The registered office is a concept specific to companies, and is located where the company's legal life, management bodies and main departments are concentrated. It determines the nationality of the SAS, its country of taxation and the competent jurisdiction in the event of litigation.
This is the first administrative form to be completed when setting up a company, and is therefore of the utmost importance.
It is a real showcase for your SAS, and can be used to convey a prestigious image of your company. The registered office address can be changed during the life of the company, provided that a number of essential legal formalities are completed.
These have a cost: clerk's fees, costs of publishing a legal announcement, administrative formalities to be carried out in-house, and so on.
Let's find out the cost of changing the registered office of your SAS.
The first step in changing the address of your registered office is to amend the company's articles of association, indicating the address of the new registered office. This can be done very simply in-house, and requires no special costs. The new articles of association must be approved at an Extraordinary General Meeting.
The next step is to publish a legal notice in an approved newspaper.
All changes must be advertised. If the new head office is located in the same département as the old one, a single announcement is sufficient. Otherwise, one must be published in the old département, and the second in the new one.
The price of a legal announcement is not fixed by law, and depends on the newspapers. In general, for a standard announcement, expect to pay between €100 and €150.
Once the modification file has been fully completed, it must be sent to the clerk's office of the relevant commercial court.
These services are not free of charge, and include registry fees, Treasury taxes, INPI fees (for intellectual property) and insertion in the Bodacc.
A single payment must be made to the commercial court clerk's office for all the above procedures.
In the case of a SAS, rates are set by law:
- If the registered office is transferred to a geographical area subject to the jurisdiction of the same commercial court, the applicable fees are €195.38 including VAT.
- If the registered office is transferred to a geographical area subject to the jurisdiction of another commercial court, the applicable fees are €242.16 including VAT.
There are several other costs involved in transferring the registered office of a SAS.
In general, companies prefer to call on the advice of a professional to draw up all legal documents (minutes of general meetings, amended articles of association, etc.) or to draw up the form for publication of the legal announcement, for example.
The authorities also require you to fill in the CERFA M2 form to formalize your application.
More often than not, they call on the services of a legal expert, a lawyer or their chartered accountant to take care of all these formalities.
Additional fees may apply, depending on the service provider's rate.
In 2019, more and more online platforms are offering this type of service. Bear in mind that all these costs are optional, since the company can decide to carry out the procedures itself (apart from the cost of labor generated by the time spent in-house).
Transferring the registered office of an SAS is no mean feat, unless you know how to get around all the difficulties.
Overall, this process costs between €200 and €400.
Thanks to this article, you'll have no more secrets. It requires specialized legal skills, which is why we recommend the intervention of a professional (lawyer, notary, etc.) to carry it out. This reduces the error rate and eases the daily burden on your employees.
A change of head office is often an opportunity to migrate to more flexible, day-to-day and less expensive solutions, such as domiciliation companies.
Written by our expert Paul LASBARRERES-CANDAU
July 8, 2019
