France's bill 2968 would bar 50m yachts, fines up to 15pc
What bill 2968 actually says
The text was registered at the Assemblee nationale on 23 June 2026 as proposition de loi number 2968, titled visant a interdire l'acces et l'usage des superyachts dans les eaux et ports francais. The lead signatory is Thomas Portes, a deputy for La France Insoumise, signing with other members of his group. The operative threshold is a total length of 50 metres. Any pleasure vessel at or above it would be refused access to French seaports, refused a berth, and refused permission to anchor in French waters.
The single exception is a maritime emergency, which leaves the right of refuge intact and nothing else. The sponsors rest their case on four points: the fuel burn of the largest yachts, the use of publicly funded port infrastructure for private leisure, anchor damage to Posidonia oceanica meadows, and ownership held through offshore structures. The file went to the commission du developpement durable et de l'amenagement du territoire. It has no examination date and no rapporteur, and the dossier records one document, the bill itself.
The penalty schedule is the unusual part
Most access rules of this kind carry a fixed fine. This one sets the penalty as a proportion of the vessel's assessed value, from 1 per cent to 15 per cent, so the sanction scales with the boat rather than with the offence. On a yacht assessed at EUR 60m that is a range from EUR 600,000 to EUR 9m for a single breach.
Two further sanctions sit behind the fine. The state could confiscate the vessel and put it to what the text calls general-interest use, and it could impose an exclusion of five to ten years that follows the owner rather than the hull, keeping any other yacht in the same ownership out of French waters. The bill also asks for disclosure of ultimate beneficial owners and transparency on crew employment contracts. Those two clauses would touch an owner who never intended to bring a 50-metre yacht to France.
What a 50-metre owner would lose
The Riviera is not one port, it is the working centre of the Mediterranean season. The Riviera Yachting Network counts 40 ports along the French Mediterranean coast that take yachts, from Marseille round to Menton, and reckons half the world's yacht fleet is on that coastline in summer. Antibes, Cannes, Golfe-Juan and Saint-Tropez are the addresses at stake. An owner shut out of them keeps Italy and Spain, and loses the coast the charter market prices highest.
The refit exposure is larger and less obvious. The same body puts more than a quarter of the world's refits of yachts over 30 metres in the south of France, and estimates that a yacht absorbs about 10 per cent of its value each year in servicing and maintenance. French yachting turnover runs above EUR 2bn, more than half generated in the south. A 50-metre exclusion would move that work to Barcelona, Genoa and the Dutch yards, and the technical supply chain with it.
A hard line at 50 metres creates a cliff
A binary threshold does what binary thresholds always do. A yacht of 49.99 metres would be untouched and one of 50.01 metres excluded, and the difference in build cost between them is close to nothing. SuperYacht24 reported the obvious industry response, that the measure would mainly generate demand for hulls sitting just under the line rather than cut the emissions the sponsors are aiming at. The trade already builds to legal thresholds as a matter of routine, most visibly around the 500 GT mark.
For a buyer weighing a resale today the question is narrower than the politics. If a length threshold of this kind ever entered French law, the market would split into hulls with Riviera access and hulls without, and the second group would carry a discount that has nothing to do with the yacht. That is the strongest argument the industry has against the bill, because the split would arrive without the environmental effect the text is written to achieve.
The odds are long and the signal is the point
A proposition de loi from an opposition group faces a scheduling problem before it faces a vote. Government business fills most of the parliamentary calendar, and a text like this one reaches the floor mainly through the reserved day each group is allotted. Bill 2968 has no government backing on the record, no examination date and no committee report. It is a statement of position rather than a threat to anyone's cruising plans.
The part worth watching is not the ban. It is that a 50-metre line and a beneficial-ownership disclosure requirement now sit in a French parliamentary document with a number on it, which is where durable rules tend to begin. Owners in that band have nothing to do operationally, and the boats booked into Antibes and La Ciotat this autumn will go as planned. The next visible step, if there is one, is the appointment of a rapporteur.