Chartered Accountant for Notaries and Notarial Offices

A notarial office follows its own rules: the notary is a public and ministerial officer who holds, on behalf of clients, funds that are not their turnover, while running a notarial office subject to special accounting, a mandatory inspection and a partly regulated tariff.

A notary accountant keeps the office's books (BNC, declaration contrôlée 2035), strictly separates the client funds deposited at the Caisse des dépôts et consignations (CDC) from the office's own income, splits receipts between regulated fees (émoluments), free fees (honoraires), disbursements (débours) and taxes collected for the State, secures VAT, prepares the periodic inspection (at least every two years) and supports both the structure (SCP, SEL) and the transfer of the office.

The comptable taxateur works inside the office: they issue the invoices for deeds, calculate for each deed the share of taxes to be paid over to the State and handle the economic and accounting management of the office's activity. The chartered accountant (expert-comptable) works from outside, under an engagement letter: they review the accounts and prepare the office's returns.

The two roles do not replace each other. The taxateur works at the pace of deeds and receipts, in the registers that the decree of 19 December 1945 requires of the notary (detailed below). In some offices, they also handle staff management: the job description published on notaires.fr lists payroll, social and tax charges, leave and absences.

Depending on the engagement letter, the chartered accountant's work covers keeping or reviewing the office's general accounts, the results return (form 2035 when the office falls under BNC) and VAT, checking the reconciliations between the office's registers and the accounts held at the Caisse des dépôts, management reporting (profitability, payroll, the office's own cash) and questions of structure, remuneration and transfer.

The boundary between the two is set in writing: who records, who reconciles, who prepares VAT, who runs payroll. One point does not depend on this split: the decree is addressed to the notary personally ("Chaque notaire doit tenir une comptabilité", each notary must keep accounts), and the client-funds accounting remains their responsibility.

For an office without a full-time taxateur, the first question to settle is day-to-day bookkeeping: the cash journal must be kept "jour après jour" (day after day), which rules out catching up at the end of the quarter.

Notarial accounting has a sensitive point that other liberal professions do not share: the separation of flows. The notary constantly receives sums that do not belong to them: the sale price of a property, estate funds, security deposits. These client funds must be deposited at the Caisse des dépôts et consignations and tracked in special accounting, separate from the notarial office's own general books. Confusing them with turnover is the most serious mistake, and the first thing an inspection looks at.

The office's remuneration breaks down into four building blocks that an accountant must isolate to read real profitability:

• émoluments: the regulated fee, set by an official tariff, for acts subject to the tariff;
• free fees (honoraires): negotiated, for advisory and drafting work outside the tariff;
• disbursements (débours): sums advanced by the notary on the client's behalf (publication, surveyor, mortgage records), which are not office income and are reimbursed (the third-party account mechanics are detailed in our article on account 467);
• taxes and duties collected for the State (registration duties, land publicity tax), which pass through the office without being its revenue.

Only émoluments and honoraires are the office's taxable income. Disbursements and taxes net out: including them in turnover distorts both the margin and the VAT base.

Decree no. 45-0117 of 19 December 1945 requires each notary to keep at least five registers (art. 16): a cash journal, a deed fees register, a cash ledger, a securities journal and a special register of quarterly balances. On top of these come a receipt for every sum collected (art. 16 A) and the deposit of third-party funds at the Caisse des dépôts et consignations (art. 15).

The office's general accounting (expenses, payroll, VAT, results return) is built alongside these registers, not in their place. The chartered accountant's work is to make the two agree: the émoluments and honoraires recorded in the deed fees register must be found in the office's income, and the client balances in the cash ledger in the accounts held at the Caisse des dépôts. An unexplained gap is the point to resolve before any profitability analysis. How this accounting works is detailed in our article on the notarial office's special accounting.

The notary falls under non-commercial profits (BNC), in the declaration contrôlée regime (form 2035). They may practise individually, in a professional civil company (SCP, tax-transparent) or in a liberal-profession company (SELARL, SELAS), depending on the size of the office, the number of partners and the transfer plan. The choice of structure commits the tax position, the director's social status and the sale value.

On the social side, the practising notary is a self-employed worker affiliated to the notaries' pension and provident fund (CPRN); clerks and employees fall under the CRPCEN for health cover, and for retirement if they joined the notarial profession before 1 September 2023. On VAT, émoluments and honoraires are subject to VAT at the standard 20% rate; disbursements and taxes collected for the State are excluded, which requires splitting receipts so as not to overstate the taxable base.

Notarial offices are subject to an accounting inspection, organised on the initiative of the president of the regional council of notaries. It checks the keeping of the special accounting, the representation of client funds, compliance with the CDC deposit and the regularity of the entries. Our role: keep the office ready at all times, not only as the inspection approaches.

Payroll in a notarial office follows two frameworks specific to the notariat. The first is the national collective agreement for the notariat of 8 June 2001, updated by the agreement of 16 December 2021 (IDCC 2205), whose scope covers employees of notarial offices and assimilated bodies. Under it, the agreed minimum salary equals the number of points of the classification coefficient multiplied by the point value (art. 14.5): each time the point value is raised, every salary paid is compared with this minimum.

The second is the CRPCEN, the pension and provident fund for notaries' clerks and employees (Caisse de retraite et de prévoyance des clercs et employés de notaires), the social security scheme of the notariat set up by the law of 12 July 1937. It covers, among other things, the sickness, maternity and death risks. For pensions, since law no. 2023-270 of 14 April 2023, the fund's old-age pension is reserved for clerks and employees recruited before 1 September 2023 who have met the affiliation conditions since that date. An employee hired in the notariat for the first time on or after that date falls under the Assurance retraite and Agirc-Arrco. For a former employee of the notariat, everything depends on when their last contract ended: before 1 September 2023, they may be affiliated again to the fund's old-age scheme if rehired within ten years; on or after that date, the CRPCEN looks at whether they kept building pension rights with the fund, who ended the contract and the time before the new hire.

A single office may therefore employ staff under two pension schemes, with different payroll settings. CRPCEN contributions on salaries are reported in the DSN (the monthly social declaration) and paid to the Urssaf, on the DSN due date.

When payroll is entrusted to the firm, the engagement covers setting up the classification and point value, checking each employee's pension scheme at hiring, payslips, the DSN and reconciling social charges with the office's accounts, as described on our payroll page.

An office's value is built over time, and prepared well before the sale. Moving to an SEL, bringing in a partner, setting up a liberal-profession financial holding (SPFPL) to hold the shares, or transferring to a successor are decisions that mix law, tax and valuation. We model these scenarios, secure the ownership structure and prepare the transfer. The general method on the seller's side (timeline, relief regimes, displayed fees) is described on our business transfer accountant page.

We first bring the special client-funds accounting under control, then we make the split between émoluments, honoraires, disbursements and taxes reliable, along with VAT and the tax and social calendar. We produce readable management (profitability by activity, payroll weight, office cash kept separate from client funds) and we prepare the inspection as well as the structure and transfer decisions. The goal: that the notary decides on accurate figures, not on a result discovered at year-end.

One-off engagements follow the firm's public price list: a written consultation at EUR 450 excl. VAT for a specific question (structure, VAT, the four-block split), a written study at EUR 900 or a situation review at EUR 1,400 excl. VAT ahead of a structure or transfer decision. Recurring bookkeeping for the office is quoted on the volume of deeds, the office payroll and the tax calendar, based on the firm's general price list.

• Never mix client funds with turnover: they are deposited at the CDC and tracked in special accounting.
• Split disbursements and taxes out of taxable income and out of the VAT base.
• Choose the structure (individual, SCP, SEL, SPFPL) according to the transfer plan, not only the current year's tax.
• Keep the office inspection-ready continuously, not in a rush.

This page informs and guides. A decision specific to your office requires reviewing your documents and your situation.

Content up to date as of 5 July 2026, reviewed by a chartered accountant; regulated fees updated on 2 October 2026. Written by Hayot Expertise (Samuel Hayot, chartered accountant and statutory auditor, Order of Chartered Accountants of Ile-de-France).