content & social · 25 august 2026 · 8 min read

Bill 96 website requirements: what Quebec's French rules mean for your marketing

Here is an odd fact about the Bill 96 website requirements: the sections of Quebec's language law that govern your marketing never use the word "website". Not once. And the $3,000-to-$30,000 fine that every panic-headline quotes is real, but it does not attach to having an English-only page. It attaches to something you would have to work quite hard to do.

Both matter, because most advice circulating about this law is written to sell translation subscriptions. What follows is sourced to the regulator and the statute rather than to other blogs — and it is a plain-English summary, not legal advice. We're a marketing company, not a law firm. Every figure and rule below is linked to the government's own page so you can check it, and if you're making a decision with real money attached, confirm it with the Office québécois de la langue française or your adviser.

what Bill 96 actually changed

Bill 96, adopted in 2022, became the Act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec. It didn't replace Quebec's language law — it amended the Charter of the French language, in force since 1977. That's why the numbers people quote are Charter sections, not "Bill 96 sections".

The changes rolled out in stages. The latest batch — trademark display, trademarks on products and francization duties — the OQLF states came into force on 1 June 2025, under a regulation published on 26 June 2024. If your understanding of this law dates from the 2022 headlines, it's two rounds out of date.

the 25-employee threshold is not the rule that applies to your website

This is the most common mix-up, and it sends small businesses in both wrong directions — some assume they're exempt, others brace for a compliance programme they don't need.

The 25-employee number is a registration duty. Section 139 says an enterprise employing 25 people or more in Quebec for six months must register with the OQLF, then submit an analysis of its linguistic situation within three months of receiving its registration certificate. That obligation is about your internal use of French, and it is where most of the news coverage went.

The rules about your website, your ads and your invoices are a different part of the Act entirely, and they carry no employee threshold. The OQLF puts it plainly on its own business page: all businesses have obligations concerning the language of work and the language of commerce and business, including respecting consumers' right to be informed and served in French. Section 5 of the Charter grants that right; section 50.2 puts the duty on the enterprise.

Which is to say: fewer employees gets you out of the paperwork, not out of the marketing rules — and there is a lot of Quebec in that category. Federal figures put Quebec at 233,235 employer businesses as of December 2024, of which 228,622 — 98.0% — are small businesses of 1 to 99 employees. Most of the businesses these rules reach will never register with the OQLF at all.

Where p.a. fits: we produce marketing content, including in French where a client needs it — but we don't give legal opinions on whether you're caught by the Charter, and you should be wary of any marketing vendor who does. We're the vendor here, so weight our opinion accordingly.
See what the packages cost →

the Bill 96 website requirements, as the Charter actually words them

There is no "website section". The coverage comes from section 52, which is medium-neutral by its own terms. It reads:

"Regardless of the medium used, catalogues, brochures, folders, commercial directories, order forms and any other documents of the same nature that are available to the public must be drawn up in French. No person may make such a document available to the public in a language other than French if the French version is not available on terms that are at least as favourable."

Two practical consequences fall out of that second sentence. First, a French version that is worse than the English one isn't compliance. "At least as favourable" is doing real work. A full English site plus a thin French landing page — or a French version buried three clicks down while English loads by default — is not the same offer twice.

Second, machine translation counts as a French version right up until someone reads it. The law asks for the document to be drawn up in French. Translation-widget output technically exists; whether it informs and serves a French-speaking customer is the standard section 5 actually sets.

Two neighbouring sections catch the rest of a marketing operation:

• Section 58 — signs and advertising. "Public signs and posters and commercial advertising must be in French." They may be bilingual "provided that French is markedly predominant". Note the wording: markedly predominant, not merely present.
• Section 57 — the paperwork. Invoices, receipts and documents of the same nature must be drawn up in French, with the same "at least as favourable" test.

your social accounts and your ad targeting are in scope too

People tend to picture a storefront sign when they think about this law. The OQLF's own description of how it handles complaints tells you where it actually looks. Step two of its published process is assessing the merits of a complaint, and it says it does this by inspecting the business or by carrying out online verifications, when the complaint concerns a website or a social media account. (That page is published in French; the quotations from it here are our translation.)

Social accounts are named explicitly — and so is the possibility of being assessed entirely remotely, by someone reading your feed, with nothing you'd notice until the letter arrives.

Section 58's "commercial advertising" is the part worth sitting with if you run paid social: a campaign served to a Quebec audience is commercial advertising, whatever platform books it. That's a production question before it's a legal one — our guide to Meta ads for small business assumes one language, and adding a second roughly doubles the asset count.

what actually happens if someone complains

This is where the widely-quoted fine gets mangled, so it's worth walking the chain properly. The OQLF publishes its four-step complaint process, and the sequence is not what the scare posts imply:

1. Receipt and admissibility. The complaint must name the business and the facts. The OQLF contacts the complainant within 30 working days unless it's anonymous.
2. Assessment and inspection. On-site, or the online verification described above. Unfounded complaints are closed and the complainant told why.
3. Support for the business. In the OQLF's own words, it "offers the support necessary to allow them to make the required corrections within a reasonable time" — and agrees a correction timetable with them.
4. Remedial measures. Only if it's still non-compliant after all that can the Office order you to comply or stop — preceded by a notice of intent, and challengeable before the Tribunal administratif du Québec within 30 days.

The fine sits one step further on again. Section 205 of the Charter sets $700 to $7,000 for a natural person and $3,000 to $30,000 "in all other cases" — but read what triggers it. It's contravening a handful of specific sections, or an order issued by the Office. Not section 52. Not section 58. The OQLF spells out the last link itself: if you don't comply with the order, it can send the file to the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions, who decides whether to prosecute, and it is the court that imposes a fine if it convicts.

So "$30,000 for an English website" is wrong in mechanism. An English-only site can generate a complaint, which generates an offer of help and an agreed deadline; only refusing that produces an order, and only ignoring the order puts you in front of a prosecutor.

Which is not a reason to relax. Section 207 doubles the minimum and maximum fines for a second offence and triples them for a subsequent one, and section 208.0.1 states that an offence continuing more than one day "constitutes a separate offence for each day it continues". Ignoring an order is the expensive move, and it gets more expensive every morning.

what to actually do about it

If you sell into Quebec, the useful posture is neither panic nor a translation plugin.

Work out whether you're really in scope before you spend anything. The Act is written around offering goods and services in Quebec rather than around where your office sits. We couldn't find a bright-line published test for out-of-province sellers and won't invent one — ask the OQLF or a lawyer, which is cheap relative to a rebuild.

Treat French as a production line, not a translation task. Every recurring asset — pages, ads, captions, newsletters, invoices — gets a French counterpart forever, not once. Price that standing capacity before you commit, the same way you'd size any other ongoing cost in your marketing budget for a Canadian small business.

Fix the front door first. Homepage, service pages, pricing, contact, and whatever your ads point at. A complaint is likelier to come from a customer who couldn't buy than from an auditor reading your archive.

Don't let the French version rot. The "at least as favourable" test is continuous. A site that launched bilingual then took eight months of English-only updates has drifted out of the thing it was built to satisfy — the same consistency problem that decides whether social media marketing works for a small business, with a regulator attached.

the honest takeaway

The Bill 96 website requirements are less exotic than the coverage suggests and broader than the employee threshold implies. There's no website clause — just a medium-neutral rule that your public commercial documents be in French, and a rule that the French can't be the worse version. Neither cares how many people you employ.

The enforcement reality is more forgiving than advertised, and that changes what you should worry about. The OQLF's published process offers help and a negotiated deadline before it orders anything. The businesses that get hurt aren't the ones caught out of compliance — they're the ones that ignore the letter, then keep ignoring it while section 208.0.1 counts the days.

If you're already sure you're in scope, the practical question isn't legal at all: can you keep producing two languages' worth of marketing every month without it falling over by March? That one we can help with — and if the answer is that Quebec isn't worth the overhead, that's a legitimate answer too. Our plain-English guide to CASL and email marketing covers the other Canadian rule that catches small businesses by surprise.