Holding Structures for Monaco Property: SCI, SCP and SAM Explained

On 19 June 2026 the Financial Action Task Force made its initial determination that Monaco has substantially completed the action plan it signed up to two years earlier, and that the Principality now warrants an on-site assessment to confirm the reforms are being sustained. Monaco stays on the grey list until that visit happens. Algeria and Namibia came off the same list in the same round, having passed theirs. Two years of legislating have landed almost entirely on the machinery that any Monaco property holding structure runs on: who owns what, through which company, and who is entitled to find out.

The right structure for a family has not changed much since 2024. How much of it is visible, and to whom, has changed a great deal.

Owning in Your Own Name, Which Is Still the Default

An individual buying an existing Monaco apartment pays 4.75 percent in registration duty and roughly 1.5 percent to the notaire. There is no company to constitute, no annual filing beyond what a resident already handles, and nothing to explain to a bank that it has not seen a thousand times. For a single owner, or a couple, with one property and an uncomplicated succession, this is usually the correct answer and most of the literature on the subject is oddly reluctant to say so.

It stops being the correct answer at a predictable point: when several heirs are involved, when assets sit on both sides of the French border, or when the property will need to change hands within the family without changing hands on the open market. Everything below is a response to one of those three problems.

The Civil Company, and What It Is Actually For

Monaco has its own civil companies, registered in a special register kept by the Trade and Industry Registry. They come in more than one flavour, including the société civile immobilière and the société civile particulière, and the shorthand that treats an SCP as “the Monegasque SCI” is a useful approximation rather than a legal equivalence. France’s SCI and Monaco’s civil companies are creatures of two different national laws and behave differently at exactly the moments that matter.

What they share is the mechanism. A civil company is tax-transparent and civil rather than commercial in character, so it can hold and let property without being fitted out for trade. Ownership then sits in company shares instead of in the walls. Shares divide; an apartment does not. A family that leaves one flat to three children in equal undivided shares has created a standing argument with a deed attached, and the civil company exists to convert that argument into a shareholders’ agreement.

A Monaco civil company whose partners are individuals meets the transparency criteria and is charged registration duty at the same 4.75 percent as an individual buyer. The structure costs something to run. It does not cost anything extra to acquire through.

What Happens When the Shares Change Hands

Buying through a company does not convert a property sale into a share sale for duty purposes, and Monaco arranged matters that way deliberately. Where a Monaco civil company’s partners are individuals acting on their own account and known to the tax authorities, the company falls outside the annual declaration regime altogether, and a transfer of its shares is taxed as a transfer of the underlying property: 4.75 percent where the buyer is itself transparent, 7.5 percent where it is not.

Every other legal entity holding rights over Monaco property, wherever it is incorporated, comes under Law 1.381 of 29 June 2011. It must appoint an accredited representative established in Monaco and file a declaration each year stating whether its beneficial owner has changed. A change triggers proportional duty of 4.75 percent on the entire market value of the property rather than on the price paid for the shares. Where nothing has changed, the filing costs a fixed fifty euros; a late one costs five thousand, and ten thousand once a formal notice has run out.

The same duty then falls away in the case families care most about. It is not due where the change of beneficial owner results from a gift or a legal succession in favour of a spouse, an ascendant or a descendant in the direct line, nor on a sale of Monaco civil company shares already taxed as a property transfer in its own right. An apartment can move down a generation inside a structure without being taxed as though it had been sold.

The Cross-Border Point, Which Is the Whole Reason This Structure Exists

The France-Monaco succession convention of 1 April 1950 does two things that pull in opposite directions. Article 2 provides that immovable property is subject to succession duty only in the state where it stands, which is why a French villa held directly generates a French bill however Monegasque its owner. Article 6 provides that shares and partnership interests are taxable only in the state where the deceased was domiciled.

Which article governs a Monegasque civil company holding a French villa was litigated to the top. On 2 October 2015 the Cour de cassation, sitting in its assemblée plénière, held that the shares are incorporeal movable property falling under Article 6, and that this holds even where French domestic law would classify the company as predominantly immovable. The same villa can meet a French scale reaching 45 percent if it is held directly, or Article 6 and a Monaco domicile if it is held through a Monegasque civil company.

Two conditions deserve stating precisely, because they are routinely stated loosely. The deceased must have been domiciled in one of the two states, and for French nationals the convention treats domicile in Monaco as established only where they had habitually resided there for at least five years at the date of death. That five-year condition attaches to French nationality and is often quoted as though it applied to everybody. Nationals of some third countries can reach the same position through a non-discrimination clause in their own treaty with France, which is a question for an adviser rather than an article. Lifetime gifts and sales of shares are a separate matter again and can create exposure on both sides of the border. Baldo Realty Group’s guide to real estate inheritance in Monaco sets out the Monegasque half of the picture.

Vehicles That Are the Wrong Shape for a Home

Monaco prices opacity, and it does so openly. Registration duty runs at 4.75 percent for buyers meeting the transparency criteria, 7.5 percent as the general rate, and 10 percent where an entity’s beneficial owners are not individuals acting on their own account, or where their identity is not brought to the tax authorities through an accredited representative. On a fifteen million euro apartment the gap between the first and the last of those rates comes to close to eight hundred thousand euros, payable at completion. An entity that never appoints an accredited representative at all owes a further 1.5 percent of market value, and owes it again every year until the position is put right.

A Société Anonyme Monégasque belongs to a different category again. Monegasque company law was overhauled by Law 1.573 of 8 April 2025, and an SAM still requires minimum capital of EUR 150,000, fully subscribed, with at least a quarter of the cash shares paid up at incorporation, articles drawn by a Monaco notaire and approved by Ministerial Order, and a board of directors. It is a proper commercial company and a reasonable vehicle for an operating business that happens to own its premises.

For holding a family apartment it is a cathedral built to shelter a bicycle.

What a Monaco Property Holding Structure Cannot Buy

This is where the opening paragraph comes back. Under Law 1.362 of 3 August 2009 as amended, and Sovereign Ordinance 2.318, entities registered in Monaco must identify and declare their beneficial owners: the individuals ultimately holding at least 25 percent of capital or voting rights, or exercising effective control by other means. Non-trading companies entered in the special register are within scope, and the Monegasque government has publicly reminded civil companies of the obligation on the back of the MONEYVAL findings. This is not incidental to the FATF process either: one of the six reforms in the action plan Monaco has just been told it has substantially completed was enhancing the sanctions applied for breaches of beneficial ownership requirements. Sitting outside the tax authorities’ annual declaration is not the same as sitting outside this register, and a Monaco civil company can do the first while remaining squarely inside the second.

Access is not public in the way some European registers briefly were. Monegasque authorities have it, as do the professionals subject to the anti-money-laundering law. Beyond that, a person demonstrating a legitimate interest connected to money laundering, terrorist financing or corruption may be granted access, subject to authorisation by the President of the Tribunal de première instance.

The practical translation is worth being blunt about. A civil company keeps a family name off a conveyance and out of casual view. It does not put that name beyond the reach of a Monegasque judge, a compliance department or a foreign tax authority operating through exchange of information, and any adviser still selling these structures primarily on confidentiality is selling a 2014 product.

Why This Still Ends With a Notaire

A Monaco notaire is a public officer rather than a processor of documents, and is involved in every property transaction whatever the vehicle. Baldo Realty Group’s guide to the notaire’s role sets out what that involvement covers, and it extends well past verifying title. The costs attaching to each structure and the due diligence a serious buyer should expect both move with the choice of vehicle.

None of the above is advice for a particular family, and the right structure for one household is frequently the wrong one next door. What it should establish is which questions to arrive with: how many heirs, how many jurisdictions, and how long the property is meant to stay in the family. Those three answers narrow the field before a notaire has said a word, and settling them before an offer goes in costs nothing. Settling them after completion costs a restructuring.

This article describes general structures as they currently stand and is not legal or tax advice. Monegasque and cross-border succession law is detailed and specific to individual circumstances; always confirm the right structure with a Monaco notaire and a qualified tax adviser before acting.