France's 2027 finance bill, presented on 1 October, introduces an exceptional 17% levy on dormant savings held by the Caisse des dépôts (CDC) as of 31 December 2026. Bercy expects the measure to raise €1.4 billion, applied against an asset base estimated by Journal du Coin at approximately €8.2 billion.
The mechanism rests on the loi Eckert of 13 June 2014, codified at Article L312-19 of the Code monétaire et financier. A checking account becomes inactive after 12 months without movement; savings accounts, securities accounts and employee savings plans after five years once any blocking period ends. Once an account has been inactive for 10 years, or three years following the holder's death, banks must transfer the funds to the Caisse des dépôts. Housing savings plans (PEL) follow a longer 20-year track before transfer.
The CDC then holds the money for 20 years — 27 years in cases tied to inheritance, via the Ciclade mechanism — before it reverts definitively to the State, roughly 30 years after the original inactivity began in succession cases. Ciclade, the free public search service for forgotten accounts, deletes unfinalised requests after six months; once a file is complete, transfers typically arrive within about three months.
The 2027 bill's text describes the 17% levy as "une anticipation de leur attribution à l'État" — an anticipation of their eventual attribution to the State — applied "sans aucune minoration correspondant au prélèvement acquitté," meaning savers who later reclaim their funds will not be compensated for the amount withheld.
No equivalent for lost bitcoin
Ciclade's scope covers five product families: bank accounts, employee savings, life insurance, death provident schemes and capitalization bonds. None of these categories extends to crypto-assets. Article L312-19 applies specifically to credit institutions, payment institutions and electronic money institutions — not to crypto-asset service providers regulated as PSAN or, under MiCA, as CASP.
That distinction matters at scale. Chainalysis estimated in November 2017 that between 2.78 and 3.79 million bitcoins — 17 to 23% of all bitcoin mined at the time — had been lost, whether through discarded hard drives, forgotten keys or the untouched holdings attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Unlike dormant euros sitting in a French bank, these coins carry no custodian obliged to report inactivity, no fifteen-year clock, and no eventual claim by the French Treasury.
Why the timing matters
The budget context explains the urgency behind the levy. The Haut Conseil des finances publiques, in an opinion dated 1 October, examined government projections showing debt interest charges reaching approximately €91 billion in 2027. The €1.4 billion expected from forgotten savings would cover roughly 5.5 days of that interest bill — a modest sum set against the scale of French public debt, but one the State can reliably collect because the underlying euros sit in regulated accounts, traceable by law, unlike bitcoin that has simply vanished from circulation.
