Definition
A supplier goes unpaid, the reminders lead nowhere, a bailiff's letter arrives. The question that follows is always the same: can they come for the car, the savings, the flat?
The answer sits in two words nobody reads when registering a business, the professional assets (patrimoine professionnel).
Since 15 May 2022, every Sole proprietorship, including that of a Micro-entrepreneur, holds two separate estates instead of one.
On one side the professional estate, made up of the assets useful to the business. On the other the personal estate, holding everything else.
The split happens automatically: nothing to file, no formality to renew each year. It takes effect on registration, or on the declared start date of the activity if that comes first.
A business already trading before the reform is only split from 15 May 2022 onwards: debts born before that date still reach everything the person owns, personal estate included.
What it changes: your business creditors can, in principle, reach only the first estate.
What a creditor can actually seize
Karim is a plumber, a craftsman running a micro-enterprise.
His professional estate is made of his van (9,000 €), his tools (3,000 €), his stock of parts (1,000 €) and the money sitting in the account reserved for the business (2,000 €), so 15,000 € in total.
His main home and his savings account sit in his personal estate.
A bad year leaves him with two debts of 6,000 € each. One is owed to his equipment supplier.
The other is owed to URSSAF for his Social contributions, calculated in 2026 at 21.2% of the revenue collected from BIC services.
On top of that come the vocational training contribution and the chamber levy, with income tax still due over and above all of it.
Same amounts, very different reach. The supplier can go after the 15,000 € of the professional estate and nothing else, whatever the flat is worth. URSSAF is not held back by that border.
What decides is not the name on the purchase invoice, it is whether the asset is useful to the business.
A Dedicated bank account therefore does not create the split, which exists without it, but it makes the split provable on the day you have to show what is professional and what is not.
The holes in the protection
The two creditors a micro-entrepreneur meets most often are precisely the ones the split does not stop.
The tax authorities can seize both estates for income tax and for the property tax on assets used by the business, and social security bodies can do the same for social contributions, as the official fact sheet sets out.
Where there is fraud, or serious and repeated failures to meet tax and social obligations, the door opens wider still.
Another breach is the waiver.
A bank financing an investment may ask you to give up the protection: the deed then covers one specific commitment, with its purpose, its amount and its end date, and a cooling-off period runs after signature.
Waiving without reading puts your home back on the table.
The last breach is the guarantee given in a personal capacity.
A sole trader can no longer stand surety for his own business, but he can mortgage a personal property other than his main home, or pledge a life insurance policy.
The reverse does not work: a business asset can never secure a private debt.
Not to be confused with main-home protection
These are two separate shields, and the second one predates the reform. The sole trader's main home cannot be seized by business creditors, automatically and with no notary involved.
Two details change everything.
Only the living area is protected: the room turned into an office, a workshop or a storeroom belongs to the professional estate and can still be seized. And the shield does not extend to other property.
Putting a second home out of reach requires a déclaration d'insaisissabilité, a declaration of unseizability drawn up by a notary, which only covers debts arising after it is published.
One last confusion to clear: splitting your estates is not the same as insuring them. Damage caused at a client's premises creates a business debt like any other.
It will not touch your home, but it will take the van and the tools, in other words the means of earning a living.
That is what Professional liability insurance pays for, not the commercial code.
Frequently asked questions
Do you have to file a list of your business assets somewhere?
No, and that is what separates today's rules from the EIRL, abolished in 2022: there is no allocation statement to file or keep up to date.
The law itself defines what counts as useful to the business, and a person holds only one professional estate, even when running several activities.
What happens to the professional estate when the business stops?
The two estates are merged again, both on cessation of activity and on death: creditors then face the whole of the assets.
It is worth weighing before starting a Deregistration while leaving business debts behind.
I work from my living room with a laptop: do I really have a professional estate?
Yes, even with no premises and no vehicle: the laptop, the software, the client list, the trading name and the money in the business account all belong to it.
It can be very light, and the opposite risk then appears, that of having almost nothing to offer a supplier as security.