Aix-en-Provence property market: 2026 prices and rules

Aix-en-Provence is an inland city, roughly 30 km north of Marseille and the Mediterranean. According to CASAFARI Area Insights in Q3 2026, the average asking price for apartments stands at €6,050/m² (up 1.0% year on year), while houses average €6,654.5/m² (unchanged over the year). These figures reflect asking prices from indexed listings, not completed sales; by comparison, the Notaires des Bouches-du-Rhône report a median transaction price of €4,770/m² for older apartments in the 12 months to mid-2026. It is a high-priced market moving sideways, with a 60% second-home tax surcharge arriving in 2027.

Where Aix-en-Provence actually is, and why it is not a beach market

A couple from London step off the TGV at Aix-en-Provence station expecting a sea breeze and find themselves on a plateau of vines and pale limestone. The historic centre with its mossy fountains is twenty minutes away by taxi; the Mediterranean is another half hour south. If you want beaches, the nearest lie on the Côte Bleue at Carry-le-Rouet and Sausset-les-Pins, or at Cassis, all a 30-to-45-minute drive.

What Aix-en-Provence sells instead is urban composure and year-round life. Buyers pay for the 17th- and 18th-century stone of the Cours Mirabeau and the Quartier Mazarin, the intellectual energy of Aix-Marseille Université, the summer opera at the Festival d'Aix, and the walking trails beneath the Sainte-Victoire mountain. Practical connections anchor the market: the TGV puts Paris about three hours away, and Marseille-Provence airport lies roughly 25 km to the west.

According to the INSEE 2023 census figures for Aix-en-Provence (in force from 1 January 2026), the commune has 149,695 inhabitants across 76,823 households, having grown by an average of 0.8% a year between 2017 and 2023. Of its 90,263 dwellings, 84.8% are main residences and 8.0% are vacant. Crucially, only 39.1% of households own their main home, compared with 57.5% across France. Aix is structurally a city of students and tenants, topped by a wealthy layer of domestic and international owners.

How much does property cost in Aix-en-Provence in 2026?

To read the Aix market accurately, one must separate what sellers ask on property portals from what buyers sign for before a notary.

In Q3 2026, CASAFARI Area Insights (location ID 493542) records an average asking price of €6,050/m² for apartments and €6,654.5/m² for houses, both calculated from indexed listings with statistical outliers excluded. That gives houses a 10.0% asking premium per square metre over apartments.

Transaction records tell the other half of the story. According to the Bouches-du-Rhône notaries' 2026 figures for Aix-en-Provence (in French), presented on 16 September 2026 for the 12 months to mid-2026, the median transaction price for older apartments is €4,770/m² across a stable volume of 1,554 sales. In the historic city centre, that notarial median rises to €5,710/m². For older houses, the median transaction price stands at €700,000 (typically for a 123 m² home on an 810 m² plot), and pushes past €860,000 in the sought-after southern and eastern sectors. New-build apartments command a median transaction price of €6,780/m² across 166 recorded sales.

Segment	Metric & Source	Period	Price
Apartments (all)	Average asking price (CASAFARI Area Insights)	Q3 2026	€6,050/m²
Houses (all)	Average asking price (CASAFARI Area Insights)	Q3 2026	€6,654.5/m²
Older apartments	Median transaction price (Notaires 13 / mesinfos.fr)	12 months to mid-2026	€4,770/m² (€5,710/m² in centre)
New-build apartments	Median transaction price (Notaires 13 / mesinfos.fr)	12 months to mid-2026	€6,780/m²
Houses	Median transaction price (Notaires 13 / mesinfos.fr)	12 months to mid-2026	€700,000 (123 m², 810 m² plot)

Why is there such a gap between the €6,050/m² asking average and the €4,770/m² transaction median? Aix has a heavy stock of grand hôtels particuliers, country bastides and luxury new-builds that linger on the market and pull the mathematical average of active listings upward. The notarial median, by contrast, cuts the completed sales in half, where 1960s and 1970s peripheral flats balance out the historic centre.

Even on the notarial metric, Aix-en-Provence sits roughly 40% above the departmental average for apartments. It remains the fifth most expensive commune in the Bouches-du-Rhône, behind four coastal neighbours: Cassis, Carry-le-Rouet, Sausset-les-Pins and La Ciotat. Before making an offer on a specific street, buyers and their advisers can bridge the gap between portal expectations and reality using Comparables and the valuation and market study tools.

Are prices in Aix-en-Provence rising or falling?

Neither a slump nor a boom describes Aix in 2026; the market has absorbed higher interest rates and settled onto a high plateau.

In the CASAFARI Area Insights asking-price series for apartments, values started at €6,166.3/m² in Q1 2023 and peaked at €6,214.9/m² in Q3 2023. As credit tightened across France, asking prices dipped to a trough of €5,900.9/m² in Q4 2024. Since Q1 2025 they have staged a quiet recovery, reaching €6,050/m² in Q3 2026—up 1.0% on Q3 2025 (€5,990.1/m²) and 2.5% above the late-2024 trough, though still 1.9% below Q1 2023 and 2.7% off the peak.

Houses adjusted earlier and have barely moved since. CASAFARI data shows house asking prices rising from €6,724.4/m² in Q1 2023 to a peak of €6,921.8/m² in Q2 2023. From Q3 2024 onwards, they have traded within a narrow band between €6,618/m² and €6,685/m². At €6,654.5/m² in Q3 2026 versus €6,655.1/m² a year earlier (0.0%), house asking prices sit 1.0% below Q1 2023 and 3.9% below their 2023 high.

Official transaction indices confirm this sideways movement. The Notaires-INSEE price index for Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (older dwellings, base 100 in 2015) stood at a provisional 128.9 in Q2 2026, compared with 128.7 in Q2 2025 (+0.2% year on year, and −0.5% quarter on quarter), down slightly from its regional peak of 131.6 in Q3 2023. Locally, the Bouches-du-Rhône notaries recorded a 0.8% annual rise in Aix apartment median prices and a 7.7% rise in the house median over the 12 months to mid-2026, while describing the broader departmental market as prudent but fragile.

Nationally, according to INSEE Informations rapides on French house prices, Q1 2026 (published 28 May 2026), older-dwelling prices across France edged up 0.1% year on year, with annual transaction volumes stabilising at 2.5% of the housing stock, down from the 3.3% peak of Q3 2021. For buyers comparing regional cycles across our property market trends across France, the takeaway for Aix is straightforward: there is no distressed discount window here, nor is there a bidding frenzy. Good stock sells at fair value; overpriced listings wait.

Who is buying in Aix-en-Provence, and what?

Demand in Aix splits cleanly between small urban units for students and large family or retirement homes with greenery.

In the historic centre, studios represent roughly 40% of all apartment transactions, selling at an average of €129,500 for 23 m² according to the notaries' mid-2026 report. The buyers here are French parents housing a son or daughter at the university for three to five years, alongside private investors targeting furnished student or executive lets.

In the house segment, demographic shifts and lifestyle relocations set the pace. The notaries note that 21.5% of house buyers in Aix are over 60, and 5.6% arrive from Île-de-France. Many are Parisians or northern Europeans trading a city flat for a stone house with plane trees and a pool. Because a median house inside the commune costs €700,000, domestic families often look to the surrounding bassin d'Aix, where the notarial median for a house is a more approachable €438,000.

International buyers—most visibly British, Belgian, Swiss, German and North American households—concentrate at the upper end of the market: 18th-century flats in the Quartier Mazarin, and country bastides around Puyricard, Éguilles and the villages flanking the Sainte-Victoire. Meanwhile, steady corporate relocation demand comes from the Aix-les-Milles and Arbois technology parks, the international ITER nuclear fusion project at Cadarache to the north-east, and executives commuting via the TGV or airport.

One technical factor is dividing the market in 2026: energy performance (Diagnostic de Performance Énergétique, or DPE). Because French law progressively restricts the letting of poorly insulated DPE F and G homes—and because fitting external insulation or heat pumps in listed 17th-century Aix stonework is both difficult and expensive—buyers are paying a clear premium for turnkey efficiency. That explains why new-build medians reached €6,780/m² (+5.7% year on year) in the notaries' latest count. Those evaluating small units can explore CASAFARI for investors to benchmark local stock.

Second homes in Aix-en-Provence: the 7.2% and the 60% surcharge

Despite its international fame, Aix is primarily a working city rather than a shuttered resort. According to the INSEE 2023 census, second homes and occasional dwellings account for 7.2% of the commune's housing stock (6,495 units). That share has climbed steadily from 4.6% in 2012 and 5.7% in 2017. While still below the French national average of 9.7%, Aix's second-home rate is more than double that of Marseille (3.5%) and sits well above the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis (4.4%) and the wider arrondissement of Aix-en-Provence (4.8%).

That steady rise in non-resident ownership prompted a sharp fiscal response from the municipality. As detailed in a report of the council vote on the 60% second-home surcharge (in French), on 28 September 2026 the Aix-en-Provence city council voted to increase the municipal surcharge on the taxe d'habitation for second homes to 60%—the maximum permitted under article 1407 ter of the General Tax Code for a zone tendue (housing-shortage area). The city had not applied any surcharge previously; the new rate takes effect from the 2027 tax year across the 3,769 second homes recorded on the municipality's 2026 tax base (which uses a narrower fiscal definition than the INSEE census).

What does this mean for a buyer's budget? Primary residences in France pay no taxe d'habitation. For second homes, the 60% uplift applies only to the municipal portion of the tax, which is calculated on each property's cadastral rental value (valeur locative cadastrale). Buyers should ask their notary or the seller for the latest tax bill to calculate the exact 2027 euro impact on a specific property. Statutory exemptions remain available upon claim, notably for owners forced to keep a secondary residence for professional reasons or those who have moved into a care home.

What does it cost to buy, and can I let it out?

France places no legal restrictions on foreign nationals buying property, and non-residents pay the same acquisition duties as French residents. (If you reside outside the EU/EEA, note that French tax law generally requires appointing an accredited tax representative—a représentant fiscal—when you eventually resell above €150,000; confirm the current threshold with your notary.)

On the purchase itself, acquisition costs rose slightly in 2025. Under article 116 of the 2025 finance law, the Bouches-du-Rhône department raised its portion of the transfer duty (droits de mutation à titre onéreux, or DMTO) from 4.5% to 5% for deeds signed from 1 May 2025 until 31 March 2028, as outlined in the departmental transfer duty rates since the 2025 finance law (in French). Including the communal share and state assessment fee, the tax alone is about 6.32%; once notary emoluments and land registry fees are added, buyers of older property should budget roughly 7% to 8% of the purchase price on top (first-time buyers purchasing a primary residence are exempt from the 0.5-point departmental increase, and new-build purchases carry much lower duties).

If you plan to let an apartment short-term on platforms such as Airbnb, Aix enforces strict municipal rules. According to the city's short-term letting procedure (in French), every furnished tourist let requires a 13-digit registration number obtained via the municipal teleservice, which must appear on the listing. If the property is not your primary residence, deliberations DL.2017-554 and DL.2017-555 require a temporary change-of-use authorisation (autorisation temporaire de changement d'usage), granted for three years and renewable up to a total of fifteen years. Furthermore, since November 2024, obtaining that authorisation requires an energy performance rating (DPE) between A and E. Primary residences do not need a change of use, but are capped at 120 nights of letting per calendar year under national law.

For an international buyer, the transaction follows a reliable three-month rhythm: once a written offer is accepted, the parties sign a preliminary contract (compromis de vente or promesse de vente), triggering a mandatory ten-day cooling-off period for the buyer before the deposit is locked in and the notary spends roughly ten to twelve weeks clearing municipal pre-emption rights and title checks ahead of the final deed (acte authentique).

Where the numbers come from and how to get them yourself

Every asking-price series in this guide is drawn directly from CASAFARI, which indexes property listings across portals and estate agencies throughout France, deduplicates multi-agency instructions, removes statistical outliers, and aggregates the clean stock by administrative boundary. In our system, the commune of Aix-en-Provence is resolved via Location Lookup to location ID 493542. The figures quoted here come from the continuous 15-quarter series (sale_apartment_psqm and sale_house_psqm) running from Q1 2023 to Q3 2026.

Property professionals, wealth advisers and analysts can work with this data in three ways:

• On the web platform, combine macro series with property-level valuations using Comparables, or connect an AI assistant directly to live market data via Casafari MCP for querying the same series from an AI assistant.
• For engineering and data teams building their own models, the endpoints are fully documented in the Area Insights API documentation on developers.casafari.com and the Comparables and valuation API documentation (both in English).
• To test the data on Aix-en-Provence or any other European municipality, you can create an account on platform.casafari.com and start querying immediately.

If your search requires a genuine seafront within the same metropolitan area, compare these figures with our Marseille property market guide, just 30 km south, or step back to view the wider national picture in the France property market guide. To run your own location analysis across French communes, visit our Area Insights page.