Noise from the neighbours: what the law says in seven countries
Italy, France, Germany, Spain, England, California and New York compared on neighbour noise: the threshold test, who you sue, whether complying with the noise limits protects you, and what you actually get.
The problem
The flat upstairs plays music until two in the morning; the heat pump on the balcony below hums all day under the bedroom window. You have asked, it has not stopped, and you want to know what the law will do about it. Every legal system in this comparison has an answer, and almost none of them is the answer people expect: there is no number in any of these provisions, and in one of the seven the ordinary route is not a lawsuit at all.
What they agree on
All five systems that answer this in a general provision start from the same uncomfortable place: you have no right to quiet. Living next to other people means absorbing a certain amount of them, and the law only steps in above a threshold. Italy's art. 844 says the owner cannot prevent smoke, heat, fumes, noise and vibration from the neighbouring land unless they exceed 'la normale tollerabilita'. Germany's § 906 says the owner cannot forbid gases, vapours, smells, smoke, soot, heat, noise and vibration where they impair the use of his land 'nicht oder nur unwesentlich'. France's art. 1253 attaches liability to a 'trouble excedant les inconvenients normaux de voisinage'. California's Civil Code § 3479 catches what is offensive to the senses or obstructs the free use of property 'so as to interfere with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property'. England's Environmental Protection Act 1990 s. 79 asks whether the thing is 'prejudicial to health or a nuisance'. Five languages, one structure: a tolerance zone with an edge.
None of them contains a number. There is no decibel figure and no curfew hour in art. 844, in § 906, in art. 1253, in § 3479 or in s. 79, and the country pages behind each of them say so in terms. The rule everybody quotes about ten o'clock at night comes from somewhere else entirely: municipal by-laws, the building's own regulations, state immission-control statutes, prefectoral or public-health orders. Those rules exist and they matter, but they are a separate body of law from the provisions compared here, and they are administered by different bodies.
All of them also make the surroundings part of the test rather than judging the noise in the abstract. Italy's text requires regard to 'la condizione dei luoghi'. Germany's § 906(2) turns on whether the use of the other land is 'ortsublich'. The California page notes that the section is read objectively, taking account of the character of the locality, so that the same generator is a different case on a farm and in a terrace. The practical consequence is the same everywhere: the comparison that decides these cases is between the background level of that area and the level when the source is running, not between the noise and a fixed value.
Where they part company
| Jurisdiction | What its law does | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Italia | Italy is the only one that instructs the judge to weigh the economics of the source. Art. 844 second sentence: in applying the rule the court 'deve contemperare le esigenze della produzione con le ragioni della proprieta'. | Where the noise comes from a business - a bakery, a workshop, a shop's air conditioning - the interest in producing is written into the Italian test itself, which is what pushes Italian outcomes towards intermediate remedies such as technical mitigation or restricted hours rather than a straight order to stop. |
| France | Compliance with the rules is expressly no protection in France, because art. 1253 imposes liability 'de plein droit' with no fault to prove. A neighbour whose installation satisfies every noise order, planning permission and sanitary regulation is still liable if the disturbance exceeds the normal inconveniences of neighbourhood. | Put the same question - does complying with the official limits protect me? - to three of these codes and you get three answers. Germany: presumptively yes. France: no, and the text is structured so the question does not arise. Italy: the country page states that normale tollerabilita is an autonomous civil criterion and can diverge from the municipal acoustic zoning. |
| France names the defendants, and the list goes well past the owner. Art. 1253 makes liable the owner, the tenant, the occupant without title, the holder of a title whose main object is to authorise occupation or exploitation of land, and the maitre d'ouvrage or whoever exercises those powers. | Italy's art. 844 and Germany's § 906 are both written around 'the owner of land', so the natural defendant is the freeholder. In France the noisy tenant can be sued directly under the same article, and the express reference to the maitre d'ouvrage is what brings a months-long building site inside it. | |
| France is the only one with a codified 'who was there first' defence. The second paragraph of art. 1253, added when the case law was written into the Code in 2024, excludes liability where the trouble comes from activities existing before the act transferring ownership or enjoyment, or before the claimant took possession - subject to three conditions in the text: the activities must comply with laws and regulations, must have continued in the same conditions, and if conditions changed must not have aggravated the disturbance. | Italy has the same idea in a much weaker form - art. 844 says the court 'puo tener conto della priorita di un determinato uso', a factor the judge may consider. Germany, Spain, England and California have nothing of the kind in these provisions. Moving in next to an existing workshop is a different legal position in France than anywhere else here. | |
| Deutschland | § 906 does not give you the right to stop anything. It is written as a limit on the owner's power to forbid, and it says only what must be tolerated. The claim to have the noise stopped comes from § 1004; § 906 then supplies the duty to tolerate that defeats it under § 1004(2). | A reader who looks up the German noise section and finds no remedy in it has not missed anything. It is the only member of this group that is purely a defence provision, which is why German argument about noise is framed as 'must I put up with this' rather than 'can I stop this'. |
| Germany is the only one of the seven with a codified 'tolerate it, but get paid' outcome. Under § 906(2), even a substantial interference must be endured where it is produced by a locally customary use of the other land and cannot be prevented by measures economically reasonable for users of that kind - and the owner who must endure it 'kann von dem Benutzer des anderen Grundstucks einen angemessenen Ausgleich in Geld verlangen' where the interference impairs the customary use of his land or its yield beyond what is reasonable. | In every other system the argument is binary: the noise is either lawful or it must stop. In Germany the argument frequently shifts to a third answer, money instead of silence, and there is a statutory hook for it rather than a judicial improvisation. | |
| Germany is also the only one that builds a bridge between the administrative noise limits and the private-law test. § 906(1) sentence 2: an interference is 'in der Regel' insubstantial where the limit or guide values fixed by statute or regulation are not exceeded, measured and assessed as those rules require - and sentence 3 extends this to values in general administrative provisions issued under § 48 of the federal immission-control Act that reflect the state of the art. | This is a presumption, not a ceiling, and the German page is careful about it. But it is a presumption, and it does not exist in the Italian, French, Spanish or Californian provisions. In Germany a compliant installation starts the argument ahead. | |
| España | The Spanish Civil Code does not mention noise. Art. 1908 makes owners liable in four numbered cases only: explosion of machines not maintained with due diligence and ignition of explosive substances kept unsafely; 'humos excesivos, que sean nocivos a las personas o a las propiedades'; the fall of trees planted in places of transit, except by force majeure; and emanations from sewers or deposits of infectious matter built without precautions appropriate to the place. Noise is in none of them, and the smoke head requires the smoke to be both excessive and harmful. | This is the clearest instance in the whole comparison of a code answering a neighbouring question and not this one. A Spanish noise complaint is routed elsewhere - the Ley de Propiedad Horizontal where there is a community, municipal noise ordinances, the noise legislation, and the general fault liability of art. 1902 - and a reader who arrives at art. 1908 expecting a Spanish equivalent of art. 844 will not find one. |
| United Kingdom | England and Wales is the structural outlier: this is not a private right at all. Section 79 sets a closed list of statutory nuisances and puts a duty on the local authority to inspect its area and, where a resident complains, to take such steps as are reasonably practicable to investigate. Section 80 then says that once the authority is satisfied a statutory nuisance exists or is likely to recur it 'shall' serve an abatement notice; breach without reasonable excuse is a criminal offence, with a further daily fine after conviction and, on industrial, trade or business premises, an unlimited fine. | In every other system the neighbour is the claimant. Here the primary actor is the council, the sanction is criminal, and the person served has twenty-one days to appeal to the magistrates. The four civil codes and California all answer 'what is my right'; England answers 'whose duty is it'. |
| The private English route exists but pays nothing. Section 82 lets any person aggrieved by a statutory nuisance complain directly to the magistrates' court, which 'shall' make an abatement order if satisfied the nuisance exists or is likely to recur, and may fine. But the money provision, subsection (12), orders the defendant to pay the complainant only such amount as is reasonably sufficient to compensate for expenses properly incurred in the proceedings - and the section is preceded by a warning letter requirement of twenty-one days, cut to three days where the complaint is about noise. | France gives damages for the harm, Germany gives an Ausgleich in money where you must tolerate the interference, Italy and California route the loss to their general damages provisions. The English statutory scheme gives you an order and your costs of getting it, and nothing for the months of lost sleep - which is why an English claimant who wants damages has to bring a separate common-law nuisance action that is not in this corpus. | |
| The English list is asymmetric in a way the continental texts are not. Smell is only within s. 79(1)(d) where the dust, steam, smell or other effluvia arises on industrial, trade or business premises. Fumes and gases under (c) apply only to private dwellings. Noise 'includes vibration', but subsection (6A) excludes noise made by traffic and subsection (6) excludes aircraft other than model aircraft. | A restaurant extractor is inside the English scheme and a neighbour's cooking is outside it. Italy's 'esalazioni' and Germany's 'Geruche' draw no such line, so the same cooking-smell complaint is admissible in principle in Rome and Berlin and inadmissible in principle in Manchester. | |
| England is the only member where liability can be routed onto someone who did not make the noise. Section 80(2) requires the abatement notice to be served on the person responsible, but on the owner of the premises where the nuisance 'arises from any defect of a structural character', and on the owner or occupier where the person responsible cannot be found or the nuisance has not yet occurred. | A landlord can be served for a defect in the fabric of a building that no tenant could have caused. The continental provisions attach to the person from whose land the interference emanates and do not contain this owner-of-last-resort mechanism. | |
| California | California's § 3479 is a definition and nothing else: it says what a nuisance is and is silent on who may sue. That division comes immediately afterwards - § 3480 defines a public nuisance as one affecting a whole community or neighbourhood or a considerable number of persons at once, and § 3481 makes every other nuisance private. And § 3482 removes from the definition anything done or maintained under the express authority of a statute. | The § 3482 carve-out is the exact mirror of the French rule. In California, statutory authority takes the activity out of nuisance altogether; in France, under art. 1253 an authorisation is irrelevant because no fault is required. Same facts, opposite starting points. |
The provision in each country
Each card links to the page that reproduces the official text and explains it in that country's own language.
Italia Codice Civile
France Code civil
Deutschland BGB
España Código Civil
United Kingdom Environmental Protection Act 1990
- EPA 1990 s. 79 A closed list of what counts as a statutory nuisance - noise, smoke, smells from business premises, animals, artificial light and the rest - plus the council's duty to inspect its area and investigate residents' complaints.
- EPA 1990 s. 80 Once satisfied that a statutory nuisance exists the council must serve an abatement notice, on the person responsible or on the owner where the cause is structural; the recipient has twenty-one days to appeal and commits an offence by ignoring it.
- EPA 1990 s. 82 The route that does not need the council: any person aggrieved may complain to the magistrates, after three days' written warning for noise, and the court must order abatement - but the money it awards is the expenses of the proceedings, not damages.
California California Civil Code
Where there is no answer in the code
A jurisdiction listed here is a finding, not a gap. Either its answer lives outside the corpus — special legislation, case law, municipal rules — or its law simply has no such rule.
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New York
The courts answer it
Private nuisance; NYC Noise Code
New York has no noise or nuisance provision in the Consolidated Laws. Private nuisance in New York is common law, developed by the courts rather than enacted, and the decibel limits and quiet hours people actually cite are the New York City Noise Code in title 24 chapter 2 of the Administrative Code, which is municipal law and outside this corpus. A lookup across the whole of the Consolidated Laws for this problem returned nothing, which is the correct answer rather than a gap in the corpus.
That's the law in seven places. Now let's settle your problem.
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This page compares provisions of several legal systems in general terms and links to the official text of each. It is not legal advice, it does not tell you which country's law governs your situation, and it takes no account of the circumstances of your case. For a live dispute, consult a qualified lawyer in the jurisdiction concerned.