Registration and Land Conservation Fees in Morocco, Line by Line

Registration duty, droits d'enregistrement, is charged on the price written into the sale deed. The rate depends on what that price is actually buying. According to the Ministry's own 2026 fiscal guide for Moroccans living abroad, a built property intended for housing, commercial, professional or administrative use is taxed at 4%. Bare land, or land carrying a building destined for demolition, is taxed at 5% instead. There is one reduction worth knowing if it applies to you: the first sale of a qualifying social housing unit, between 50 and 80 square metres and priced at 250,000 dirhams or less before VAT, is taxed at 3%.

None of this changes with the buyer's nationality. A foreign buyer and a Moroccan buyer pay the same registration duty on the same property, worked out the same way. What differs for a buyer abroad sits elsewhere, mainly in how the purchase money has to arrive and be documented, not in the rate stamped on the deed.

The deed has to be registered, and the duty paid, within 30 days of signing. The same guide is explicit that missing that window brings penalties and a surcharge on top of the duty itself, so treat it as a hard date rather than a guideline. Your notary normally handles the filing, but the clock starts on the date the deed is signed, not the date someone gets round to submitting it.

There is a second cost that sits entirely within your control. An additional 2% registration duty applies to any property sale over 300,000 dirhams where the price, or part of it, is paid in a way that cannot be traced, which in practice means cash rather than a crossed cheque, a bank transfer, a bank card or another documented method. The same guide confirms that if part of the price is settled in cash and the rest through a traceable method, the 2% only applies to the cash portion, not the whole price. On a built property, that pushes the effective rate on the cash slice from 4% to 6%; on land, from 5% to 7%. Pay by bank transfer, in your own name, and this cost simply does not arise.

Registration duty is paid to the tax authority. A second, separate fee goes to the ANCFCC, the land registry, to inscribe the change of ownership on the titre foncier itself. The decree that fixes the land registry's tariff, still the one current professional guides cite as in force for 2026, sets a standard sale inscription at an ad valorem rate of 1.5% of the price, plus a fixed 100 dirhams per property, with a minimum total charge of 500 dirhams. On anything above a very low-value property, the 1.5% is what drives the number.

Add the two fixed costs together and a standard built property clears roughly 5.5% before a notary's own fee is even in the picture: 4% registration duty plus 1.5% and 100 dirhams at the land registry. On bare land, it is closer to 6.5%.

The same decree lists charges for situations beyond a straightforward sale. If the seller had a mortgage that needs releasing from the title before your own purchase can be registered, that mainlevée d'hypothèque carries its own fixed charge of 500 dirhams, separate from the 1.5% sale inscription. Merging two adjoining plots into a single property is a fixed 1,000 dirhams per property merged.

One case costs noticeably more. If the property you are buying has never been through the land registry at all, bringing it in for the first time, a réquisition d'immatriculation, is charged on a different schedule from an ordinary sale: its own publicity fee, an ad valorem rate of 1% rather than 1.5%, and a higher minimum charge of 1,000 dirhams. Whether a property sits on a registered titre foncier or an older melkia document is exactly what decides which of these two tariffs applies to you, and it is worth knowing before you agree a price, not after you have paid a deposit.

In practice, the buyer settles both costs, since they are what allows the title to move into the buyer's name. The notary collects the registration duty and the land registry fee at the signing table and pays them on to the tax authority and the ANCFCC directly, rather than leaving either filing to you. That is one of the reasons a Moroccan sale cannot complete without a notary: beyond authenticating the deed, they carry the legal responsibility for getting both costs paid inside the 30-day window.

Ask for a written breakdown of both figures before completion day, calculated on the actual price in the deed, so nothing on the final statement comes as a surprise.

Take a built apartment at 900,000 dirhams, paid entirely by bank transfer. Registration duty at 4% comes to 36,000 dirhams. The land registry's fee, at 1.5% plus the fixed 100 dirhams, comes to 13,600 dirhams. Together, before the notary's own bill, that is 49,600 dirhams, just under 5.5% of the price.

Change one thing: say 200,000 dirhams of that price is paid in cash and the rest by transfer. The 2% surcharge applies only to the cash portion, adding 4,000 dirhams, which brings the total fixed cost to 53,600 dirhams. One change in how the money moves, and the bill grows by a real amount, entirely avoidably. If you are still working out whether you are even entitled to register a title in your own name, that question has to be settled before any of these figures apply to you at all.