If you sell clothing, footwear or household linen to French customers, you owe an eco-contribution on every single piece you ship — a men's T-shirt costs you €0.0396, a pair of men's boots €0.2138. This is France's TLC filière (textiles d'habillement, linge de maison, chaussures), run by the eco-organisme Refashion, and it works nothing like the packaging EPR most e-commerce founders already know. This guide walks through the 2026 tariff structure, the two declaration modes (one of which is expensive by design), the billing formula, and what a foreign D2C brand actually has to do. Every figure comes from Refashion's official 2026 eco-contribution guide.
Per piece, not per kilogram
Packaging EPR everywhere in Europe is priced by weight and material: so many cents per kilogram of cardboard, so many per kilogram of plastic. If that is your mental model, the French textile filière will surprise you. Refashion prices per piece placed on the market, and the rate depends not on what the garment weighs but on what it is and who it is for.
That changes the data problem completely. For packaging you need weights by material; for TLC you need a classification of every SKU against Refashion's own taxonomy, and a count of units sold to France. Get the classification wrong — or skip it — and the price changes by an order of magnitude, as we will see below.
(The parcel, polybag and shoebox around the garment are a separate obligation under the packaging filière — see our guide to fashion packaging EPR. Selling one hoodie to Paris genuinely touches two filières.)
The tariff grid: product line × rayon
Refashion's detailed 2026 tariff (Annexe I of its official eco-contribution guide) is a grid with two axes:
- Product line — what the item is. Three families: V (clothing textiles: T-shirts, shirts, jumpers, jeans, coats, swimwear…), L (household linen: sheets, duvet covers, towels, blankets…) and C (footwear: low shoes, ankle boots, boots, trainers…).
- Rayon — the target public or size band the line is priced for: adult man (15+), adult woman (15+), child (4–14), baby (0–36 months), or "all audiences" for lines where Refashion sets a single rate.
Each cell of the grid has an official code in the form V-11-H-EM0: family and line (V-11 = tops, T-shirt type), rayon (H = homme adulte), plus a fixed suffix. The 2026 detailed barème contains 72 clothing lines, 15 household linen lines and 17 footwear lines — roughly 100 distinct tariffs in total. Some real examples, in € per piece:
| Product line | Rayon | Code | 2026 rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tops — T-shirt type | Adult man | V-11-H-EM0 | €0.0396 |
| Tops — T-shirt type | Child (4–14) | V-11-E-EM0 | €0.0214 |
| Jeans | Adult man | V-16-H-EM0 | €0.1098 |
| Coats | Adult woman | V-25-F-EM0 | €0.1582 |
| Trainers | Adult man | C-04-H-EM0 | €0.1243 |
| Boots | Adult man | C-03-H-EM0 | €0.2138 |
| Duvet covers | All audiences | L-07-N-EM0 | €0.2017 |
| Blankets | All audiences | L-10-N-EM0 | €0.2175 |
Notice the spread: the same T-shirt line costs €0.0396 in the men's rayon but €0.0214 in the children's — nearly half. A men's boot costs more than five times a men's T-shirt. Classification is the price.
And you cannot guess the grid from intuition. In most lines the men's rate is the highest — but Refashion's 2026 barème inverts that pattern in places: waterproof rainwear is €0.0807 for women against €0.0505 for men (V-24), and summer shoes are €0.0892 for women against €0.0880 for men (C-07). The only safe approach is to work code by code from the official table.
Two declaration modes — and why the simple one is expensive by design
Refashion offers two ways to declare, and the choice has a bigger cost impact than any single tariff line:
- Detailed declaration (Annexe I): you declare pieces per tariff code and pay the rates above. This mode is mandatory if you declare eco-modulations — the bonuses for more durable products.
- Simplified declaration (Annexe II): available only if you place fewer than 5,000 pieces per year on the French market and claim no eco-modulations. One flat rate per family: €0.5799 per piece for clothing, €0.6525 for household linen, €0.6414 for footwear.
Look at those flat rates against the grid. €0.5799 per clothing piece is roughly 15 times the men's T-shirt rate, and about 27 times the children's T-shirt rate. Even against the most expensive clothing lines the simplified rate is a multiple. That gap is not an accident or a rounding artefact — it is the mechanism. Refashion prices the simplified mode so that not sub-classifying your catalogue is the costly option. If you sell any real volume of low-ticket basics, filing simplified because "classifying 200 SKUs is too much work" can multiply your eco-contribution by an order of magnitude.
What the invoice actually looks like
Refashion's 2026 billing formula, from the same official guide, is:
(estimated volumes × tariff) + €30 administrative fee + redevance ADEME
Three practical consequences. First, the €30 fixed admin fee means even a micro-seller with a handful of French orders pays something — there is no volume below which the filière is free. Second, the redevance ADEME (the levy funding the French regulator's producer register) rides on top of the eco-contribution itself. Third, because the call for funds works on estimated volumes, your declared unit counts drive your cash flow directly — which is a good reason to build them from real sales data rather than a guess you will have to reconcile later.
Foreign seller? You are the producer — and since July you need a mandataire
Under French EPR law, a distance seller shipping from abroad directly to French households is the producer for everything it ships — your company's country of incorporation is irrelevant. A Berlin or Barcelona D2C brand selling shoes on its own webshop to customers in Lyon owes Refashion the eco-contribution exactly as a French brand would.
Since 10 July 2026 there is a second layer: France now requires every producer not established in France to appoint a mandataire — a representative established in France who takes over the registration, declarations and payments. This applies to the textile filière like every other. We covered the new mandataire rule in detail here, including how to vet providers — worth reading before you sign anything, because Refashion's own model mandate contract requires the mandataire to be solvent, and if it is not, the eco-organisme can come back to you.
Enforcement, as usual in France, runs through your sales channels before any inspector calls. Registering with Refashion gets you an IDU (identifiant unique) from ADEME's SYDEREP register for the TLC filière, and marketplaces are legally required to verify that third-party sellers hold a valid IDU for the filières their products touch — otherwise the platform itself becomes the producer. No textile IDU, no Amazon.fr apparel listings. The administrative penalties (up to €30,000 per missing unique identifier, per filière) are almost secondary to being delisted.
The data you need per SKU
Strip away the French vocabulary and the compliance task is a data task. For every SKU you sell to France you need:
- The product line — which of Refashion's ~100 lines it belongs to (tops T-shirt type? tops shirt type? jeans? trousers city? trainers? ankle boots?). The distinctions are finer than a typical e-commerce category tree.
- The rayon — men's, women's, child, baby, or all-audiences, matching the rayons Refashion actually prices for that line.
- Units sold to France in the declaration period — from your order data, not your total production.
From those three facts, the eco-contribution is deterministic: code × official rate × units, summed across the catalogue, plus the €30 and the redevance. The hard part is the first two — classifying hundreds of SKUs against a French taxonomy, and keeping the classification current as your catalogue changes.
How Pack Declare helps
This grid is exactly the kind of problem Pack Declare was built for. We carry Refashion's official 2026 taxonomy and tariff codes in the product, help you classify your catalogue against the real product lines and rayons (not an approximation of them), and compute your estimated eco-contribution from your actual Shopify, WooCommerce or Amazon sales to France — per SKU, per code, auditable down to the tariff line. You see what detailed declaration will cost before you file, and what the simplified flat rate would have cost you instead. The same platform tracks your French obligations across the other filières your products touch, starting with the packaging around every parcel.
Check your French textile and packaging obligations free →
Already using Pack Declare? The estimate for your own catalogue is in the app.
Frequently asked questions
Is the French textile eco-contribution charged per piece or per kilogram?
Per piece placed on the French market. Unlike packaging EPR, which is priced by weight and material, Refashion prices each item by what it is and who it is for. A men’s T-shirt costs €0.0396 and a pair of men’s boots €0.2138 under the 2026 detailed barème.
How much is the Refashion eco-contribution in 2026?
It depends on the tariff code. Refashion’s 2026 detailed grid holds roughly 100 tariffs — 72 clothing lines, 15 household linen lines and 17 footwear lines — crossed with a rayon (adult man, adult woman, child, baby, or all audiences). Rates run from a few cents to well over twenty cents per piece.
What is the difference between Refashion’s detailed and simplified declaration?
The detailed declaration reports pieces per tariff code at the published rates, and is mandatory if you claim eco-modulations. The simplified declaration applies one flat rate per family — €0.5799 for clothing, €0.6525 for household linen, €0.6414 for footwear — and is available only under 5,000 pieces a year with no eco-modulations.
Why is Refashion’s simplified declaration so much more expensive?
By design. At €0.5799 per clothing piece, the flat rate is roughly 15 times the men’s T-shirt rate and about 27 times the children’s. The gap is the mechanism: Refashion prices the simplified mode so that not classifying your catalogue is the costly option, not an administrative shortcut.
Is there a minimum Refashion fee for very small sellers?
There is no volume below which the filière is free. The 2026 billing formula is estimated volumes × tariff, plus a €30 fixed administrative fee, plus the redevance ADEME that funds the French producer register. Even a handful of French orders produces an invoice.
Do foreign online sellers have to register with Refashion?
Yes. Under French EPR law a distance seller shipping from abroad directly to French households is the producer, whatever its country of incorporation. Since 10 July 2026 a producer not established in France must also appoint a French mandataire to hold the registration and file on its behalf.
Does my packaging count towards the textile declaration?
No. The parcel, polybag and shoebox are a separate obligation under the household packaging filière, with its own eco-organismes and its own per-material tariffs. Selling a single hoodie to France genuinely triggers two filières and two declarations.
What happens if I sell textiles to France without a Refashion IDU?
Registration yields an IDU in ADEME’s SYDEREP register for the TLC filière, and marketplaces are legally required to verify third-party sellers hold a valid IDU or become the producer themselves. In practice listings get blocked. Administrative penalties reach €30,000 per missing identifier, per filière.
Related reading: France's new mandataire rule for foreign sellers · The complete guide to France's EPR filières · Fashion and EPR: polybags, shoeboxes and packaging compliance