannot have an EPC withdrawn on a mere report. The regulatory route is a complaint to the certification body, whose name and address must appear on the report (art. R. 271-3 of the CCH). The order of 20 July 2023 requires that body to handle the complaint within one month at most, and the complaint may trigger a documentary or on-site audit (annex I); where certification is withdrawn, the professional cannot reapply for six months, with any body.
The complaint therefore targets the professional, not the document. To have the report itself corrected, the route is a challenge to the EPC with the assessor and, if necessary, before the civil courts.
Check your EPC for consistency before you sign
Enter the ADEME number of your certificate: the tool retrieves the data filed with the observatory, checks their internal consistency (floor area, construction year, walls, generators, consumption) and flags the inconsistencies that justify questioning the assessor before a sale or a letting.
Going further: the EPC pre-check to run a report through the mill before it is filed, and the EPC banding criteria page to place your home against the thresholds of each label.
Conclusion
The complacent EPC does not exist in law: it exists only in method. It is a formally impeccable report in which every debatable assumption has been settled the same way, for want of a document to contradict it. Its signature is always the same — a favourable characteristic that points to no supporting document — and that is what makes it possible to spot without technical skill.
Run these six checks before signing a preliminary agreement, setting a price or letting a property. OneDpe EPC verification automates the cross-checking of the data filed with ADEME and pinpoints the items to question, while the negotiation is still open.
