Google Ads & French soldes 2026: legal rules, dates, and campaign compliance

Most seasonal Google Ads guidance is about strategy — when to bid up, how to pace budget, which campaigns to run. The French soldes are different: before you optimize anything, you have to comply with a specific legal framework that governs when you can run a sale, what you can call it, and how you must present the discount. France regulates the soldes tightly because the official periods carry a special legal status — they permit selling at a loss, which is otherwise restricted — and that privilege comes with strict rules enforced by the DGCCRF.

This guide is compliance-focused, written for advertisers running Google Ads to French consumers during the soldes in 2026. It covers the legal framework and the fixed dates, the regional derogations that mean the national dates do not apply everywhere, the DGCCRF advertising rules, the price-reference and 'prix barre' requirements, which ad-copy claims are legal, and how Google's own policies layer on top of French law. A practical caveat up front: this is general information, not legal advice — regulations and dates change, and for your specific situation you should verify the current rules with the official sources cited and, where the stakes warrant it, with qualified legal counsel.

What the French soldes are and why the legal framework matters

The soldes are France's official, legally-defined sales periods, and understanding their special legal status explains why the rules around them are so specific.

The defining legal feature: selling at a loss is permitted. Under normal French commercial law, reselling a product below its purchase cost (revente a perte) is prohibited — a measure designed to protect competition and small retailers. The soldes are one of the few legal exceptions: during the official periods, retailers may sell at a loss to clear inventory. This is the core reason the soldes are regulated. Because they unlock a privilege (loss-leading) that is otherwise restricted, the law tightly controls when they happen, what qualifies, and how they are advertised.

The term 'soldes' is legally reserved. Precisely because soldes carry this special status, the word itself is protected. A retailer cannot label an ordinary promotion 'soldes' to borrow the regulatory cachet and consumer trust associated with the official event. Using 'soldes' outside the official periods, or for offers that do not qualify, is prohibited and sanctionable. Year-round, retailers use other terms — promotion, remise, offre speciale, ventes privees, destockage — and reserve 'soldes' strictly for the official windows.

Genuine reductions are required. Soldes must represent real reductions from genuine reference prices. The whole point is consumer protection: a shopper seeing 'soldes' should be able to trust that the discount is real and calculated from a legitimate prior price. Fabricated reference prices, fake markdowns, and misleading discount claims are exactly what the DGCCRF checks for and sanctions.

Why this matters for Google Ads. Every one of these principles bears directly on your advertising:

• Your ad scheduling must respect the legal dates (you cannot advertise 'soldes' before the official start).
• Your discount claims must derive from legitimate reference prices.
• Your use of the term 'soldes' must be confined to the official period.
• Your Shopping sale_price annotations and landing-page 'prix barre' must reflect genuine references, consistent with the ad.

The soldes are not just a high-demand window to optimize for — they are a regulated event you must advertise lawfully. The strategy comes after the compliance. For the broader European data-and-consent compliance context that also affects French campaigns, see our Consent Mode v2 and GDPR guide.

The 2026 soldes dates and how the law sets them

France has two national soldes periods each year, with their timing and duration governed by law.

Two periods, four weeks each. There are winter soldes (soldes d'hiver), beginning in early January, and summer soldes (soldes d'ete), beginning in late June. Each period lasts four weeks. The duration was reduced from six weeks to four by the loi Pacte (the 2019 business-growth law), reflecting a policy shift to concentrate the soldes and protect the rest of the retail calendar.

The dates are set annually and published in advance. While the periods fall in predictable months (January and June/July), the exact start dates are fixed each year by the authorities and published ahead of time. The start day shifts from year to year — it is typically anchored to a particular weekday in the relevant week rather than a fixed calendar date. This is why you must confirm the precise current-year dates from official sources rather than assuming last year's dates carry over.

Where to confirm the dates. The authoritative sources are the French government's own channels: service-public.fr (the official public-service portal) publishes the soldes dates each year, and economie.gouv.fr (the Ministry of the Economy, which oversees the DGCCRF) provides the regulatory detail. These are the sources to check, and to re-check, before scheduling soldes advertising. Treat the dates as a hard input to your campaign calendar.

Why the precision matters for advertising. Because the term 'soldes' is reserved and the loss-leading privilege is tied to the official dates, advertising a 'soldes' offer even a day before the legal start is a violation. Your Google Ads scheduling, your promotion-extension date ranges, and your Shopping sale_price activation must all align to the exact legal start and end. Using date-scheduled promotion extensions and scheduled feed updates lets you automate this alignment so 'soldes' messaging cannot accidentally go live early or persist past the end.

The national dates are the baseline — but they are not universal across France, which brings us to the regional derogations.

Regional date variations: Alsace-Moselle and overseas

A common compliance trap is assuming the national soldes dates apply uniformly everywhere in France. They do not — several territories have derogations with different dates, and advertising to those regions on the national calendar can put you out of compliance there.

Alsace-Moselle (Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin, Moselle). These three departments, for historical legal reasons (a distinct local law dating to the period when the region was under German administration), have derogations affecting the soldes calendar. The dates in these departments can differ from the national dates. If you target consumers in these departments, you must align your soldes advertising to the applicable local dates, not the national ones.

Overseas territories (DROM-COM). France's overseas departments and territories — such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane, La Reunion, Mayotte, and others — have their own soldes dates set to reflect local conditions (different seasons, climate, and retail calendars; the southern-hemisphere seasons in some territories make the metropolitan summer/winter framing inappropriate). These dates differ, sometimes substantially, from the metropolitan dates.

Why this matters for geo-targeted Google Ads. Google Ads lets you target specific regions, and your soldes campaigns must respect the legal dates for each targeted region:

• If you run a national campaign with 'soldes' messaging timed to the metropolitan dates, that messaging may be non-compliant in Alsace-Moselle or the overseas territories where the dates differ.
• The compliant approach is to segment campaigns or ad scheduling by region so the soldes window matches the legal dates applicable to each targeted area.

Practical implementation. Build a region-by-region soldes calendar at the start of your planning (it is the first HowTo step for good reason). Confirm the metropolitan dates, the Alsace-Moselle dates, and the dates for any overseas territories you target, all from official sources. Then structure your Google Ads geo-targeting and scheduling so each region sees 'soldes' messaging only within its own legal window. For advertisers targeting only metropolitan France excluding Alsace-Moselle, this is simpler — but you must consciously exclude or separately handle the derogation regions rather than assume one calendar fits all.

The regional variations are exactly the kind of detail that is easy to miss and costly to get wrong. A single national 'soldes' campaign is convenient but legally risky across the derogation territories.

The DGCCRF advertising rules that apply to your ads

The DGCCRF (Direction generale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la repression des fraudes) is the French authority that enforces consumer-protection and pricing rules, and it actively checks soldes advertising. Understanding what it scrutinizes lets you build compliant campaigns.

What the DGCCRF enforces during the soldes:

• Genuine reductions: that advertised discounts are real and calculated from legitimate reference prices, not fabricated to appear larger than they are.
• Legitimate reference prices: that the struck-through reference price corresponds to a genuine prior price per the price-reference regulations, not an inflated figure invented to exaggerate the markdown.
• Lawful use of the term 'soldes': that 'soldes' is used only within the official periods and for qualifying offers.
• Truthful advertising generally: that the advertising does not constitute a misleading commercial practice (pratique commerciale trompeuse), a broad consumer-protection concept that captures false or deceptive claims.

The consequences of non-compliance. Violations can lead to administrative fines and other sanctions. Misleading commercial practices are treated seriously under French consumer law, and the soldes are a period of heightened DGCCRF attention precisely because the high promotional volume creates more opportunity for deceptive pricing.

How this maps to your Google Ads surfaces. Each consumer-facing element of your campaign is a place where these rules apply:

The advertiser is responsible. A frequent misconception is that the offer is the merchandising team's responsibility and the ad merely reflects it. Under French consumer law, the advertisement itself is a regulated communication — if the ad makes a misleading price claim, that is a violation regardless of who set the underlying price. As the party running the Google Ads, you must ensure the ad's claims are compliant. This is why reference-price documentation and ad-feed-landing-page consistency (covered next) are central to soldes compliance.

Price-reference rules and the 'prix barre' requirement

The 'prix barre' — the struck-through reference price shown next to the reduced soldes price — is the visual centerpiece of soldes pricing, and it is governed by specific reference-price rules that every advertiser must respect.

What the 'prix barre' communicates. The convention shows the original price crossed out beside the lower soldes price, signaling the size of the discount. Its entire credibility rests on the reference price being genuine — a struck-through price that was never really charged turns the whole presentation into a deceptive claim.

The reference-price requirement. French regulations (which have evolved in line with EU rules on price-reduction announcements) require that the reference price used to calculate and display a reduction be legitimate — generally tied to the lowest price actually applied during a defined prior period before the reduction. The precise determination of the reference is specified by the regulations, and it has tightened over time specifically to stop retailers from inflating 'before' prices to manufacture impressive-looking discounts. The practical rule for advertisers: you cannot invent a high reference price; it must correspond to a price genuinely applied beforehand per the regulations.

How this constrains your Google Ads:

• Shopping sale_price annotations. When you set a sale_price against a price in your Merchant Center feed, Google can display a strikethrough sale annotation. The price (reference) must be genuine — the product must actually have been sold at that price. This is both a Google requirement and a French legal one. An inflated reference here is non-compliant on both fronts.
• Discount claims in ad copy. A headline like '50% off in the soldes' must be true relative to a legitimate reference. If the reference is fabricated, the claim is misleading.
• Landing-page consistency. The 'prix barre' on the destination page must show the same legitimate reference as the ad and the feed. Discrepancies between what the ad promises and what the page shows are both a poor experience and a compliance risk.

The depth of discount is not the constraint — the honesty of the reference is. Because the soldes legally permit selling at a loss, you may advertise very deep discounts. What you may not do is misrepresent the reference price from which the discount is calculated. A genuine 70% reduction from a real reference is fine; a 70% reduction from a fake reference is a violation. Build your soldes pricing on documented, legitimate references and the 'prix barre' takes care of itself.

What ad-copy claims are legal during the soldes

Translating the legal framework into concrete ad-writing guidance: here is what you can and cannot say in your Google Ads during the French soldes.

Claims that are legal (when accurate):

• The term 'soldes' itself — but only within the official period for the relevant region, and only for qualifying offers. 'Soldes d'hiver — jusqu'a -50%' is fine during the winter soldes if the discounts are genuine.
• Genuine discount percentages and amounts calculated from legitimate reference prices: '-30%', 'jusqu'a -60%', specific euro reductions — all permitted when true and traceable to a real reference.
• The actual reduced price stated plainly: 'Manteau a 49 EUR au lieu de 99 EUR' is the clearest and safest form, because it states both the soldes price and a genuine reference.
• Legitimate duration framing: 'Soldes jusqu'au [date legale]' is fine when the date matches the official end.

Claims to avoid:

• 'Soldes' outside the legal window or for the wrong region. Using 'soldes' before the official start, after the end, or in a region with different derogation dates is a misuse of the reserved term.
• Discounts from inflated or fictitious reference prices. Any percentage or euro reduction calculated from a fake 'before' price is a misleading practice, no matter how the ad is worded.
• Claims your feed or landing page does not honor. If the ad says '-50%' but the page shows a smaller discount, the inconsistency is a problem. The ad, feed, and page must agree.
• Unsubstantiated superlatives and urgency. 'Les meilleurs prix de France', 'derniere chance' (when it is not), 'stock limite' (when it is not) — superlative and urgency claims you cannot substantiate risk being deemed misleading. Use them only when demonstrably true.

Outside the soldes, switch terminology. For promotions that run before, after, or independently of the soldes, use the permitted year-round terms — 'promotion', 'offre speciale', 'remise', 'ventes privees', 'destockage' — instead of 'soldes'. These let you advertise discounts lawfully outside the official periods (subject to the general reference-price and misleading-practice rules, which still apply to all promotional pricing, not just soldes).

A quick-reference table of compliant versus risky claims:

The safe default. When uncertain, state the actual reduced price alongside a genuine reference price, confine 'soldes' to the official dates, and ensure the ad, feed, and landing page all show the same numbers. Plain, accurate, consistent price statements are both effective and compliant — and they sidestep the superlative and reference-price traps that draw DGCCRF attention.

Why honesty is also good performance. Beyond compliance, there is a marketing argument for plain, accurate price claims: they convert. French consumers are sophisticated about soldes and increasingly skeptical of inflated 'before' prices and unsubstantiated superlatives, which the press and consumer associations regularly scrutinize. An ad that states a genuine reduced price and a real reference reads as trustworthy precisely because it is specific and verifiable. The compliant path and the high-performing path converge on the same behavior — truthful, specific, consistent pricing — so treating compliance as a constraint that hurts performance is a false trade-off. The retailers who build trust during the soldes also tend to win the repeat business that follows.

Google Ads policy on top of French law

French law is the first compliance layer, but Google enforces its own advertising and Merchant Center policies independently — and an offer can satisfy French law yet still violate Google policy, or vice versa. You must clear both.

Google's relevant policies. Google Ads and Merchant Center maintain policies on:

• Misrepresentation and misleading content — Google prohibits ads and offers that deceive users, including misleading pricing and false discount claims. This overlaps with French rules but is enforced by Google through its own review systems.
• Pricing accuracy — Merchant Center requires that prices in your feed match your landing pages. Google crawls your pages and compares; mismatches lead to disapprovals. This is a frequent soldes problem when prices change rapidly and the feed lags the site.
• Promotions policy — merchant promotions and sale-price annotations have their own eligibility and accuracy requirements.
• Editorial and content standards — applying to ad copy quality and claims.

Why both layers matter. Consider two scenarios:

• An offer is legal under French soldes rules (genuine discount, legitimate reference, within the official period) but the feed price does not match the landing page because of a sync lag. This passes French law conceptually but fails Google's pricing-accuracy policy, and the products get disapproved — so the offer cannot run regardless of its legality.
• An offer satisfies Google's policies (consistent prices, no obvious misrepresentation in Google's automated review) but uses 'soldes' a few days before the legal French start date. Google may not catch the date issue, but it is a French legal violation exposing you to DGCCRF sanction.

The point is that clearing one layer does not clear the other. You need French legal compliance and Google policy compliance.

Practical reconciliation. The good news is that the two layers reinforce each other on the core principle — honest, consistent pricing. The actions that satisfy French law (legitimate references, truthful claims, consistency across surfaces) also largely satisfy Google's misrepresentation and pricing policies. The main Google-specific additions are: keep the feed and landing pages tightly in sync (Google's automated price-accuracy checks are strict and unforgiving of lag), resolve Merchant Center disapprovals before the soldes start, and follow the merchant-promotions setup and approval process. Build for both layers from the start rather than treating Google policy as an afterthought. For the technical feed-accuracy practices that prevent the most common Google disapprovals, see our Q4 Shopping feed optimization guide.

A pre-soldes compliance checklist for advertisers

Bringing the framework together into an actionable pre-soldes routine. Run this before every soldes period (the rules are the same for winter and summer, only the dates change).

1. Confirm the dates, per region. Verify the current-year national soldes dates from service-public.fr and economie.gouv.fr. Identify whether you target any derogation regions (Alsace-Moselle, overseas territories) and confirm their distinct dates. Build a region-by-region soldes calendar that your ad scheduling will follow exactly.

2. Document legitimate reference prices. For every product you will discount, record a genuine reference price consistent with the price-reference rules, plus the soldes price. This documentation is the foundation for every downstream claim and your evidence in case of a DGCCRF check.

3. Align the Shopping feed. Set sale_price against genuine price values so strikethrough annotations are legitimate. Confirm feed prices match landing pages exactly. Schedule feed/sale-price activation to the legal start date per region so no 'soldes' discount appears early.

4. Write compliant ad copy and extensions. Confine 'soldes' to the legal window per region (use date-scheduled promotion extensions). State genuine discounts from documented references. Avoid unsubstantiated superlatives and urgency. Use permitted terms ('promotion', 'remise') for any non-soldes offers.

5. Verify ad-feed-landing-page consistency. Cross-check that the discount and reference price are identical across all three surfaces. Inconsistency is both a Google disapproval risk and a French compliance risk.

6. Clear Google policy. Confirm no Merchant Center pricing-accuracy disapprovals, and that ad copy and promotions meet Google's misrepresentation and promotions policies. Resolve issues before the start.

7. Monitor during the period. Check that scheduling matches the legal window per region, that prices and references stay accurate as inventory changes, that feed and landing pages do not drift out of sync, and that no 'soldes' messaging persists past the end date.

8. Switch terminology and archive after. When the period ends, remove 'soldes' from all surfaces and switch to permitted terms for continuing offers. Archive your reference-price documentation and compliance records.

A closing note on scope and advice. This guide explains the compliance landscape for Google Ads during the French soldes, but regulations evolve, dates change annually, and specific situations vary. Always confirm the current rules and dates from the official sources cited, and for material decisions or uncertainty, consult qualified legal counsel familiar with French consumer law. The cost of confirming compliance is trivial against the cost of a DGCCRF sanction or disapproved campaigns during your most important French sales window. For the broader French and EU privacy-and-consent compliance that also governs your campaigns, see our Consent Mode v2 and GDPR guide.

If you want AI-driven Google Ads optimization that keeps your feed accurate, flags pricing and disapproval issues, and helps you run compliant promotional campaigns through the soldes, SteerAds runs a free 14-day audit on your Google and Microsoft Ads accounts.

Sources

Official and third-party sources consulted for this guide:

• economie.gouv.fr/dgccrf — DGCCRF guidance on soldes, pricing rules, and misleading commercial practices
• service-public.fr — Official French public-service information on soldes dates and rules
• legifrance.gouv.fr — French legal texts on soldes, the loi Pacte, and consumer-protection provisions
• support.google.com/merchants — Google Merchant Center pricing accuracy and promotions policies
• fevad.com — FEVAD French e-commerce federation soldes and market data

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