Family office: consolidation and family wealth tax in 2026

Quick answer. In a family office, the chartered accountant consolidates the wealth's entities (holding, SCIs, securities portfolio, operating companies), steers group taxation and makes intra-group flows reliable. In France the family office has neither a professional order nor its own tax regime. The central lever is the parent-subsidiary regime of articles 145 and 216 of the French tax code, which exempts dividends upstreamed to the holding by 95%, with a 5% share of costs and charges remaining taxable.

Once family wealth exceeds a few million euros, it stops being a simple set of accounts: it becomes an organisation in its own right, with its entities, its flows, its tax deadlines and its trade-offs. The family office is the operational answer to that complexity. But the accounting and tax machinery still has to hold up under the pressure of an audit, a disposal or a transfer. That is exactly where our work creates value.

A family office gathers all the services used to manage, structure and pass on a family's wealth: shareholdings, real estate, financial investments, taxation, family governance. It is not a legal status but a function. In practice it takes the form of one or several structures (often a holding company) and an internal or outsourced team.

The need usually appears after a liquidity event: the sale of a business, an exceptional distribution, an inheritance. The family then finds itself holding scattered assets, steered by different contacts, with no aggregated view. The accountant's role is to give this whole a single, reliable reading.

A single family office serves one family and internalises its wealth management. A multi family office shares these services across several families. The consolidation logic is identical, but the fee structure and the regulatory framework differ sharply.

A purely family single family office, managing only the assets of the family that owns it, may escape regulated statuses. As soon as advisory or management is provided to third parties, oversight applies: registration with ORIAS, membership of a professional body approved by the AMF, and compliance with the financial-investment-adviser (CIF) status. Many structures cross this line without realising it, for instance by invoicing services to members of the extended family or to close friends.

Family wealth almost always comprises several entities steered separately: a top holding, SCIs, a securities portfolio held in a corporate-tax company, sometimes still-owned operating companies. Each produces its own accounts, its own filing, its own logic. The result is a fragmented view, where no one can say in one sentence what the wealth is really worth or how it performs.

Our value is to aggregate assets and performance at family level, eliminate intra-group flows (an upstreamed dividend is not new income at consolidated level) and produce a usable reading. Concretely, consolidated reporting answers three questions:

1. What are the assets worth, by entity and overall, distinguishing book value from market value?
2. What net return is actually generated, after tax and after structural costs?
3. What is the exposure by asset class (real estate, listed securities, private holdings, cash), to inform trade-offs?

This work belongs to our consolidated financial steering and reporting assignments, where the point is not to produce one more figure, but a figure the family can actually use to decide.

The parent-subsidiary regime, set out in articles 145 and 216 of the French tax code, exempts dividends upstreamed to the holding by 95%, with a 5% share of costs and charges remaining subject to corporate income tax. It is the mechanism that lets cash circulate within the family group without excessive tax friction, for instance to reinvest the proceeds of an activity into a new project or a real-estate asset.

The flip side is demanding. Inter-entity loans, cash-pooling agreements and management fees must rest on written contracts, market conditions and real substance. A management fee charged by the holding to a subsidiary with no identifiable service, no human means to deliver it, or a price unrelated to the service, is a textbook source of reassessment. Reclassification may then target both the deductibility of the charge in the subsidiary and the very existence of the service.

Hayot Expertise tip. Before setting up or reviewing management fees, ask what you would tell an inspector on three points: what concrete service, delivered by whom, and invoiced at what market price. If one of the three answers is missing, the flow is fragile. Documenting upstream beats explaining after the fact.

Some situations deserve particular attention in a family office:

• The active holding. When it qualifies as an active holding, it opens levers (notably for wealth transfer), but the qualification is proven by facts: effective involvement in steering the subsidiaries, services rendered, agreements. An animation claimed but not documented is a risk.
• Real estate in an SCI. Depending on whether the SCI is taxed under income tax or corporate tax, the consolidation logic and the taxation of flows change radically. The initial choice has lasting effects.
• Private holdings owned directly by individuals. Not everything passes through the holding. Part of the wealth often stays held directly, with its own rules, which complicates consolidation and requires close dialogue with the family's notary and lawyer.
• Valuing the shareholdings. A credible consolidated view assumes defensible asset values. For private holdings, this calls for a rigorous approach, which we handle in our business valuation assignments.

• The line between a family-only office and a regulated activity is crossed quickly: watch the moment you invoice or advise third parties.
• An intra-group flow with no contract, no substance or off-market terms is the first item reviewed in an audit.
• Reliable consolidation requires homogeneous source data: a consistent chart of accounts across entities avoids costly adjustments at every closing.
• Coordination with the other advisers (notary, lawyer, private banker) is not a formality: it is what prevents blind spots between corporate and personal taxation.

In the family-wealth files we support, the most frequent sticking point is almost never the absence of a structure: it is the absence of documentation. We took over the organisation of a family owning a holding, two SCIs and a securities portfolio, where management fees had been flowing between the entities for several years. The principle was sound and the intent legitimate, but no written agreement formalised the services, and the amounts rested on no traceable economic logic. In the event of an audit, the exposure spanned several financial years at once.

Our work consisted in rebuilding coherence: formalising the agreements, anchoring the amounts in real services, making the consolidation reliable so that each flow is legible. The lesson applies to every family office: consolidation rigour and flow documentation are worth more than any clever scheme. The accountant does not bring one more structure, but reliable figures and tax coherence, in coordination with the family's other advisers. This logic also runs through our work on family holding structuring and taxation, where the goal is never optimisation for its own sake, but the soundness of the whole.